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There are sicknesses worse than any sickness;
There are pains that don’t ache, not even in the soul,
And yet they’re more painful than those that do.
There are anxieties from dreams that are more real
Than the ones life brings; there are sensations
Felt only by imagining them
That are more ours than our very own life.
There are countless things that exist
Without existing, that lastingly exist
And lastingly are ours, they’re us ...
Over the muddy green of the wide river
The white circumflexes of the seagulls ...
Over my soul the useless flutter
Of what never was nor could be, and it’s everything.
Give me more wine, because life is nothing.
19 November 1935
Notes
Mary Oliver watched the world let go of what had already lived; Pessoa is haunted by something stranger. He's haunted by the lives, feelings, and possibilities that never happened at all, yet somehow occupy as much space within us as the things we actually experienced. What we imagine can become part of us without ever becoming real. An unlived possibility leaves no event to mourn and no memory to return to, yet its absence can still shape a life, which is perhaps why Pessoa can call “what never was nor could be” everything. October’s decay reaches beyond what withers and dies. Some ruins belong to things that were never built. #October #FernandoPessoa #Decay #Existentialism #Poetry