Here are three fragments posthumously found in his trunk:
- I’ve reached the point where tedium is a *person, the incarnate fiction of my own company
- The outer world exists like an actor on stage: it’s there but is something else.
- … and everything is an incurable illness. The indolence of feeling, the frustration of never knowing how to do anything, the inability to take action . . . .
It sounds like a case of solipsism. I found this article in the New Yorker, which serendipitously summarises his life, with pointers to the kind of person he seems to have been in real life, apart from his strange recorded thoughts. Sometimes I wonder if he self-indulgently writes for effect, as I may do in my voluminous notebooks, up to 120,000 words per month. No one would bother to read them when I’m gone.
Perhaps his thoughts above are part of his sense of “disquiet”.
Yet here’s an example (item 286 in the Zenith translation) of a lyrical prose poem:
We walked, still young, beneath the tall trees and the forest’s soft rustling. The moonlight made ponds out of the clearings that sprang to view along our aimless path, and their branch-tangled shores were more night than the night itself. We talked about impossible things, and our voices were part of the night, the moon and the forest. We heard them as if they belonged to others.
The obscure forest wasn’t entirely pathless. Our steps wended along trails that we instinctively knew,among dappling shadows and streaks of cold, hard moonlight. we talked abut impossible things, and the whole of that real-life landscape was just as impossible.
He did publish a book of poems in his lifetime. A quick glance reveals the following, it’s titled XXXV, found on page 37
* It’s worth mentioning that person in Portuguese is pessoa, his given name. Pessoa is among the 300 most occurring surnames in the Portuguese-speaking Brazil
a wayfarer’s notes 