A nice pessimistic/antinatalist poem ( by Fernando Pessoa)
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“If you want to kill yourself, why don’t you want to kill yourself?
Now’s your chance!
I, who greatly love both death and life,
Would kill myself too, if I dared kill myself…
If you dare, then be daring!
What good to you is the changing picture of outer images
We call the world?
What good is this cinema of hours played out
By actors with stock roles and gestures,
This colorful circus of our never-ending drive to keep going?
What good is your inner world which you don’t know?
Kill yourself, and maybe you’ll finally know it…
End it all, and maybe you’ll begin…
If you’re weary of existing, at least
Be noble in your weariness,
And don’t, like me, sing of life because you’re drunk,
Don’t, like me, salute death through literature!
You’re needed? O futile shadow called man!
No one is needed; you’re not needed by anyone…
Without you everything will keep going without you.
Perhaps it’s worse for others that you live than if you kill yourself…
Perhaps your presence is more burdensome than your absence…
Other people’s grief? You’re worried
About them crying over you?
Don’t worry: they won’t cry for long…
The impulse to live gradually stanches tears
When they’re not for our own sake,
When they’re because of what happened to someone else, especially death,
Since after this happens to someone, nothing else will…
First there’s anxiety, the surprise of mystery’s arrival
And of your spoken life’s sudden absence…
Then there’s the horror of your visible and material coffin,
And the men in black whose profession is to be there.
Then the attending family, heartbroken and telling jokes,
Mourning between the latest news from the evening papers,
Mingling grief over your death with the latest crime…
And you merely the incidental cause of that lamentation,
You who will be truly dead, much deader than you imagine…
Much deader down here than you imagine,
Even if in the beyond you may be much more alive…
Next comes the black procession to the vault or grave,
And finally the beginning of the death of your memory.
At first everyone feels relieved
That the slightly irksome tragedy of your death is over…
Then, with each passing day, the conversation lightens up
And life falls back into its old routine…
Then you are slowly forgotten.
You’re remembered only twice a year:
On your birthday and your death day.
That’s it. That’s all. That’s absolutely all.
Two times a year they think about you.
Two times a year those who loved you heave a sigh,
And they may sigh on the rare occasions someone mentions your name.
Look at yourself in the face and honestly face what we are…
If you want to kill yourself, then kill yourself…
Forget your moral scruples or intellectual fears!
What scruples or fears inflence the workings of life?
What chemical scruples rule the driving impulse
Of sap, the blood’s circulation, and love?
What memory of others exists in the joyous rhythm of life?
Ah, vanity of flesh and blood called man,
Can’t you see that you’re utterly unimportant?
You’re important to yourself, because you’re what you feel.
You’re everything to yourself, because for you you’re the universe,
The real universe and other people
Being mere satellites of your objective subjectivity.
You matter to yourself, because you’re all that matters to you.
And if this is true for you, O myth, then won’t it be true for others?
Do you, like Hamlet, dread the unknown?
But what is known? What do you really know
Such that you can call anything “unknown”?
Do you, like Falstaff, love life with all its fat?
If you love it so materially, then love it even more materially
By becoming a bodily part of the earth and of things!
Scatter yourself, O physicochemical system
Of nocturnally conscious cells,
Over the nocturnal consciousness of the unconsciousness of bodies,
Over the huge blanket of appearances that blankets nothing,
Over the grass and weeds of proliferating beings,
Over the atomic fog of things,
Over the whirling walls
Of the dynamic void that’s the world”
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