Why Think? > Why Think?

Fernando Pessoa

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raul:
H. and H.

I found these words by Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa.

I saw the little children ...
A hatred of institutions, of conventions, kindled my soul with its fire. A hatred of priests and kings rose in me like a flooded stream. I had been a Christian, warm, fervent, sincere; my emotional, sensitive nature demanded food for its hunger, fuel for its fire. But when I looked upon these men and women, suffering and wicked, I saw how little they deserved the curse of a further hell. What greater hell than this life? What greater curse than living? “This free will,” I cried to myself, “this also is a convention and a falsehood invented by men that they might punish and slay and torture with the word ‘justice,’ which is a nickname of crime. ‘Judge not,’ the Bible has it—the Bible; ‘judge not, that ye may not be judged!’”
When I had been a Christian I had thought men responsible for the ill they did—I hated tyrants, I cursed kings and priests. When I had shaken off the immoral, the false influence of the philosophy of Christ, I hated tyranny, kinghood, priestdom—evil in itself. Kings and priests I pitied because they were men.

Nation of One:

--- Quote ---What greater hell than this life? What greater curse than living?
--- End quote ---

Amen, to that!

You get it, Raul.  "Kings and priests I pitied because they were men."

Maybe we might actually reach a point where we could meet aggression with compassion, if only because we know what it is to be a man.

Then again, Cioran said that both Christ and the Buddha are masters of illusion for their doctrines protect the ruling class from the wrath of the underclass.

The greatest thinkers always seem to reject or transcend their teachers.

“The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for in life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.” ~ Cioran

The Earth is one big ball of sex and death.

raul:
Hentrich,
I am glad you like this paragraph by Fernando Pessoa. His first language was English.

I sometimes pity these men and women in power but I suppose I think that way because I also want to be pitied at the same time. Many factors and circumstances may have prevented me from tasting the use of the fist of power. And we use this fist of power against our fellow human beings.

Stay safe.

Holden:
 “I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.My worst sorrows have evaporated when I’ve opened the window on to the street of my dreams and forgotten myself in what I saw there.I’ve never aspired to be more than a dreamer. I paid no attention to those who spoke to me of living. I’ve always belonged to what isn’t where I am and to what I could never be. Whatever isn’t mine, no matter how base, has always had poetry for me. The only thing I’ve loved is nothing at all. The only thing I’ve desired is what I couldn’t ever imagine."


I'm handed faith like a sealed package on a strange-looking platter and am expected to accept it without opening it. I'm handed science, like a knife on a plate, to cut the folios of a book whose pages are blank. I'm handed doubt, like dust inside a box--but why give me a box if all it contains is dust?”


“No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it. Collective thought is stupid because it's collective. Nothing passes into the realm of the collective without leaving at the border -like a toll- most of the intelligence it contained.

In youth we're twofold. Our innate intelligence, which may be considerable, coexists with the stupidity of our inexperience, which forms a second, lesser intelligence. Only later on do the two unite.
That's why youth always blunders - not because of its inexperience, but because of it's non-unity.
Today the only course left for the man of superior intelligence is abdication.”

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept – our own selves – that we love.

This is true in the whole gamut of love. In sexual love we seek our own pleasure via another body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via our own idea.The mast-urbator may be abject, but in point of fact he’s the perfect logical expression of the lover. He’s the only one who doesn’t feign and doesn’t fool himself. The relations between one soul and another, expressed through such uncertain and variable things as shared words and proffered gestures, are deceptively complex. The very act of meeting each other is a non-meeting.

Two people say ‘I love you’ or mutually think it and feel it, and each has in mind a different idea, a different life, perhaps even a different colour or fragrance, in the abstract sum of impressions that constitute the soul’s activity.

Today I’m lucid as if I didn’t exist. My thinking is as naked as a skeleton, without the fleshly tatters of the illusion of expression. And these considerations that I forge and abandon weren’t born from anything – at least not from anything in the front rows of my consciousness. Perhaps it was the sales representative’s disillusion with his girlfriend, perhaps a sentence I read in one of the romantic tales that our newspapers reprint from the foreign press, or perhaps just a vague nausea for which I can think of no physical cause…The scholastic who annotated Virgil was wrong. Understanding is what wearies us most of all. To live is to not think.

The superior man differs from the inferior man and his animal brother by the simple trait of irony.Irony is the first sign that our consciousness has become conscious and it passes through two stages-one,represented by Socrates when he says all I know is that I know nothing and the other represented by Sancho when he says I don't even know if I know nothing.

I don't complain about the world. I don't protest in the name of the universe. I'm not a pessimist. I suffer and complain, but I don't know if suffering is the norm, nor do I know if it's human to suffer. Why should I care to know?

I suffer, without knowing if I deserve to. (A hunted doe.)
I'm not a pessimist. I'm sad.

To die is to be become completely other,that is why suicide is cowardice,it is to surrender ourselves completely to life.

Whatever we pursue,we pursue for the sake of an ambition,we  either never realise the ambition and we are poor and we realise it and are rich fools.


How shoddy and contemptible life is, note that for it to be shoddy and contemptible all it takes is you not
wanting it ,it being given to you anyway and nothing about it depending on your
will or even on your illusion of your will.


It sometimes occurs to me with sad delight that if one day in a future to which I won't belong ,the sentences I  write  are read and admired then at last I'll have my own kin people who understand me, my true family in which to be born and loved but far from being born into it I'll have already died long ago I'll be understood only in effigy
when affection can no longer compensate for the indifference that was the dead man's lot in life. Perhaps one day they'll understand that I fulfilled like no one else my instinctive duty to interpret a portion of our century and when they've understood that they'll write that in my time I was misunderstood but the people around me were unfortunately indifferent and insensitive to my work and that it was a pity this happened to me and whoever writes this will fail to understand my literary counterpart in the future time just as my contemporaries do not  understand me because men learn only what would be of use to their great-grandparents, the right way to live is something we can teach only the dead .


― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

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