Passing from world to world, from incarnation to incarnation, forever coddled by illusion, forever caressed by error…

We are death. What we call life is the slumber of our real life, the death of what we really are. The dead are born, they don’t die. The worlds are switched around in our eyes. We’re dead when we think we’re living; we start living when we die.
The relation that exists between sleep and life is the same that exists between what we call life and what we call death. We’re sleeping, and this life is a dream, not in a metaphorical or poetic sense, but in a very real sense.

Everything in our activities that we hold to be superior participates in death and is death. What are ideals but an admission that life is worthless? What is art but the negation of life? A statue is a dead body, chiselled to capture death in incorruptible matter. Pleasure itself, which seems to be an immersion in life, is in fact an immersion in ourselves, a destruction of the relations between us and life, an excited shadow of death.

The very act of living means dying, since with each day we live, we have one less day of life remaining.

We inhabit dreams, we are shadows roaming through impossible forests, in which the trees are houses, customs, ideas, ideals and philosophies.

Never finding God, and never even knowing if God exists! Passing from world to world, from incarnation to incarnation, forever coddled by illusion, forever caressed by error…

Never arriving at Truth, and never resting! Never reaching union with God! Never completely at peace but always with a hint of peace, always with a longing for it!

Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet
translation: Richard Zenith