Pessoa - nibbida

I’m losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless.
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Those of us who have risen highest merely have a deeper awareness of how uncertain and empty everything is.
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The burden of feeling! The burden of having to feel!
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It was in a certain sense home – the place, that is, where one doesn’t feel.
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...all just to say that life smells bad and hurts me in my consciousness. All for not knowing how to say, as in that simple and all-embracing phrase from the Book of Job, ‘My soul is weary of my life!’

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Everything wearies me, including what doesn’t weary me. My happiness is as painful as my pain.
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To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter.
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It’s possible to feel life as a sickness in the stomach, the very existence of one’s soul as a muscular discomfort. Desolation of spirit, when sharply felt, stirs distant tides in the body, where it suffers pain by proxy.
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There are moments when the emptiness of feeling oneself live attains the consistency of a positive thing. In the great men of action, namely the saints, who act with all of their emotion and not just part of it, this sense of life’s nothingness leads to the infinite. They crown themselves with night and the stars, and anoint themselves with silence and solitude. In the great men of inaction, to whose number I humbly belong, the same feeling leads to the infinitesimal; sensations are stretched, like rubber bands, to reveal the pores of their slack, false continuity.
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The very act of living means dying, since with each day we live, we have one less day of life remaining.
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I bowed out of life before it began, for not even in dreams did I find it attractive. Dreams themselves wearied me, and this brought me a false, external sensation, as of having come to the end of an infinite road.
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I aspire to nothing. Life hurts me. I’m not well where I am nor anywhere else I can think of being.
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So great is this tedium, so sovereign my horror of being alive, that I can’t conceive of anything that might serve as a palliative, antidote, balsam or distraction for it. Sleeping horrifies me the way everything does. Dying is as horrifying as everything else. Going and stopping are the same impossible thing. Hope and doubt are equally cold and grey. I’m a shelf of empty jars.
And yet what nostalgia for the future* if I let my ordinary eyes receive the dead salutation of the declining day! How grand is hope’s burial, advancing in the still golden hush of the stagnant skies! What a procession of voids and nothings extends over the reddish blue that will pale in the vast expanses of crystalline space!
I don’t know what I want or don’t want. I’ve stopped wanting, stopped knowing how to want, stopped knowing the emotions or thoughts by which people generally recognize that they want something or want to want it. I don’t know who I am or what I am. Like someone buried under a collapsed wall, I lie under the toppled vacuity of the entire universe. And so I go on, in the wake of myself, until the  night sets in and a little of the comfort of being different wafts, like a breeze, over my incipient self-unawareness.
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This dreadful hour when I shrink to being possible or rise to mortality.
If only the morning wouldn’t dawn. If only I and this alcove and its interior atmosphere where I belong could all be spiritualized into Night, absolutized into Darkness, so that not so much as a shadow of me would remain that could taint, with my memory, whatever lived on.
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If men knew how to meditate on the mystery of life, if they knew how to feel the thousand complexities which spy on the soul in every single detail of action, then they would never act – they wouldn’t even live. They would kill themselves from fright, like those who commit suicide to avoid being guillotined the next day.
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I’ve witnessed, incognito, the gradual collapse of my life, the slow foundering of all that I wanted to be.
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The sweetness of having neither family nor companions, that pleasant taste as of exile, in which the pride of the expatriate subdues with a strange sensuality our vague anxiety about being far from home – all of this I enjoy in my own way, indifferently.
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Ah, who will save me from existing? It’s neither death nor life that I want: it’s that other thing shining in the depths of longing, like a possible diamond in a pit one can’t descend.
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No: no ties even to ourselves! Free from ourselves as well as from others, contemplatives without ecstasy, thinkers without conclusions and liberated from God, we will live the few moments of bliss allowed us in the prison yard by the distraction of our executioners. Tomorrow we will face the guillotine. Or if not tomorrow, then the day after. Let us stroll about in the sun before the end comes, deliberately forgetting all projects and pursuits. Without wrinkles our foreheads will glow in the sun, and the breeze will be cool for those who quit hoping.
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