Pessoa - Possessions

How often I’ve heard people say the same old phrase that symbolizes all the absurdity, all the nothingness, all the verbalized ignorance of  their lives. It’s the phrase they use in reference to any material pleasure: ‘This is what we take away from life…’ Take where? take how? take why? It would be sad to wake them out of their darkness with questions like that… Only a materialist can utter such a phrase, because everyone who utters such a phrase is, whether he knows it or not, a materialist. What does he plan to take from life, and how? Where will he take his pork chops and red wine and lady friend? To what heaven that he doesn’t believe in? To what earth, where he’ll take only the rottenness that was the latent essence of his whole life? I can think of no phrase that’s more tragic, or that reveals more about human humanity.
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Love wants to possess, but it doesn’t know what possession is. If I’m not my own, how can I be yours, or you mine? If I don’t possess my own being, how can I possess an extraneous being? If I’m even different from my own identical self, how can I be identical to a completely different self?
Love is a mysticism that wants to be materialized, an impossibility that our dreams always insist must be possible.
I’m talking metaphysics? But all of life is a metaphysics in the darkness, with a vague murmur of the gods and only one way to follow, which is our ignorance of the right way.
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What does it mean to possess? We don’t know. So how is it possible to possess anything? You will say that we don’t know what life is, and yet we live… But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is – is that living?
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Be it atoms or souls, nothing interpenetrates, which is why possession is impossible. From truth to a handkerchief – nothing is possessable. Property isn’t a theft: it’s nothing.
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To possess is to lose.
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To possess is to be possessed, and therefore to lose oneself.

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Life is whatever we conceive it to be. For the farmer who considers his field to be everything, the field is an empire. For a Caesar whose empire is still not enough, the empire is a field. The poor man possesses an empire, the great man a field. All that we truly possess are our own sensations; it is in them, rather than in what they sense, that we must base our life’s reality.
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Gold is worth no more than glass to a child. And is gold’s value truly any greater? The child obscurely senses the absurdity of the wraths, passions and fears he sees sculpted in adult gestures. And aren’t all our fears, hatreds and loves truly vain and absurd?
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Life being fundamentally a mental state, and all that we do or think valid to the extent we consider it valid, the valuation depends on us. The dreamer is an issuer of banknotes, and the notes he issues circulate in the city of his mind just like real notes in the world outside. Why should I care if the currency of my soul will never be convertible to gold, when there is no gold in life’s factitious alchemy?
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Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.
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The first way to live life in the extreme is by possessing it to an extreme degree, via a Ulyssean journey through all experiential sensations, through all forms of externalized energy. Few people, however, in all the ages of the world, have been able to shut their eyes with a fatigue that’s the sum of all fatigues, having possessed everything in every way.
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I don’t dream of possessing you. Why should I? It would only debase my dream life. To possess a body is to be banal. And to dream of possessing a body is perhaps even worse, if that’s possible: it’s to dream of being banal – the supreme horror.
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I love you the way I love the sunset or the moonlight: I want the moment to remain, but all I want to possess in it is the sensation of possessing it.
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We cannot love, son. Love is the most carnal of illusions. Listen: to love is to possess. And what does a lover possess? The body? To possess it we would have to incorporate it, to eat it, to make its substance our own. And this impossibility, were it possible, wouldn’t last, because our own body passes on and transforms, because we don’t even possess our body (just our sensation of it), and because once the beloved body were possessed it would become ours and stop being other, and so love, with the disappearance of the other, would likewise disappear.
Do we possess the soul? Listen carefully: no, we don’t. Not even our own soul is ours. And how could a soul ever be possessed? Between  one and another soul lies the impassable chasm of the fact that they’re two souls.
What do we possess? What do we possess? What makes us love? Beauty? And do we possess it when we love? If we vehemently, totally possess a body, what do we really possess? Not the body, not the soul, and not even beauty. When we grasp an attractive body, it’s not beauty but fatty and cellular flesh that we embrace; our kiss doesn’t touch the mouth’s beauty but the wet flesh of decaying, membranous lips; and even sexual intercourse, though admittedly a close and ardent contact, is not a true penetration, not even of one body into another. What do we possess? What do we really possess?
Our own sensations, at least? Isn’t love at least a means of possessing ourselves through our sensations? Isn’t it at least a way of dreaming vividly, and therefore more gloriously, the dream that we exist? And once the sensation has vanished, doesn’t the memory at least stay with us always, so that we really possess…
Let’s cast off even this delusion. We don’t even possess our own sensations. Don’t speak. Memory is no more than our sensation of the past. And every sensation is an illusion…
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How can I possess with my body, when I don’t even possess my body? How can I possess with my soul, when I don’t possess my soul? How can I understand with my mind, when I don’t understand my mind?
There is no body or truth we possess, nor even any illusion. We are phantoms made of lies, shadows of illusions, and our life is hollow on both the outside and the inside.
Does anyone know the borders of his soul, that he can say ‘I am I’?
But I know that I’m the one who feels what I feel.
When someone else possesses this body, does he possess the same thing in it as I? No. He possesses another sensation.
Is there anything that we possess? If we don’t know who we are, how can we know what we possess?
If, referring to what you eat, you were to say, ‘I possess this’, then I would understand you. Because you obviously incorporate what you eat into yourself, you transform it into your substance, you feel it enter into you and belong to you. But it’s not with regard to what you eat that you speak of possession. What do you call possessing?
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She said, ‘I am the fire of cold fireplaces, the bread of bare tables, the faithful companion of the lonely and the misunderstood. The glory that’s missing in this world is the pride of my black domain. In my kingdom love doesn’t weary, for it doesn’t long to possess; nor does it suffer from the frustration of never having possessed.
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Love wants to possess. It wants to make into its own that which must remain outside it; otherwise the distinction between what it is in itself and what it makes into itself will be lost. Love is surrender. The greater the surrender, the greater the love. But total surrender also surrenders its consciousness of the other. The greatest love is therefore death, or forgetting, or renunciation – all forms of love that make love an absurdity.
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