"....If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you’ve got it half licked."..
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.."Perhaps it is curiosity — about anything and everything — that made me the writer I am. It has never left me…
With this attribute goes another which I prize above everything else, and that is the sense of wonder. No matter how restricted my world may become I cannot imagine it leaving me void of wonder. In a sense I suppose it might be called my religion. I do not ask how it came about, this creation in which we swim, but only to enjoy and appreciate it."..
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..."Perhaps the most comforting thing about growing old gracefully is the increasing ability not to take things too seriously. One of the big differences between a genuine sage and a preacher is gaiety. When the sage laughs it is a belly laugh; when the preacher laughs, which is all too seldom, it is on the wrong side of the face."...
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personal note:
I like him to say 'if you can fall in love again and again".
Somebody important in my life keeps saying it is not important to be in love
and it is a stupid thing to fall in love.
i feel this so different, so very much.
i can fall in love with a flower, a stone, a tree..and i can fall in love with a woman,
it is the moment of total presence and the recognition of essence ,it happens,
and to do this with the mind alone is not the same as falling into a moment of seeing.
the longing for union with the essence is not born in the head.
to be in love and to fall means an act of falling, of opening to vulnerability,
it means soft knees and a readiness to give your blood.
it is something going totally beyond being 'adult', beyond controlled behaviour,
it has nothing to do this moment with love as an idea, it is love, it is still innocent and
untouched by conditioned gates of perception as far as this can be possible for a human.
because to fall in love with just this one may have roots we never knew nor ever will know.
without falling in love with a woman or the sea or the sky or music life would be boring
and depressing, wings grow out of this, the moment of true seeing, still out of all wanting.
to love is another kind of human experience and more so doing, it does take real blood and work and patience.
and sometimes i ask me why falling and rising is such an act, and i see love as the
overcoming of gravity, as release into kindness and as the composition of a long song. and yes, i cannot say that i like the music to stop. and somewhere somehow it never will.
so i will never say all is nothing but all is no-thing.
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Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet:
"I.
I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God,
for the same reason their elders had had it
-without knowing why.
And since the human spirit tends to make naturally judgements based on feeling
instead of reason, most of these young people chose Humanity to replace God.
I, however, am the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to,
seeing not only the multitude he's a part of but also the wide open space around it.
That's why I didn't give up God as completely as they did, and I never accepted Humanity.
I reasoned that God, though improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshipped; wheras Humanity being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing
more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than
any other animal species.
The cult of Humanity, with its rites of Freedom and Equality, always stuck me
as a revival of those ancient cults in which Gods were like animals or had animal heads.
And so, not knowing how to believe in God and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I, along with other people on the fringe, kept a distance from things, a distance
commonly called Decadence.
Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life.
Could it think, the heart would stop beating."
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note:
why to follow up Henry Miller and my last notes with Fernando Pessoa?
i understand this 'decadence" well, it is a distance to oneself and others
in a cultured estrangement from the roots of life itself. It is a way of staying
thinking non-stop, it took him several personalities to keep it up,
and i cannot see Fernando Pessoa with a belly laugh.
would i have liked to meet him? yes, for curiosity,
not for a real conversation as i couldn't have known who is talking and who is listening.
he is profoundly honest-"Humanity being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing
more than the animal species we belong to"- i really appreciate this.
The idea on worshipping ´though appears irrelevant to my perspective.
Less observation and more falling and meeting may make all the difference.
when we observe, we judge , classify-and we all know how conditioned
the observer is and how the results of his or her research and opinions depend on herself/himself. observing is not living. we end up with a collection of dead butterflies.
Pessoa and Kafka appear not so far from each other in some ways,
but they are totally different. but both share and give the experience
of honest fight and truthful stress of soul in the quest for freedom.
What is freedom there?
Is it freedom they achieve?
or only a strife for freedom from patterns and the sharpening of the saw
to cut bonds and false perception? i hear the saw shrieking.
i heard it for so long.
give us a break, a laugh.
give us not only blood , give us a heart to find.
can i do this?
i don't know.
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