I first came across Fernando Pessoa when I was in Lisbon, the city he spent all of his adult life in. It was also in Lisbon that I re-met Anna after a separation of almost twenty years. It was a meeting that changed my life. The city is beautiful enough to be memorable but that meeting transformed it into a location that will forever resonate with regeneration and love. It broke the dark spell that I’d been under since I separated from my ex-wife some years before. 

I’d moved back to Australia from France thinking that after thirty years away from the country I grew up in I would find ‘home’. I was wrong and quickly spiralled into a state of dislocation and alienation from myself,  those around me, and, most painfully, from my children  still living in France. I had annihilated myself and the re-creation job I was doing was horribly misconceived. I was creating a Frankensteinian creature that bolted together all of my unrealized and conflicting aspirations. It was doomed to failure. 

When I met Anna in Lisbon the journey along the road back to a far brighter place began. After three years, we married and that love which so powerfully resurged in Lisbon has, after nearly a decade of living together, never diminished, only increased. We return to Lisbon from time to time and it always reminds me, with its beautiful clear light and relaxed pace of living, that life can move from dark to light, from desperation to happiness, from meaninglessness to meaning, and from confusion to understanding. Love and regeneration can suddenly materialise when we feel they are lost to us  forever. As banal an observation as that is, it was an incredible surprise when it happened.

Not that my reunification with Anna resolved everything. I was having bouts of  ‘trouble’:  darkness, self-loathing, meaninglessness – the usual. I stop short of calling them periods of depression. I prefer Pessoa’s description of this state as ‘tedium‘ – a listless, self-isolating, existential angst – a type of staring in the face of a reality that we often don’t want to look at. A conflict between the meaning of life and love and the essential meaninglessness of existence where no side can be victorious. It comes, it sits on me, takes its time … and then it goes. It goes, in great part, because I live with someone whose conviction is that love is existence and therefore meaning is established. It’s not possible to hold out against that fundamental position when it is backed by emotional force. Tedium cannot win and I return … meekly.

For someone like Pessoa his periods of profound tedium were lived entirely internally and for very prolonged periods – he never allowed himself a partner and few companions. I find that both courageous and an abdication. Courageous to not want to inflict these inner battles on others and an abdication of the possibility of loving another person and trusting their understanding. I am not alone and don’t want to be alone. I am loved. And I love in return although, often, imperfectly. I understand the rationale behind Pessoa’s avoidance of close relationships when I see those around me suffer from my self-isolation and emotional withdrawal. It is painful for them and for me.  Yet, try as I might, to take a step toward them to comfort them and release myself from solitary confinement, it only seems to me to be an act of duplicity as I still feel isolated and exhausted with … mainly myself. I am emotionally manacled in a Houdini-like box, slowly sinking to the bottom of the ocean, the water seeps in and I am unable to free myself from the chains, but I wait, wait to escape. I am always aware that it will end, that I am loved, that I love (when out of the box), but my inaction and lassitude is overwhelming.

So why read Pessoa for ‘comfort’ when the tedium descends? If you read his The Book of Disquiet  it could appear to be like sticking knives into your leg to relieve the pain of a headache.was