photograph: graffiti in Lisbon, © Tony Hughes
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
We are isolated within ourselves from ourselves, an isolation in which what separates us is as stagnant as us, a pool of dirty water surrounding our inability to understand... Tedium is ... It is suffering without suffering, wanting without will, thinking without reason... it's like being possessed by a negative demon, bewitched by nothing at all.
[Tedium is...] the emptiness of the soul experiencing that emptiness and feeling itself to be empty that provokes a sense of self-disgust and repudiation... Someone who is afflicted by tedium feels himself the prisoner of a futile freedom, in a cell of infinite size...The walls of an infinite cell cannot crumble and bury us, since they do not exist, nor can we claim as proof of our existence the pain caused by handcuffs that no one has placed around our wrists. These are my feelings as I stand before the placid beauty of this immortal but dying evening.
photograph: accordian player, old city of Lisbon, © Tony Hughes
Pessoa is the writer par excellence of existential angst, of life’s tediousness, of the utterly essential and inescapable solitude that is the human condition, of the essential meaninglessness of human activity, of the terrible and draining ennui of having to ‘do’ life every day. He is also one of the most lyrical, intelligent and sensitive observers of the human condition. His self-analysis, especially in The Book of Disquiet, often seems the reflections of a man on the verge of suicide yet, like Camus, he rejects that as a plausible solution:
I never considered suicide a solution, because I only hate life out of love for it.
In the same moment that he lays open with razor-sharp precision the existential depths of his angst and the insoluble conflict and sadness of being, he counterpoints with the most beautiful observation of a sunset over Lisbon, of a landscape, of the Tagus River, or of rain dripping down a window and blurring the movement of people in the street.
The sunset is scattered with stray clouds that fill the whole sky. Soft reflected lights of every colour fill the multifarious upper air and float, oblivious, amongst the great disquiet above. On the very tops of the tall roofs, lying in half light, half shade, the last slow rays of the setting sun take on shades of colours that belong neither to them nor to the things on which they alight. A vast peace hovers above the noisy surface of the city that is itself slowly settling into quietness. Beyond all the colour and sound everything takes in a deep, dumb breath of air...
Everything that I ever had is like this lofty sky, diversely uniform, full of scraps of nothing touched by a distant light, fragments of a false life that death, from afar, touches with gold, with the sad smile of the whole truth... Far off the first tiny star - a hesitant, tremulous drop of silver - begins to shine.
photograph: Lisbon skyline, © Tony Hughes
And these moments, so beautifully written, are soft, sad reminders of a genuine and deep-felt, if ambiguous, love of being alive, being human and being in the world that is given to us despite, or maybe because of, the suffering.
