Prescient quote
Flipping through a copy of The Book of Disquiet at City Lights yesterday, landed on this passage:
I sometimes think with sad pleasure that if, one day in a future to which I will not belong, these sentences I write should meet with praise, I will have at last found people who "understand" me, my own people, a real family to be born into and to be loved by.
But far from being born into that family, I will have been long dead by then, I will be understood only in effigy, and then affection can no longer compensate the dead person for the lack of love he felt when alive.
One day, perhaps, they will understand that I fulfilled, as did no other, my inborn duty as interpreter of one particular period of our century; and when they do, they will write that I was misunderstood in my own time; they will write that, sadly, I lived surrounded by coldness and indifference, and that it is a pity it should have been so.
And the person writing, in whatever future epoch he or she may live, will be as mystified by my equivalent in that future time as are those around me now.
It's especially spooky to consider after learning a little about Pessoa's life.
And then I picked up something very different, which had this epigraph:
There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported. And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them.
- Ecclesiasticus 44:8-9
Which seemed an enormous synchronicity, to my overtired mind.