“A silent anatomy of melancholy”
November 12, 2007
Lee Rourke, writing at The Guardian:
He has been called – amongst other splendid things – "the man that never was." It is a stamp that makes perfect sense: Fernando Pessoa never revealed himself, just his work. He lived solely through his work. He has also been misconstrued many times over the years, readers often seem to label him as a pessimist, his writing the blathering of a depressed man – I see it more as a silent anatomy of melancholy.
Maybe this is why his work is not as popular as it should be? Maybe we can’t stomach his – and more tellingly our own – emptiness as it is so beautifully laid bare in The Book of Disquiet? It is so often the case, as Nietzsche pointed out, when we look into the abyss the abyss also looks into us. It’s a shame that the majority of us – unlike Fernando Pessoa – don’t have the nerve to look into it more than once.
