“I suffered in me, with me, the aspirations of all eras, and every disquietude of every age walked with me to the whispering shore of the sea.” (Text #95)

"SENSATIONAL … Another exemplary tale of suffering from one of the
best writers of our time." The Times.

This is a review of J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man, quoted on the front cover
of the Vintage Books edition of 2006. "Oh," I thought, looking at it.
"So suffering can be done well or badly. It can even be judged. I
wonder which one of them has suffered better, Pessoa or Coetzee.
Coetzee at least has the advantage of being alive to see that his
suffering is exemplary."

Could this be a comfort? In his autobiographical fiction, Youth,
Coetzee tells us that he thinks he is good at misery, better at misery
than at anything else. If you truly believed that misery was your
forte would you feel a tug of pleasure, seeing that The Times was
giving you top marks in the thing you did best? The central character
of Youth claims that he is "so dull and ordinary that you would not
spare him a second glance." One page after that he lies on a park
bench in the sunshine and feels unexpectedly joyful. "It lasts no more
than a few seconds of clock time, this signal event … If he has not
been transfigured then at least he has been blessed with a hint that
he belongs on this earth."

Think of Pessoa in text #450 when a storm passes over the office and
everyone is happy. It rains "like a nightmare" whereupon "enormous
joy, full of deliverance and peace of mind, disconcerted us all." It
rains and he is joyful; the sun shines and Coetzee is joyful. The
lesson: suffering can end with a change in the weather.

“The darkness of the forever overcast day” (text 461)

"Knowing how easily the littlest things can torture me, I deliberately avoid contact with the littlest things. If I suffer when a cloud passes in front of the sun, how will I not suffer from the darkness of the forever overcast day that’s my life?" (Text #461)

Nonadaptation

I was not made to live anywhere except in Paradise.

Such, simply, was my genetic inadaptation.

Here on earth every prick of a rose-thorn changed into a wound.

whenever the sun hid behind a cloud, I grieved.

I pretended to work like others from morning to evening,

but I was absent, dedicated to invisible countries. 

For solace I escaped to city parks, there to observe

and faithfully describe flowers and trees, but they changed,

under my hand, into the gardens of Paradise.

I have not loved a woman with my five senses.

I only wanted from her my sister, from before the banishment.

And I respected religion, for on this earth of pain

it was a funereal and a propitiatory song.

Czesław Miłosz, Polish poet, Nobel Prize winner.

Name of translator unknown by me. Potentially a combination of Miłosz himself and the American Robert Hass. Robert Hass lives in California and his wife’s name is Brenda Hillman. Brenda Hillman, like her husband, is a poet. She once said in an interview: "It is impossible to put boundaries on your words, even if you make a poem. Each word is a maze. So you are full of desire to make a memorable thing and have the form be very dictated by some way that it has to be. But the poem itself is going to undo that intention. It’s almost like you’re knitting a sweater and something is unraveling it on the other end."

I’ve left that word, "unraveling," with only one l because she is American, she was quoted in an American magazine (Rain Taxi), and requoted on an American website (where I found the quote), and so it seems somehow better to leave her with the American spelling. Writing one l, I feel as if I am being fair to her nationality, which pleases me. Perhaps she is very proud of being American and would be insulted to see herself quoted with two ls. She might panic. She might feel that her own quote was lying about her origins. "I am not a two-l person. I am a one-l person," she might think angrily. "I’ll admit I have never thought about this one-l two-l business before and yet suddenly, as I see myself quoted with two ls, the importance of a single l feels central to my being. How is it that I can be represented as a two-l person? How is this violation possible? Where do I stand? What are my legal rights? May I sue?" Or she might not care.

But I am not American, and so I think I see her ‘unraveling’ with two ls when I read it. It’s only if I go back and stare at the word as it is printed here that I realise it only has one.

Whether she ever reads this or thinks those things or not, I am still pleased by my idea of her being pleased. And it seems to me that this is the central thing.

Her quote reminds me of text #169: "Everything we do . is the imperfect copy of what we thought of doing."

“Spools of thread and chess pawns” (Text 92)

"I am still obsessed with creating false worlds, and will be until I die. Today I don’t line up spools of thread and chess pawns (with an occasional bishop or pawn sticking out) in the drawers of my chest, but I regret I don’t ." (Text #92)

When I was little I had an ice cream container of plastic toy animals and with these I made a small society in the back garden. I miss my animal society’s inhabitants more than I miss any person I met at school during the same period of time. I have a better idea of the animals’ personalities than I do of the peoples’, and I trust my memory of those animal personalities more since all of the personalities were really mine alone; the inhabitants I miss were all me. As I think back I know I have no way of returning to that society, to that twig forest where the baby kangaroo got lost (almost eaten by the scratched lion and the glossy orange wolf), those rivers loved by the brown crocodile whose tail had been chewed until it looked feathered, the cold, muddy burrow, voluptuous with black loam, where the plastic hyaena lived, the triangular cave in the rocks, the florid jungle of giant leaves …

“We shouldn’t read newspapers” (Text 314)

"We shouldn’t read newspapers, for example, or should read them only to find out what anecdotal and unimportant things are happening. You can’t imagine the delight I get from the provincial news round-up." (Text #314)

Excerpts from The Geelong Advertiser, October 6^th, 2007.

"Mr Plumridge said he was initially thinking the football should be about 10 metres tall but many people had told him that would be far too small." 

"Farquharson’s ex-wife and the boys’ mother, Cindy Gambino, cried out at the first verdict and was helped from court wailing as her mother, Beverly, fainted and had to be carried from court."

"Rod Aires said the meals take about 10 minutes to heat once water is added to an adjoining unit containing iron oxide and magnesium … "They are quite nice," he said." 

"Shanahan has been forced to sit out the game because of knee soreness while the 17-year-old Colbourne, who spent the week in Brisbane at a bowling camp at Cricket Australia’s Centre of Excellence, has a heel problem."

"This week’s New Moon takes place just as Mercury becomes stationary."

Office personnel (Text 56)

Section #56 ‘The firm’s moneyed partner, chronically afflicted by a vague illness, decided on a whim during one of his healthy respites to have a group portrait made of the office personnel.’

“How I envy those who produce novels” (Text 291)

"How I envy those who produce novels, those who begin them and write them and finish them!" (Text #291)

Effect follows cause. A woman is struck by lightning and after lingering for a day she dies. A man finds a lump in his armpit; three months later he is dead. One afternoon in 1870 Charles Dickens wrote in pen the words, "Before sitting down to it he opens his corner-cupboard door; takes his bit of chalk from its shelf; adds one thick line to the score, extending from the top of the cupboard door to the bottom; and then falls to with an appetite," which would become the last line in his unfinished final book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

In the evening he fell unconscious and remained that way until five minutes to six o’ clock late in the following day when he sighed, shed one tear from his right eye, and died.

Logically, sensibly and seriously, what can we deduce from these facts? That the words "and then falls to with an appetite," written at the moment he wrote them, attained a super-alchemical power of destruction, and killed him. Upon examining further evidence we realise that unfinished books are dangerous, for everyone who writes one dies. Douglas Adams never finished The Salmon of Doubt; John Aubrey never revised the notes in his Brief Lives, and Walter Benjamin and Pessoa never ordered the entries in The Arcades Project and The Book of Disquiet. See: all of them are dead.

“Inaction makes up for everything.” (Text 164)

"Inaction makes up for everything." (Text #164)

Have there been other books written as if they were monuments to stasis? Yes. There’s Titus Groan and Gormenghast. And Titus Alone as well, the third book, in which Titus leaves the castle and roams the world meeting zookeepers and sulking? Yes, that too. Titus (although the book is a picaresque and he thinks he is travelling) actually goes nowhere. Over a wide countryside he describes the same hermetic, mentally-circling world that his family does immured in their castle. He has found a new ritual, the ritual of returning. He doesn’t need to see Gormenghast at the end of the book because the action of going back to look at it has taken the place of actually looking. His journey can be symbolised by a circle.

“Imperfect copy” (Text 169)

Section #169 ‘Page by page I slowly and lucidly reread everything I’ve written and find that it’s all worthless … What grieves me is that my best is no good, and that another whom I dream of,if he existed, would have done better. Everything we do, in art or in life, is the imperfect copy of what we thought of doing.’

“I feel sad because of whom I never was, and I don’t know with what kind of nostalgia I miss him.” (Text 194)

(This came to me after I read section 194: "I feel sad because of whom I never was, and I don’t know with what kind of nostalgia I miss him.")

I’m re-reading The Guermantes Way, the third book of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, which has been translated into English first as Remembrance of Things Past and then as In Search of Lost Time (each title, each translation, giving us a new Proust, as Pessoa’s Trunk gives us fifteen Pessoas) and it occurs to me that Pessoa relaxes where Proust fights, that the Portuguese opens his arms to the possibility of dark, unknowable swamps, sinking gladly into them, while Proust works diligently, connecting this thing and that thing — tying sexual desire to kitchens and a bas-relief, or sickness to an ogre — trying to find a path through the same swamp, a fragile road of thin boards that will take him to the other side. Pessoa is hope-in-langour. Proust is hope-in-effort. Yet both of them write about the same subjects: life and thought.