He recorded Pessoa with trepidation

When 1935 came, Fernando. Pessoa died in obscurity, and his essays and poems began to circulate in Portugal. Pessoa published only one book of poetry during his lifetime, but otherwise, like Kafka, he was just a clerk in a Lisbon firm who worked quietly all day, never said a word, made enough money to live, and then hid at home. No one would have expected such an obscure man to be rediscovered by the literary world in the 80s and 90s, dubbed by critics as "the central figure of European modernism". This itself has a certain absurd and helpless significance. The journey of Pessoa's life can be illustrated by a sentence in the preface to the book, "For he had nowhere to go, nothing to do, no interesting books to read, and no friends to call upon. So every night after supper he would go back to his rented room and write to pass the long nights." Loneliness is the source of writing and greatness, and this loneliness does not come from the outside world, but from his heart. Apart from being able to write, he was no different from the people around him.

Pessoa lived to be 47, and "Trepon" contains much of the "pseudo-journal" of his later years. It is not a book that will be read in one sitting. Perhaps you will only open it when you are bored, read a random article, and slowly think about it, and time will pass quietly. But "Trepidus record" will be a deep soul of the book, it said the modern desire and can not get things, said people want to say but can not open the words. When you close the book again, you feel lost in your heart, as if you have no direction, your soul seems to drift in the sun, the distance is there, but can not reach. Pessoa himself is a man of apprehension, but the purpose of apprehension is not apprehension. The reconstruction of meaning is possible only when the self-bewildering and crushing of the soul is achieved.

"Trepidation record" a thick book, a preface plus more than 160 articles with sense, in short, two words: "contradiction". Overwhelmed by conflict. The preface to "Trepidation" is interesting. Pesoavi's book invented a man named "Bernardo. Soares. He describes Bernardo in detail in his preface. Soares appearance and living habits, fantasy himself in a cafe every day to see Soares, and he had a conversation. It was as if Soares actually existed. This is undoubtedly a kind of division, oneself is one's own fellow and one's own different. It is an extraordinary folly for Pessoa to look at himself through the eyes of the other, to achieve self-doubt and self-confrontation, to push himself into the abyss of his soul, and then to re-establish his own values and ideas. Most people in the world do not need such mental tension and self-imposition. They are so busy realizing their own values that they forget to look inside them: their hearts. But not many people want to look into the mind, because once a man begins to face the mind, he also pushes himself to the altar of life, begins the endless spiritual journey. Pessoa's life experiences were few and far between. He was, in his own words, no more than an "immobile traveller", who seldom ventured beyond Lisbon, except in his late-night fantasies. But as soon as he began to think, thinking was far more important to him than life, and great universal love began to wander the world.

It seems to me that the subject of Pessoa's "Trepidation" is the modernist dilemma. There are mainly four aspects: the relationship between life and the distance. The relationship between the self and the mind. The relationship between individuals and groups. The relationship between freedom and love.

People can not leave life, in fact, people can not leave life, but life is a part of people. No matter where you go, you always meet someone and do something. That's life. In this sense: there is no difference between here and there. So Pessoa wrote this classic line: "If I had the whole world in my hands, I would exchange it for a tram ticket back to the Avenue Doladores." But in every human being there is always a primal desire, a kind of dissatisfaction. So the distance becomes a mysterious and dangerous symbol for people to look up to, but no one is willing to really go into it, because it is unknown and full of bone lonely, all people lose courage in front of him, including Pessoa. Pessoa's life is boring, but experience is sometimes not equal to experience. Pessoa's solution to the conflict between life and the distance is to choose an escape method, which is what he calls "travel in the mind." Stay at home alone, face the long night and a lonely lamp, start a spiritual journey. The infinite stars and unreal dreams are the source of fantasy. Such long journeys point to countries that have never been visited, or to countries that are purely fictional and impossible. The maze of the city and the wilderness of nature are spiritually integrated, far from being far away.

In the modern city, people are gradually separated from their own minds. It is on the mind and the mind that Pessoa seems more conflicted than anything else. Sometimes he affirmed the objectification of man. He even thinks that I am nothing, that "I" is just a visual appearance of feeling things around me. And what we think and feel about what we see makes no sense. "I'm a character in a novel I haven't even started writing yet." Thought was in his eyes only an illusion, something that could be undone. In the machinery of the city, people are the necessary parts for the operation of the machine, and individual nature is cruelly ignored. Pessoa finds joy in the monotony of existence. Noble people always think that other people's lives are how vulgar and pathetic. But the good fortune of man is that every man is himself. Others do not feel and live as they do, but have their own way of being, and can not impose their feelings on others. In fact, people in the world do not think for pleasure. But to enjoy life, however thoughtless it may be. So the city can be seen as a source of earthly pleasure. But when Pessoa talks about himself at some length, he expresses a longing and joy for the pure spiritual world. He is grateful to have a quiet life, to be able to think and write in his room. I once said that we should live in peace and write with passion. Passion can only be maintained in peace. Pessoa personally seems to like to transcend the material and the city, flying in the mysterious sky, to travel outside the world to another world. Pessoa's contradiction of material and soul is actually to express his other point of view: an individual should live in a group, but maintain his own uniqueness, to achieve spiritual independence. Pessoa believed that the group and other people are their own food and clothing parents, without the group can not survive. But more importantly, the interdependence between individuals and groups is not about obedience and assimilation. Everyone is unique, and our lives are connected with the group, but the spirit should remain absolutely independent, and do not cross with anyone's feelings and reason. For once my spirit is assimilated, we are sucked into the machinery of the city, captive to envy and glory, but utterly numb. Therefore, Pessoa thinks that the best state for human beings is to stay in a semi-dissociative state, keeping close to the urban group. "Trepidation Record" in the perfect interpretation of this view: "rather than be a decisive mediocre, it is better to be a hesitant wise."

Given the above considerations, it is easy to see that Pessoa's attitude towards the world is not despair, but hope. Yet all hope is based on spiritual independence. So the quest for spiritual independence is at the heart of Pessoa's "Trepperism." And so I saw Pessoa's loneliness. He can not despair of life, can not despair of life, but the only despair he felt is love, in his eyes, with love, people can not achieve spiritual independence, so he refused to love. "It seems to me that all love is so sincerely shallow. My love at all times is fake love, even to myself." Love became in his eyes a burden of emotional responsibility. A person falls in love with another person, he is not really in love with her, but in love with the feeling of loving her, this feeling comes from oneself, so love others in the final analysis is in love with yourself. Pessoa's rejection of love contributed to his own loneliness and to his greatness. When I read his articles about love, I always feel a chill, I always think his understanding of love is too rational, rational let me cannot accept. I accepted love because I knew I couldn't say no like Pessoa. So I am not as great as him, I chose to escape the sublime, but close to the world. When a person cannot explain the meaning of love, in fact, he has already believed in the existence of love.

I spent half a month to read the "Trepnery record", feel really like a long journey, the heart is tired and full of melancholy. Pessoa had already died in peace and restlessness, time did not leave any trace of him, but let me in the summer hazy see his pale thin face, as he said: thinking above life. Our lives will end, but our thoughts will last forever. That's why I wanted to write this article. A tribute to his greatness and his ordinariness. I'd like to end this post with the first entry in Trepidation: "Sometimes I thought I'd never leave Doladores Avenue. Once I wrote it, it was like saying something forever." Writing is eternal