Flashes

I am reading Fernando Pessoa 's The Book of Disquiet . It is an edited book taken from the 25,000 pages of his writings from the 1920s and 1930s, found in a trunk after his death in 1935.  Pessoa had many alter egos ; this book is credited to one of them, Bernard Soares , a book-keeper working in Lisbon , at Rua dos Douradores . For the first time in my life, I am urged to underline sentences in a book that is not a text book, to find them again and again. A hundred years later, they go under my skin, they express emotions I did not know I had. " Brief, dark shadow of a city tree, the light sound of water falling into a sad pool, the green of smooth grass – a public garden on the edge of dusk – in this moment you are the whole universe to me, because you entirely fill my every conscious feeling. I want nothing more from life than to feel it ebbing away into these unexpected evenings to the sound of other people’s children playing in gardens fenced in by the melancholy o...