"Politically, Pessoa considered himself a "mystical nationalist" and, despite his monarchist sympathies...

>"Politically, Pessoa considered himself a "mystical nationalist" and, despite his monarchist sympathies, he didn't favour the restoration of the monarchy. Pessoa described himself as conservative within the British tradition. He was an outspoken elitist and aligned himself against communism, socialism, fascism and Catholicism. He supported the military coups of 1917 and 1926, and wrote a pamphlet in 1928 supportive of the Military Dictatorship"

>" He never married, and while biographers speculate about his sexuality [...] it is possible that he died a virgin."

So THIS is the power of right-wing intellectuals?

Anyone who has actually read Book of Disquiet could plainly see that he was an emotional introvert. It makes sense for him to hold those beliefs but it doesn't discredit them.

Are emotional introverts more prone to be right wing?

More prone to seek protection from institutional power rather than risk defying it.

He renounced support for the dicatorship, tho.

He realized idealism and utopianism shouldn't be the way to go about actual politics.

Salazar: Nothing against the Nation, Everything for the Nation.

Pessoa: Everything for Humanity, Nothing against the Nation.

Whether I like it or not, everything that isn’t my soul is no more for me than scenery and decoration. Through rational thought I can recognize that a man is a living being just like me, but for my true, involuntary self he has always had less importance than a tree, if the tree is more beautiful. That’s why I’ve always seen human events – the great collective tragedies of history or of what we make of history – as colourful friezes, with no soul in the figures that appear there. I’ve never thought twice about anything tragic that has happened in China. It’s just scenery in the distance, even if painted with blood and disease.

With ironic sadness I remember a workers’ demonstration, carried out with I don’t know how much sincerity (for I find it hard to admit sincerity in collective endeavours, given that the individual, all by himself, is the only entity capable of feeling). It was a teeming and rowdy group of animated idiots, who passed by my outsider’s indifference shouting various things. I instantly felt disgusted. They weren’t even sufficiently dirty. Those who truly suffer don’t form a group or go around as a mob. Those who suffer, suffer alone.

What a pathetic group! What a lack of humanity and true pain! They were real and therefore unbelievable. No one could ever use them for the scene of a novel or a descriptive backdrop. They went by like rubbish in a river, in the river of life, and to see them go by made me sick to my stomach and profoundly sleepy.

Well written and interesting but psychologically vapid. Nietzschean but not even as startling and original as Nietzsche.

The entire day, in all the desolation of its scattered and dull clouds, was filled with the news of revolution. Such reports, true or false, always fill me with a peculiar discomfort, a mixture of disdain and physical nausea. It galls my intelligence when someone imagines that things will change by shaking them up. Violence of whatever sort has always been, for me, a flagrant form of human stupidity. All revolutionaries, for that matter, are stupid, as are all reformers to a lesser extent – lesser because they’re less troublesome.

Revolutionary or reformer – the error is the same. Unable to dominate and reform his own attitude towards life, which is everything, or his own being, which is almost everything, he flees, devoting himself to modifying others and the outside world. Every revolutionary and reformer is a fugitive. To fight for change is to be incapable of changing oneself. To reform is to be beyond repair.

A sensitive and honest-minded man, if he’s concerned about evil and injustice in the world, will naturally begin his campaign against them by eliminating them at their nearest source: his own person. This task will take his entire life.

Everything, for us, is in our concept of the world. To modify our concept of the world is to modify the world for us, or simply to modify the world, since it will never be, for us, anything but what it is for us. That inner justice we summon to write a fluent and beautiful page, that true reformation of enlivening our dead sensibility – these things are the truth, our truth, the only truth. Everything else in the world is scenery, picture frames for our feelings, book bindings for our thoughts. And this is true whether it be the colourful scenery of beings and things – fields, houses, posters, clothes – or the colourless scenery of monotonous souls that periodically rise to the surface with hackneyed words and gestures, then sink back down into the fundamental stupidity of human expression.

Revolution? Change? What I really want, with all my heart, is for the atonic clouds to stop greyly lathering the sky. What I want is to see the blue emerge, a truth that is clear and sure because it is nothing and wants nothing.

More prone to be attracted by the aesthetic component of nationalism.
t. introvert attracted by the aesthetic component of nationalism

Nothing irks me more than the vocabulary of social responsibility. The very word ‘duty’ is unpleasant to me, like an unwanted guest. But the terms ‘civic duty’, ‘solidarity’, ‘humanitarianism’ and others of the same ilk disgust me like rubbish dumped out of a window right on top of me. I’m offended by the implicit assumption that these expressions pertain to me, that I should find them worthwhile and even meaningful.

I recently saw in a toy-shop window some objects that reminded me exactly of what these expressions are: make-believe dishes filled with make-believe tidbits for the miniature table of a doll. For the real, sensual, vain and selfish man, the friend of others because he has the gift of speech and the enemy of others because he has the gift of life, what is there to gain from playing with the dolls of hollow and meaningless words?

Government is based on two things: restraint and deception. The problem with those glittering expressions is that they neither restrain nor deceive. At most they intoxicate, which is something else again.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a reformer. A reformer is a man who sees the world’s superficial ills and sets out to cure them by aggravating the more basic ills. A doctor tries to bring a sick body into conformity with a normal, healthy body, but we don’t know what’s healthy or sick in the social sphere.

I see humanity as merely one of Nature’s latest schools of decorative painting. I don’t distinguish in any fundamental way between a man and a tree, and I naturally prefer whichever is more decorative, whichever interests my thinking eyes. If the tree is more interesting to me than the man, I’m sorrier to see the tree felled than to see the man die.There are departing sunsets that grieve me more than the deaths of children. I keep my own feelings out of everything, in order to be able to feel.

I almost reproach myself for writing these sketchy reflections in this moment when alight breeze, rising from the afternoon’s depths, begins to take on colour. In fact it’s not the breeze that takes on colour but the air through which it hesitantly glides. I feel, however, as if the breeze were being coloured, so that’s what I say, for I have to say what I feel, given that I’m I.

I’d like to develop a code of inertia for superior souls in modern societies.

Society would govern itself spontaneously if it didn’t contain sensitive and intelligent people. You can be sure that they’re the only thing that hinders it. Primitive societies were happy because they didn’t have such people.

Unfortunately, superior souls would die if expelled from society, because they don’t know how to work. And without any stupid blanks between them, perhaps they would die of boredom. But my concern here is with overall human happiness.

Each superior soul who appeared in society would be exiled to the Island of the superiors. The superiors would be fed, like animals in cages, by normal society.

Believe me: if there were no intelligent people to point out humanity’s various woes, humanity wouldn’t even notice them. And sensitive people who suffer cause the rest to suffer by association.

For the time being, since we live in society, our one duty as superiors is to reduce to a minimum our participation in the life of the tribe. 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. The very names make doors to the indefinite open up in me.

The highest honour for a superior man is to not know the name of his country’s chief of state, or whether he lives under a monarchy or a republic.

He should be careful to position his soul in such a way that passing things and events can’t disturb him. Otherwise he’ll have to take an interest in others, in order to look out for himself.

Yesterday the preacher of those truths of his
Talked to me again.
He talked about the suffering of the working classes
(Not about the people who suffer, who are the ones who really suffer when all’s said and done).
He talked about the injustice of some having money,
And other people going hungry, but I don’t know if it’s hunger for food,
Or hunger for someone else’s dessert.
He talked about whatever gets him mad.

He should be happy because he can think about the unhappiness of others!
He’s stupid if he doesn’t know other people’s unhappiness is theirs,
And isn’t cured from the outside,
Because suffering isn’t like running out of ink,
Or a trunk not having iron bands!

There being injustice is like there being death.

I would never take a step to change
What they call the the world’s injustice.
A thousand steps taken for that
Would only be a thousand steps.
I accept injustice like I accept a stone not being a perfect circle,
And a cork tree not growing into a pine or an oak.

I cut an orange in two, and the two parts can’t be equal.
Which one was I unjust to — I, who am going to eat them both?

>I keep my own feelings out of everything, in order to be able to feel

I prefer prose to poetry as an art form for two reasons, the first of which is purely personal: I have no choice, because I’m incapable of writing in verse. The second reason applies to everyone, however, and I don’t think it’s just a shadow or disguised form of the first. It’s worth looking at in some detail, for it touches on the essence of all art’s value.

I consider poetry to be an intermediate stage between music and prose. Like music, poetry is bound by rhythmic laws, and even when these are not the strict laws of metre, they still exist as checks, constraints, automatic mechanisms of repression and censure. In prose we speak freely. We can incorporate musical rhythms, and still think. We can incorporate poetic rhythms, and yet remain outside them. An occasional poetic rhythm won’t disturb prose, but an occasional prose rhythm makes poetry fall down.

Prose encompasses all art, in part because words contain the whole world, and in part because the untrammelled word contains every possibility for saying and thinking. In prose, through transposition, we’re able to render everything: colour and form, which painting can render only directly, in themselves, with no inner dimension; rhythm, which music likewise renders only directly, in itself, without a formal body, let alone that second body which is the idea; structure, which the architect must make out of given, hard, external things, and which we build with rhythms, hesitations, successions and fluidities; reality, which the sculptor has to leave in the world, with no aura of transubstantiation; and poetry, finally, to which the poet, like the initiate of a secret society, is the servant (albeit voluntary) of a discipline and a ritual.

I’m convinced that in a perfect, civilized world there would be no other art but prose. We would let sunsets be sunsets, using art merely to understand them verbally, by conveying them in an intelligible music of colour. We wouldn’t sculpt bodies but let them keep for themselves their supple contours and soft warmth that we see and touch. We would build houses only to live in them, which is after all what they’re for. Poetry would be for children, to prepare them for prose, since poetry is obviously something infantile, mnemonic, elementary and auxiliary.

Even what we might call the minor arts have their echoes in prose. There is prose that dances, sings and recites to itself. There are verbal rhythms with a sinuous choreography, in which the idea being expressed strips off its clothing with veritable and exemplary sensuality. And there are also, in prose, gestural subtleties carried out by a great actor, the Word, which rhythmically transforms into its bodily substance the impalpable mystery of the universe.

I'm not taking any sides, but I think one should always be aware that the words change their meaning over time by a lot. Some guy from the beggining of the 20th century saying he opposes or is in favour of communism is very different from some guy saying it today. For good or for bad or whatever, it's different, what were his references of it then? What are our references of it now? etc. Just something to keep in mind.

The Book of Disquiet is one of the comfiest I've ever read. It takes zero effort to read because there's no form or structure. You can skip sentences, paragraphs, and pages without missing anything essential. It's perfect reading when you're tired and can't be bothered to read but still want the comfort of reading.

I have the most conflicting opinions, the most divergent beliefs. For it’s never I who thinks, speaks or acts. It’s always one of my dreams, which I momentarily embody, that thinks, speaks and acts for me. I open my mouth, but it’s I-another who speaks. The only thing I feel to be really mine is a huge incapacity, a vast emptiness, an incompetence for everything that is life. I don’t know the gestures for any real act.....

I never learned how to exist.

I obtain everything I want, as long as it’s inside me.

I’d like the reading of this book to leave you with the impression that you’ve traversed a sensual nightmare.

What used to be moral is aesthetic for us. What was social is now individual.

Why should I look at twilights if I have within me thousands of diverse twilights –including some that aren’t twilights – and if, besides seeing them inside me, I myself am them, on the inside and the outside?

>I have the most conflicting opinions, the most divergent beliefs. For it’s never I who thinks, speaks or acts. It’s always one of my dreams, which I momentarily embody, that thinks, speaks and acts for me. I open my mouth, but it’s I-another who speaks. The only thing I feel to be really mine is a huge incapacity, a vast emptiness, an incompetence for everything that is life. I don’t know the gestures for any real act.....
God damn I need to read this man. Ordering Book of Disquiet as suggests.

Why are leftists so obsessed if someone gets laid or not?

Nice vague detatched criticism, feels good to place yourself in a position to cast DOWN anonymous judgements on prominent thinkers
Pessoa never got to edit and publish his work, while Nietzsche put on affected nobility in his public writing but showed a much different personality in even the letters meant for private correspondance. I will take the honest musings of Pessoa over the superimposed sheen of Nietzsche

Bumping for the person posting passages, not because I enjoyed them but because they made me realize, after being curious about this book and downloading the pdf, that I will not be reading it. Self-indulgent introspective writing like this is a major turn-off and is for teenagers, and although I was intrigued initially I realize that's what this book is and that it was Veeky Forums's most emotionally lost element that made me spring for it. Got me again.

your loss faggot

also why does every discussion of pessoa on here pass over his heteronyms entirely? Surely something like that would be important when considering his perspectives?

last point, i suppose, but the pessoa's true value was as an artist more so than a thinker or intellectual, and going into his work with an expectation of a concrete worldview is counterproductive imo

Sounds like the Tao.

this desu.

multicultural globalist liberalism is just ugly.

Leftists are some of the dumbest people to exist

>implying nationalism is a politics and not a religious delusion

>also why doesw every discussion of pessoa on here pass over his heteronyms entirely?
Truly sad. Through Álvaro de Campos he captured weltschmerz better than maybe anyone else.

>the aesthetic component of nationalism
what is this meme?

How is it a delusion?

Oh don't be so tedious.

You have to admit parades, monuments national hymns and all the talk about Volksgeist and the destiny of the nation are pretty cool.

Little kids like this kind of stuff desu.

Guarantee he'll deny it for some autistic reason. He knows it's true deep down but he'll deny it. Watch it. He'll post below me now with some silly explanation.

I spoke too soon!

Close but not quite. Agree with yall

like always

Nah dude, there's a reason why these things were always used as a means to do propaganda in the totalitarian states.

Yeah, totalitarian states treat their people like little kids.

You have a point.

The nation is an organism that represents the strength of a people. It is you who have been propagandized by outsiders that oppose that collectivized strength because they are not a part of it, because it's bad for them and their own group interests. The jews running every media outlet you frequent have installed this opinion in your head. Nationalism is natural and essential to the survival of a people.

Are you saying that totalitarian states don't use these things as propaganda?

pessoa was beta as fuck

Ah fuck i didn't mean to attract the dumb shill. Now the thread is ruined.

Everything is propaganda. You are repeating jewish propaganda believing it to be aligned with your interests, assuming you are white, when it's not. At least nationalist 'propaganda' is made by your own people and ideally has the interests of those people at heart. Anti-nationalist jewish propaganda otoh is being made by outsiders who don't like you and don't want your group to assert its interests because that's bad for them.

What is wrong with what he said?

Da joos

>Everything is propaganda
brainlet.jpg

You advertising that you don't understand the current problem within the west does not make you appear wiser, it makes you look dumb.

that representing organism metaphor is weak

he got that from the Soviets which is unbelievably amusing and the idea of weaponized propaganda comes from a Jew

You live under the most powerful propaganda machine to ever exist. And it is so powerful because it makes you believe you're getting objective truth.

Maybe you do but I don't live under Veeky Forums.

The Soviet Union was established by jews too. I know you're not a very smart guy, but stubbornness won't help your condition.

Your entire education was propaganda. The question is why can't you use this new, decentralized information outlet called the internet to better understand that?

cool graphics bro

>worries about propaganda
>thinks internet is legit
you're dumb

He's empirically wrong because the bloodthirsty nature of nationalism (especially the fascist kind) has caused more damage to Europeans the any other ideology thanks to ww1 and ww2. He's also strawmanning my point with some dumb nonsense (every institutions represents the strength of its people, not only those of nationalism). He doesn't seem to be aware that the warmongering tendencies of these ideologies are not a wise thing in the age of the atomic bomb. He's attacking me on the basis of some strawman he thinks I'm embodying (I'm in favor of a more civic and liberal nationalism) because he's a nolife nerd (or a shill, you choose) that wants to talk about "the Jewish problem". Watch as he replies with some nonsense such as "the Jews are sick people" (he always repeats the same formulas for some reason).

t. autodidact

>every institutions represents the strength of its people
You can't be serious

Post shows a very poor understanding of history. Some people like this poster are just too afraid and don't have the mental capacity.

Why don't you comment on the other points user made?

Afraid of what?
Are you making a threat?

He wrote a story called the anarchist banker, which is exactly like the title suggests. Pessoa dabbled with the futurism movement and wrote a thesis justifying the military dictatorship in Portugal. He was probably right-wing, but even if he wasn't, fear of persecution by the dictatorship regime prevented him from voicing, or writing, other opinions.

>Post shows a very poor understanding of history
details please

little kids like adventures, wild animals, playing sports, the outdoors, stories of heroics

"adult" "men" like pornography, castrated house pets, watching sports, staying home and binge watching netflix, barely disguised soap operas

little kids are virile, you are gay

He wasn't a philosopher, and the book of disquiet was never published while he lived. It's raw stuff, semi-fiction.

>little kids are virile
reported

You are the weak. That is why strength frightens you and why you blindly buy into the propaganda of outsiders who present a feminine version of the world to you.

It's just a shit-tier, unnuanced perspective of 20th history and events.

Please, tell us more about where user lives, how he is educated and why he is so afraid and weak.

Ok I was wrong about that. What I meant to say is that every institution in the west represents its people.

Because I agree on everything else.

>It's just a shit-tier, unnuanced perspective of 20th history and events
What's wrong about it specifically?

fair enough

>a feminine version of the world
what does that even mean?

>every institution in the west represents its people.
This is true. And as power within those institutions has been handed over to outsiders, they in turn come to reflect them. Every major media outlet in the west is now run by jews, and it's no wonder no one trusts them anymore and thinks of them as purely propaganda outlets.

Now one can accept that, learn about how the nature of peoples differs, and better educate themselves about how jewish influence per the media example above has seeped into the public school curriculum, academia, Hollywood, and other institutions built and formerly controlled by whites, or they can whine about nationalism in Pessoa threads like beta boys and go on being mindless drones that repeat jewish talking points. There is a choice here.

Damn you fags overexaggerate about how bad nationalism is especially in current times with how sterile it is.

I just said nationalism appeals to a childish side of man. An exaggeration would be to say that nationalism is an organism that represents this and that.

First off, it's just not true that nationalism was to blame in WWII. Jewish bolsheviks had perpetrated a coup in Russia and slaughtered millions of people. Jewish bolsheviks orchestrated similar coups elsewhere like Germany. These nationalist movements derived from that: from jewish actions attempting to create these communist revolutions in Europe.

>mindless drones that repeat jewish talking points
ironic

Anything else?

>nationalism was to blame in WWII
user didn't write that desu

I wouldnt really say its childish more passive.

It means the version of history white men receive promotes weakness in attemp to break us down and make us feel bad about our people's past instead of proud of it.

The nation is an organism that represents the collective power of a people. I didn't counter your opinion earlier that this analogy was 'weak' but the basics of the statement should be obvious.

proofs?

It means there's not enough dick for user's appetite.

were they actually Jewish movements though. I mean that sincerely, it is kind of hard to classify them as being Jewish. There was a strong Jewish presence certainly, the Jews are not innocent, but there was as strong a non-Jewish element as well and these are fundamentally secular ideologies in the end.

If you have read your nation's history and aren't a nationalist, you're either Gay or German

nationalism =/= chauvinism

I'm sure there's more to be said.

Okay, but he basically did. I can amend my statement to the "caused the most damage" part anyway. WWII was a war between European nationalism and jewish internationalism. Of course you think the former caused the most damage... because the latter won. That's how it works. But 20th century nationalist movements were only counter movements to jewish internationalism. They were not the source of the conflict.

How would it be possible that white men recieve a different version of history than anybody else?

This is the same old dumb talking point that antisemites always employ when discussing ww2. First, it's false. Mussolini created the first kernel of the his movement before the october revolution. Second, initially he was very close to socialist positions. When he presented the program of San Sepolcro (pic related) in 1919 a lot of what the program asked was considered progressive (8 hour working day, for example) and anti bourgeoise.
Third, it's Hitler who started the war by invading Poland and breaking every possible treatise, not Jews.

Say it then, I'm all ears. Or are you going to repeat the same old talking points to impress the newfags?

Did you see this? This jewish strategy is to use other groups (lower classes, women, minorities, gays, etc.) against the ruling elite (white men). Just like the jewish media stirs up blacks today, bolshevism was a jewish-led minority coup. Yes, others were involved, but jews are the revolutionaries who lead these things. What I'm explaining here is a strategy they use and have used time and again.

>elites are challenged by lower classes
genius

I'm only saying that's the only group that matters. Everyone hears it, but whites are the target.

The information in this post is irrelevant or untrue, but I've seen this jewish talking point before. The Mussolini date doesn't matter and judea declared war on Germany in 1933.

...

You are no gatekeeper here, and if information itt comprises things you're aware of feel free to move on.

>The information in this post is irrelevant or untrue
You're clearly demented. If it's irrelevant or untrue you need to say how, otherwise it's clear that you don't know how to respond.
>The Mussolini date doesn't matter
Of course it does.

I just want to learn but you make it very difficult. It often sound like you are repeating scripts desu.

>It often sound like you are repeating scripts desu
He is. Probably a shill or something, he has been on this board for a lot of time now.