Nothing

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Well then now & The Paradox of Living

I’m returning more to what is considered a day-to-day normal. That is I don’t look around me in a degree of oddness as if things don’t quite fit. That they don’t fit is not the issue, and in fact nothing is at issue. The only practical question would not be what but why. But that is a gift of age: that we quit asking why.

Those first nights in rehab when I couldn’t move, go anywhere, made more of an impression on me than I thought. You become that. And I had to live on the surface, in the center of my mind. Any of the edges would have entrapped me and they were many and dark. Interesting that I didn’t pray. And I didn’t invoke The Buddha, or The Christ, or even “the guys.” But then I didn’t seek help. I sought nothing. And then, for a while I became someone else.

So, to post from Belles-letters:

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Fernando Pessoa

Poetic Outlaws Yesterday at 06-59 · Shared with Public In order to understand, I destroyed myself

Posted by Poetic Outlaws

“Through these deliberately unconnected impressions I am the indifferent narrator of my autobiography without events, of my history without a life. These are my Confessions and if I say nothing in them it’s because I have nothing to say.”

And then,
“In order to understand,
I destroyed myself.”

He came to us and he left us as he intended, in the disquiet of something that both was and was not. A history without a life. He would not have caught our attention and yet today he is admired and celebrated for his words. Words that take us beyond ourselves and into the Mystery. Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe.