{"id":11602,"date":"2025-09-26T18:36:54","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T22:36:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/fernando-pessoa-on-unselfing-into-who-you-really-are-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-09-26T18:36:54","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T22:36:54","slug":"fernando-pessoa-on-unselfing-into-who-you-really-are-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/fernando-pessoa-on-unselfing-into-who-you-really-are-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Fernando Pessoa on Unselfing into Who You Really Are \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"Fernando<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cTo be nobody-but-yourself \u2014 in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else \u2014 means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight,\u201d E. E. Cummings wrote in his timeless summons for the courage to be yourself<\/a>. But what does it really mean to be oneself when the self is an ever-moving target of ever-changing sentiments and cells, a figment of fixity to dam the fluidity that carries us along the river of life, to soften the hard fact that we never fully know who we are because we are never one thing long enough. \u201cThe self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion,\u201d Iris Murdoch insisted in her magnificent case for unselfing<\/a>, and yet we do live out our entire lives in it \u2014 the self is our sieve for reality, the sensory organ through which we experience love and politics and the color blue. How to inhabit it with authenticity but without attachment might be the great task of being alive. <\/p>\n

<\/a>
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/a><\/em>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The great Portuguese poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa<\/strong> (June 13, 1888\u2013November 30, 1935) takes up these immense and intimate questions in The Book of Disquiet<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 his posthumously published collection of reflections and revelations partway between autobiography and aphorism, profoundly personal yet shimmering with the universal. <\/p>\n

Considering himself \u201cthe sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to, seeing not only the multitude he\u2019s a part of but also the wide-open spaces around it,\u201d with a soul \u201cimpatient with itself,\u201d Pessoa writes:<\/p>\n

\n

Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I\u2019d languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s finally time for me to make this one effort: to take a good look at my life. I see myself in the midst of a vast desert. I tell what I literarily was yesterday, and I try to explain to myself how I got here.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

I retreat into myself, get lost in myself, forget myself in far-away nights uncontaminated by duty and the world, undefiled by mystery and the future.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A generation before the great Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh lost his self and found himself in a dazzling epiphany at the library<\/a>, Pessoa recounts one such moment when the veils of the self parted long enough to glimpse the vastness of the unself:<\/p>\n

\n

All that I\u2019ve done, thought or been is a series of submissions, either to a false self that I assumed belonged to me because I expressed myself through it to the outside, or to a weight of circumstances that I supposed was the air I breathed. In this moment of seeing, I suddenly find myself isolated, an exile where I\u2019d always thought I was a citizen. At the heart of my thoughts I wasn\u2019t I.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m dazed by a sarcastic terror of life, a despondency that exceeds the limits of my conscious being. I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought\u2026 This sudden awareness of my true being, of this being that has always sleepily wandered between what it feels and what it sees, weighs on me like an untold sentence to serve.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s so hard to describe what I feel when I feel I really exist and my soul is a real entity that I don\u2019t know what human words could define it. I don\u2019t know if I have a fever, as I feel I do, or if I\u2019ve stopped having the fever of sleeping through life. Yes, I repeat, I\u2019m like a traveller who suddenly finds himself in a strange town, without knowing how he got there, which makes me think of those who lose their memory and for a long time are not themselves but someone else. I was someone else for a long time \u2014 since birth and consciousness \u2014 and suddenly I\u2019ve woken up in the middle of a bridge, leaning over the river and knowing that I exist more solidly than the person I was up till now.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And yet, like Virginia Woolf\u2019s garden epiphany about the creative spirit<\/a> and Margaret Fuller\u2019s hilltop unselfing into \u201cthe All,\u201d<\/a> such moments of revelation in which the soul contacts reality are but brief sidewise glances at some elemental truth we cannot bear to look at continuously less we dissolve into it. Pessoa reflects:<\/p>\n

\n

To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think. To know yourself in a flash, as I did in this moment, is to have a fleeting notion of the intimate monad, the soul\u2019s magic word. But that sudden light scorches everything, consumes everything. It strips us naked of even ourselves.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Complement with Herman Melville on the mystery of what makes us who we are<\/a> and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein on what makes you and your childhood self the \u201csame\u201d person despite a lifetime of physiological and psychological change<\/a>, then revisit Jack Kerouac on the self illusion and the \u201cGolden Eternity\u201d found in its wake<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cTo be nobody-but-yourself \u2014 in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else \u2014 means to fight the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11603,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11602\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}