the self I pretend to be (in this moment) by Ricardo Reis

Since we do nothing in this confused world
That lasts or that, lasting, is of any worth,
And even what’s useful for us we lose
So soon, with our own lives,
Let us prefer the pleasure of the moment
To an absurd concern with the future,
Whose only certainty is the harm we suffer now
To pay for its prosperity.
Tomorrow doesn’t exist. This moment
Alone is mine, and I am only who
Exists in this instant, which might be the last
Of the self I pretend to be.

- Ricardo Reis (Fernando Pessoa)

Meaning

When I die, I will see the lining of the world.
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
The true meaning, ready to be decoded.
What never added up will add Up,
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.
- And if there is no lining to the world?
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?
- Even if that is so, there will remain
A word wakened by lips that perish,
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,
And calls out, protests, screams.

- Cczeslaw Milosz

Where beauty resides

"Where the self is, beauty is not. Is that beauty in the picture, painting, in a concert of Mozart or Beethoven, or in the poems of Keats, or is it possible to be totally free of oneself to look at the world? Then in that there is great beauty, where you are not absorbed by anything. Something doesn't take you over, or the very grandeur, the majesty of something drives away for a second the self. And when there is the absence of that self with all its problems, there is then great beauty, not in something, or externally or subjectively, but the very complex problems of one's life, which is the problem of the self, the selfishness, the agony and so on, to be free of all that, totally, completely, then there is great beauty - beauty to be found nowhere else on earth or in any painting or in any poem."

- J. Krishnamurti (Brockwood Park, 4th Public Talk, September 6, 1981)
http://www.kinfonet.org/articles/8-the-secret-life-of-trees

The might of a wish

from April 24, 2010

I look into that fire, I cannot take my eyes away from the fire. For the fire has eyes, and the eyes have hands, and the hands are gloved, and I wish with all my might, that I might remove those gloves, and see those hands, then touch that hand through the fire.

As if the sky were a suspended sea

"It is raining wherever one looks, as if the sky were a suspended sea draining interminably through countless leaks"

- Jose Saramago, The Year of The Death of Ricardo Reis (118)

Establishing The Kingdom of Universal Happiness

"If proofreaders were given their freedom and did not have their hands and feet tied by a mass of prohibitions more binding than the penal code, they would soon transform the face of the world, establish the kingdom of universal happiness, giving drink to the thirsty, food to the famished, peace to those who live in turmoil, joy to the sorrowful ... for they would be able to do all these things simply by changing the words ..."

- Jose Saramago

Don't Go Far Off, Not Even For A Day

Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

--Pablo Neruda