According to my bookmark... I guess I've been trying to hack my way through Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet for a year now. I might never have been so conflicted over an author. This might have something to do with the book being translated from Pessoa's original Portuguese... I might have a bias against translated works. I agree with him as often as I disagree. I enjoy his work (almost) as often as I find it incredibly pretentious and boring.
In item 390 in The Book of Disquiet (each excerpt or thought is numbered and they rarely refer or relate to each other, as far as I'm aware), Pessoa only has one sentence to share.
To know how to be superstitious is still one of the arts which, developed to perfection, distinguishes the superior man.
I don't know entirely if he condones superstition (which I don't), or condones knowing why people are superstitious. The true meaning may be lost in translation... I'm not sure right now.
In the very next item, number 391 (a much lengthier piece), he delves into ideas much more in line with my own.
Ever since I've been using my idle moments to observe and meditate, I've noticed that people don't agree or know the truth about anything that's of real importance in life or that would be useful for living it. The most exact science is mathematics, which lives in the cloister of its own laws and rules; when applied, yes, it elucidates other sciences, but it can elucidate only what they discover - it cannot help in the discovery. In the other sciences, the only sure and accepted facts are those that don't matter for life's supreme ends. Physics knows the expansion coefficient for iron, but it doesn't know the true mechanics of the world's composition.
(Something that may be unknowable to an organ as simple as the human mind.)
And the more we advance in what we'd like to know, the more we fall behind in what we do know.
Yes: the hydra of research science.
Metaphysics would seem to be the supreme guide, since it alone is concerned with ultimate truth and life's supreme ends, but it isn't even a scientific theory, just a pile of bricks that these or those hands form into awkward houses with no mortar holding them together.
Philosophers and (legitimate) religious founders (religions, universally it seems, tend to lose their intellectual/philosophical value from generation to generation, culminating in the form of militant followers and people unwilling to back up debate with reasoned thought) are the "brick pilers."
I've also noticed that the only difference between humans and animals is the way they deceive themselves and remain ignorant about the life they live. Animals don't know what they do: they're born, they grow up, they live and they die without thought, reflection or a real future.
Roughly true, it seems, thought I don't think it should be seen as a simply black and white statement: that humans are conscious of themselves, other organisms are not. It may be the case, but it's difficult to really tell for sure.
And how many men live differently from animals? We all sleep, and the only difference is in what we dream, and in the degree and quality of our dreaming. Perhaps death will awaken us, but we can't even be sure of that unless it's by faith (for which believing is having), by hope (for which wanting is possessing), or by charity (for which giving is receiving).
True: no one has ever come back from being truly dead, therefore I think the best evidence for what death will be like is what it was like before birth. We have all not existed before. Finally, to top off a fantastic entry:
It's raining on this cold and sad winter afternoon as if it had been raining, just as monotonously, since the first page of the world. It's raining, and as if the rain had made them hunch forward, my feelings lower their stupid gaze to the ground, where water flows and nourishes nothing, washes nothing, cheers up nothing. It's raining, and I suddenly feel the terrible weight of being an animal that doesn't know what it is, dreaming its thought and emotion, withdrawn into a spatial region of being as into a hovel, satisfied by a little heat as by an eternal truth.
