From The Book of Disquiet —
Life gets in the way of being able to express life. If I were to experience a great love, I would never be able to describe it.
I myself don’t know if the “I” I am setting before you in these serpentine pages really exists or is merely a false, self-created aesthetic concept of who I am. Yes, I live aesthetically in another being. I have sculpted my life like a statue made of a material alien to myself. Sometimes, I don’t even recognize me, so external to myself have I become, and so entirely artistically have I deployed my consciousness of myself.
Who am I behind this unreality? I don’t know. I must be someone. And if I do not seek to live, to act or to feel, it is — believe me — so as not to disturb the already laid-down lines of my false persona. I want to be exactly what I want to be and am not. If I were to live I would destroy myself. I wanted to be a work of art, at least as regards my soul, since that’s impossible. That is why I sculpted myself calmly and differently and placed myself in a hothouse, far from draughts and direct light — where the exotic flower of my artificiality can bloom in secluded beauty.
I sometimes think how lovely it would be if I could unify my dreams and create a continuous life, with one day succeeding another, with imaginary banquets attended by imaginary guests and to live and suffer and enjoy that false life. Misfortunes would befall me there; I would experience great joys. And none of it would be real. But it would have a superb logic all its own; it would follow a rhythm of voluptuous falseness and take place in a city made of my soul, stretching as far as the quay beside a calm bay, far away inside myself, far, far away…
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet.
