"Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they [poems] have. By day they’re full of meaningless activity; by night, they’re full of meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things. There is an equal, abstract destiny for men and for things; both have an equally indifferent designation in the algebra of the world's mystery.
"But there's something else...In these languid and empty hours, a sadness felt by my entire being rises from my soul to my mind--a bitter awareness that everything is a sensation of mind and at the same time something external, something not in my power to change. Ah, how often my own dreams have raised up before me as things, not to replace reality but to declare themselves as equals, in so far as I scorn them and they exist apart from me, like the tram now turning the corner at the end of the street or like the voice of an evening crier crying I don't know what but with a sound that stands out--an Arabian chant like the sudden patter of a fountain--against the montony of twilight!
"Future married couples pass by, chatting seamstresses pass by, young men in a hurry for pleasure pass by, those who have retired from everything smoke on their habitual stroll, and at one or another doorway a shopkeeper stands like an idle vagabond, hardly noticing a thing. Army recruits--some of them brawny, others slight--slowly drift along in noisy and worse-than-noisy clusters. Occasionally someone quite ordinary goes by. Cars at that time of day are rare, and their noise is musical. In my heart there's a peaceful anguish, and my calm is made of resignation.
"All of this passes, and none of it means anything to me. It's all foreign to my fate, and even to fate as a whole. It's just unconsciousness, curses of protest when chance hurls stones, echoes of unknown voices--a collective mishmash of life."
--Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet
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