THE SCAFFOLD
by Fernando Pessoa
The time I’ve spent dreaming—
Years and years of my life!
Ah, how much of my past
Was only the false life
Of a future I imagined!
Here on the bank of the river
I grow calm for no reason.
Its empty flowing mirrors,
Cold and anonymous,
The life I’ve lived in vain.
How little hope ever attains!
What longing is worth the wait?
Any child’s ball
Rises higher than my hope,
Rolls farther than my longing.
Waves of the river, so slight
That you aren’t even waves,
The hours, days and years
Pass quickly—mere grass or snow
Which die by the same sun.
I spent all I didn’t have.
I’m older than I am.
The illusion that kept me going
Was a queen only on stage:
Once undressed, her reign was over.
Soft sound of these slow waters
Aching for shores you’ve passed,
How drowsy are the memories
Of misty hopes! What dreams
All dreaming and life amount to!
What did I make of my life?
I found myself when already lost.
Impatient, I let myself be,
As I might let a lunatic go on
Believing what I’d proved was wrong.
Dead sound of these gentle waters
That flow because they must,
Take not only my memories
But also my dead hopes—
Dead, because they must die.
I’m already my future corpse.
Only a dream links me to myself—
The hazy and belated dream
Of what I should have been—a wall
Around my abandoned garden.
Take me, passing waves,
To the oblivion of the sea!
Bequeath me to what I won’t be—
I, who raised a scaffold
Around the house I never built.
(29 August 1924)
• • 34 notes
“What else have we got? We never talk about anything. We stay in this room and we drink and make love. We’re strangers.”
The Hustler (Robert Rossen, 1961)
• • 1 note
ozu-teapot:
The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family | Yasujirô Ozu | 1941
Shin Saburi
• • 220 notes
A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs (aka Sing a Song of Sex) (1967) dir. Nagisa Oshima
•
Singing Lovebirds (1939) dir. Masahiro Makino
• • 2 notes
“You begin to see that you yourself, innocent, upright you, have contributed and do contribute to the misery of the world. Which will never end because we’re what we are.”
— Another Country (1963), James Baldwin
• • 9 notes
“Perhaps you can write better if you leave the mistakes.”
— Jorge Luis Borges (via theparisreview)
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“
At bottom no one in life can help anyone else in life; this one experiences over and over in every conflict and every perplexity: that one is alone.
All companionship can consist only in the strengthening of two neighboring solitudes, whereas everything that one is wont to call giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to come close to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling.
”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
On Love and Other Difficulties
(Trans. John L. Mood)
• • 3 notes
“If God exists, what is the point of literature? And if He doesn’t exist, what is the point of literature?”
— Eugene Ionesco (via theparisreview)
• • 554 notes
“I reached that odd point when you are no longer young, and yet you’re still not old. You become a kind of centaur: half the person you used to be, half somebody else; that point when there is more you do not care about and less and less you do - you are in no man’s land; you keep moving, but not because you will get anywhere.”
— Benjamin Prado from Not Only Fire (via gravellyrun)
(via thenightlymirror)
• • 1,913 notes
