The Art of Being Alone: Fernando Pessoa
Solitude. Alone which is not lonely, but contemplative.
If I were to imagine it and give it some sense of materiality, solitude is the wind, the color white and the silence of trees. My view and Fernando Pessoa’s have something in common: the connection to nature and the freedom associated with being alone. Pessoa was a Portuguese modernist poet who died in 1935—basically unknown to the wider reading public despite his poems being charged with philosophy and depth. While maintaining a peculiar and individual sense of self through his poems, his description of solitude is universally human.
I encountered the short collection “I Have More Souls Than One” a few months ago and I haven’t left it since. As I keep on reading it every once in a while, I can’t wrap my head around the magic behind: what is it that makes Pessoa so special? What is it about his explanations and analogies on solitude that make his poems comforting rather than pitiful? Why do we tend, while reading his poems, to feel the fullness of solitude rather than its general association with emptiness?
If we were to oversimplify the answer to those questions, Pessoa describes solitude as we experience it in an everyday life context, simple, direct, yet “normal” and accessible in some sense. However, it’s much more complex than that. In fact there are a few poems in the collection in which through the rhythm and the precise choice of the words he uses, the idea of solitude goes beyond the simple experience of solitude and we are re-living our own solitude with the poet himself, we are, in that instant, alone yet in the company of Pessoa’s words.
In “Master, Serene”, Pessoa, through his alter-ego Ricardo Reis, describes the paradox of the temporality of existence and those moments that, although brief in relation to the bigger picture of life, still seem endless and isolated:
“Let us pick flowers,
Let’s dip lightly
These hands of ours
In the calm streams,
That we may learn
Calm like them.
Sunflowers ever
Eyeing the sun,
From life let’s go
Tranquilly, not have
Even the remorse
Of having lived.”
Fernando Pessoa, “I Have More Souls Than One” (Penguin Modern 19) from Penguin Modern Classics 2000 ed., p.16
Solitude is the gesture of picking up flowers and of the sun touching your skin while being content of the state you are finding yourself in. Solitude is dipping your hands slightly in a stream of water, knowing your days are a search for tranquillity, while constantly eyeing the sun, living inexorably.
In this sense, while the solitude is hidden behind simple movements and perceptions, it is in the universal “we” that Pessoa convinces us of the humanity of solitude: you are caressing the water, being touched by the sun, feeling the wind blowing in a field of wild flowers, and eventually while being alone with the poem, you’re not alone anymore.
It is in the ode “I Want” that Pessoa-Reisis direct about his desires for calm and unknown days of solitude, ultimately ending in the hope for nothingness. The spirit of the poem is negative:
“To those for whom happiness is
Their sun, night comes around”
He is hinting at the idea that happiness is unreachable because of obstacles coming your way. However, here solitude is “filling [his] days”; it is “unknown” yet longed for in a feeling ending in the confusing “hope for nothing”. This is a wanted and hated unconstrainable force breathing through a body.
Here again, a paradox: it is the desire for nothing, in a calm and content esprit that will lead you to a “grateful life”, he says, yet it is this quest that fills your existence. Is this search nothingness itself then? There’s a nothing living and breathing inside you that is pushing further and further until the calmness is reached.
While reading Pessoa’s works, we have to remember that he is human in all forms and sensations, he is not aspiring to be The Poet explaining to us The Truth, but he is asking himself and ultimately us, the readers, if whatever he was experiencing was any way real and universal.
Look for nothing, he says, experience everything you can, but don’t forget the soft sides of your being and especially don’t be afraid to ask yourself if the solitude you may live ever, sometimes or often, is just a search for the sun and you, as a sunflower, are just trying to fill your days with whatever you need, that being nothingness or the company of trees. ◆
Martina is a literature lover and occasional writer constantly trying to make people see the beauty of books, poetry, and the arts. Contact Martina through: martina.p.marti@gmail.com