Read The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa for Free Online

it is, you understand, very delicate and very sad. Besides, it may have been (how I wish it may have been!) an accident, and in that case our hasty condemnation would itself be a crime. It is just my task, by inquiring into his mental condition, to determine whether the catastrophe was a crime or a mere accident.
    An early reply will [be] very much obliged.

Two Prose Fragments
Alexander Search
     

1.
     
    Bond entered into by Alexander Search, of Hell, Nowhere, with Jacob Satan, Master, though not King, of the same place:
1. Never to fall off or shrink from the purpose of doing good to mankind.
2. Never to write things, sensual or otherwise evil, which may be to the detriment and harm of those that read.
3. Never to forget, when attacking religion in the name of truth, that religion can ill be substituted and that poor man is weeping in the dark.
4. Never to forget men’s suffering and men’s ill.
    October 2nd, 1907
Alexander Search
     
    † Satan
(his mark)

2.
     
    30 October 1908
    No soul more loving or tender than mine has ever existed, no soul so full of kindness, of pity, of all the things of tenderness and of love. Yet no soul is so lonely as mine—not lonely, be it noted, from exterior but from interior circumstances. I mean this: together with my great tenderness and kindness an element of an entirely opposite kind enters into my character—an element of sadness, of self-centeredness, of selfishness, therefore, whose effect is two-fold: to warp and hinder the development and full
internal
play of those other qualities, and to hinder, by affecting the will depressingly, their full
external
play, their manifestation. One day I shall analyze this, one day I shall examine better, discriminate, the elements of my character, for my curiosity about all things,linked to my curiosity about myself and my own character, will lead to an* attempt to understand my personality.
    It was on account of these characteristics that I wrote, describing myself, in “A Winter Day”:*
One like Rousseau
...
A misanthropic lover of mankind
.
     
    I have, as a matter of fact, many, too many, affinities with Rousseau. In certain things our characters are identical. The warm, intense, inexpressible love of mankind, and the portion of selfishness balancing it—this is a fundamental characteristic of his character and, as well, of mine.
    My intense patriotic suffering, my intense desire of bettering the condition of Portugal provokes in me—how to express with what warmth, with what intensity, with what sincerity!—a thousand plans which, even if one man could realize them, he would have to have one characteristic which in me is purely negative—the power of will. But I suffer—on the very brink of madness, I swear it—as if I
could
do all and was unable to do it, by deficiency of will.
    ...
    Besides my patriotic projects—writing of “Portuguese Regicide” to provoke a revolution here, writing of Portuguese pamphlets, editing of older national literary works, creation of a magazine, of a scientific review etc.; other plans consuming me with the necessity of being soon carried out—Jean Seul projects,* critique of Binet-Sanglé,* etc.—combine to produce an excess of impulse that paralyzes my will. The suffering that this produces I know not if it can be described as on this side of insanity.
    Add to all this other reasons still for suffering, some physical, others mental, the susceptibility to every small thing that can cause pain (or even that to a normal man could not cause pain), add to this other things still, complications, money difficulties—join all this to my fundamentally unbalanced temperament, and you may be able to
suspect
what my suffering is.
    One of my mental complications—horrible beyond words—is a fear of insanity, which itself is insanity. (...)

Rule of Life
     
1. Make as few confidences as possible. Better make none, but, if you make any, make false or indistinct ones.
2. Dream as little as possible,