Read The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa for Free Online Page B

and Pessoa’s dozens of unfinished plays, including a monumental but vastly disordered
Faust,
have few positively
dramatic
qualities to offer. Describing his life’s work as “a drama divided into people instead of into acts,” Pessoa specialized in inventing characters without true plays (or stories) for them to inhabit, and the larger characters—his heteronyms—ended up haunting him, not because they were convincing replicas of carnal realities but because Pessoa felt, or decided, that their other-world reality had every bit as much right to exist. No matter how ethereal a dreamed thing may be, it is in some sense an object of experience, as real to an unbiased sensibility as any other object, only more mysteriously so. Pessoa escaped from the world of material chaos into dreams, whose more obscure and endlessly proliferating reality proved to be even more disquieting. No wonder the Second Watcher, in the second
half of the play, desperately pleads with her two companions: “Talk to me, shout at me, so that I’ll wake up and know that I’m here with you and that certain things really are just dreams
....”
    She pleads in vain. No dream, for Pessoa, was
just
a dream; every dream, every fiction, every vision, every passing thought, was its own small but infinite universe, full of unknown wonders—and horrors—for the adventurer who dares to explore it. Pessoa would never have said that truth is stranger than fiction. What he did say was that truth is fiction, fiction is truth, and that everything—when we really look at it—is strange beyond all telling
.

The Mariner—A Static Drama in One Act
     
By “static drama” I mean drama in which action is absent from the plot, drama in which the characters don’t act (for they never change position and never talk of changing position) and don’t even have feelings capable of producing an action—drama, in other words, in which there is no conflict or true plot. Someone may argue that this is not drama at all. I believe it is, for I believe that drama is more than just the dynamic kind and that the essence of dramatic plot is not action or the results of action but—more broadly—the revelation of souls through the words that are exchanged and the creation of situations. ...... It’s possible for souls to be revealed without action, and it’s possible to create situations of inertia that concern only the soul, with no windows or doors onto reality.*
     
    A room in what is no doubt an old castle. We can tell, from the room, that the castle is circular. In the middle of the room, on a bier, stands a coffin with a young woman dressed in white. A torch bums in each of the four comers. To the right, almost opposite whoever imagines the room, there is one long, narrow window, from which a patch of ocean can be glimpsed between two distant hills
.
    Next to the window three young women keep watch. The first is sitting opposite the window, her back to the torch on the upper right. The other two are seated on either side of the window
.
    It is night, with just a hazy remnant of moonlight
     
FIRST WATCHER We still haven’t heard the hour strike.
     
SECOND WATCHER We can’t hear it. No clock is near. Soon it will be day.
     
THIRD WATCHER No: the horizon is black.
     
FIRST WATCHER Why don’t we amuse ourselves by telling what we once were? It’s beautiful, sister, and always false ...
     
SECOND WATCHER No, let’s not talk about it. Besides, were we ever anything?
     
FIRST WATCHER Perhaps. I don’t know. But it’s always beautiful, in any case, to talk about the past ... The hours have gone by and we have remained silent. I’ve passed the time gazing at the flame of that candle. Sometimes it flickers, or turns yellow, or more white. I don’t know why this happens. But do we know, sisters, why anything happens? ...
     
    (pause)
     
FIRST WATCHER To talk about the past must be beautiful, for it is useless and makes us feel so sorry ...
     
SECOND WATCHER