Mindfulness...: Magis amica veritas...

Magis amica veritas...

Magis amica veritas...

Patriot? No: just Portuguese.

I was born Portuguese like I was born blond and blue-eyed.

If I was born to speak, I have to speak a language.

When it’s cold in time of cold, for me it’s like a spring day,
Because since I belong to the existence of things
The natural is pleasing simply because it’s natural.

I accept life’s difficulties because they’re destined,
Like I accept extreme cold in the depth of Winter —
Calmly, without complaining, like someone simply accepting,
And I find a happiness in the fact of accepting —
In the sublimely scientific and difficult fact of accepting the inevitable natural.

What are my illnesses and the disease that comes over me
But the Winter of my person and my life?
The irregular Winter, whose laws of appearance I don’t know,
But which exists for me in virtue of the same sublime fatality.
And has the same inevitable exteriority to me
As the heat of the earth in the height of Summer
And the cold of the earth at the peak of Winter.

I accept because of my personality.
I was born subject like others to errors and defects,
But never to the error of wanting to understand too much,
Never to the error of wanting to understand only with the intellect..
Never to the defect of demanding of the World
That it be anything that’s not the World.

Whatever it is in the center of the World,
It gave me the exterior world as an example of Reality,
And when I say “This is real,” even about a feeling,
I can’t help seeing it in some exterior space,
I see it with some vision outside me and alien to me.

Being real means not being inside myself.
I have no notion of reality inside my person.
I know that the world exists but I don’t know if I exist.
I’m more certain of the existence of my white house
Than of the existence of the owner of my white house.
I believe more in my body than in my soul,
Because my body is present in the middle of reality,
Able to be seen by others,
To touch others,
To sit and stand,
But my soul can only be defined in terms of the outside.
It exists for me — in the moments when I believe it actually does exist —
Borrowed from the exterior reality of the World.

If the soul is more real
Than the exterior world, as you say, philosopher,
Why was the exterior world given to me as the model of reality?

If it’s more certain I sense
Than the thing I sense exists —
Why do I sense
And why does the thing rise up independently of me
Without needing me to exist,
And I’m always joined to me-myself, always personal and intransmissible?
Why do I move with others
In a world where we meet each other and where we’re in the same place
If this world is somehow wrong and it’s me that’s right?
If the world is wrong, then it’s everybody’s error.
And each one of us is only the error of each one of us.
Thing for thing, the World is more certain.

But why do I question myself, if not because I’m sick?

On certain days, the exterior days of my life,
My days of perfect natural lucidity,
I feel without feeling I feel,
I see without knowing I see,
And the Universe is never as real as those times,
The Universe is never (not near or far from me
But) so sublimely not-mine.

When I say “It’s evident,” do I somehow mean “It’s only me who sees it?”
When I say “It’s the truth,” do I somehow mean “It’s my opinion?”
When I say “There it is,” do I somehow mean “There it isn’t?”
And if this is so in life, why should it be different in philosophy?
We live before philosophizing; we exist before we know we do.
The first fact deserves at least precedence and worship.
Yes, rather than interior, we’re exterior,
So we’re essentially exterior.

You say, sick philosopher, philosopher to the end, that this is materialism.
But how can this be materialism, if materialisn is a philosophy,
If a philosophy would be, at least if it were mine, a philosophy of mine,
And this isn’t even mine, and I’m not even I?

Alberto Caeiro

"Poemas inconjuntos"

E eu que estou bêbado

de toda a injustiça do mundo...

E eu que estou bêbado de toda a injustiça do mundo…

— O dilúvio de Deus e o bebé loirinho boiando morno à tona de água,
Eu, em cujo coração a angústia dos outros é raiva,
E a vasta humilhação de existir um amor taciturno

— Eu, o lírico que faz frases porque não pode fazer sorte,
Eu, o fantasma do meu desejo redentor, névoa fria

— Eu não sei se devo fazer poemas, escrever palavras, porque a alma

— A alma inúmera dos outros sofre sempre fora de mim.

Meus versos são a minha impotência.
O que não consigo, escrevo-o;
E os ritmos diversos que faço aliviam a minha cobardia.

A costureira estúpida violada por sedução,
O marçano rato preso sempre pelo rabo,
O comerciante próspero escravo da sua prosperidade
— Não distingo, não louvo, não

[…]

— São todos bichos humanos, estupidamente sofrentes.

Ao sentir isto tudo, ao pensar isto tudo, ao raivar isto tudo,
Quebro o meu coração fatidicamente como um espelho,
E toda a injustiça do mundo é um mundo dentro de mim
Meu coração esquife, meu coração […], meu coração cadafalso

— Todos os crimes se deram e se pagaram dentro de mim.

Lacrimejância inútil, pieguice humana dos nervos,
Bebedeira da civilidade altruísta,
Voz com papelotes chorando no deserto de um quarto andar esquerdo…