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Introduction
Alberto Caeiro da Silva was born in Lisbon on April 16, 1889, and died of tuberculosis in the
same city on (...), 1915. He spent nearly all his life in a village in Ribatejo; and only returned to
the city of his birth in his final months. In Ribatejo he wrote nearly all his poems, those of the
book entitled The Keeper of Flocks, those of the incomplete book, The Amorous Shepherd, and
some of his first which I myself, having inherited them for the purposes of publication with the
rest, gathered together under the designation graciously suggested by Álvaro de Campos:
Detached Poems. His final poems, beginning with the one numbered (...), were written in the last
leriod of the author’s life, after he had returned to Lisbon. The task befalls me briefly to establish
a distinction. Some of these poems reveal, by reason of the perturbation caused by illness,
something new and rather foreign — in nature and direction — to the general character of his
work.
Caeiro’s life cannot be narrated: there is nothing in it to be told. His poems were the life within
him. In all else there was neither incident nor story. Even the brief, fruitless, and absurd episode
which gave rise to the poems of The Amorous Shepherd was not an incident but rather, so to
speak, a forgetting.
Caeiro’s work represents the absolute essence of paganism, fully reconstructed. The Greeks and
the Romans, who lived in the midst of paganism and therefore did not think about it, would have
been incapable of such a thing. Yet Caeiro’soeuvre and its paganism were never thought through,
nor were they even felt. They came from something within us deeper than feeling or reason. To
say any more would be to explain, which serves no end; to affirm any less would be to lie. Every
oeuvre speaks for itself with its own voice in the language that shapes both work and voice. “If
you have to ask, you will never know.” There is nothing to explain. Imagine attempting to
explain to someone a language he did not speak.
Ignorant of life and nearly so of letters, practically without companionship or culture, Caeiro
created his work through a deep and imperceptible progress, like that which drives the logical
development of civilizations through unconscious humanity’s conscious mind. His was a
progress of sensation, of ways of feeling, and an intimate evolution of thought derived from
these progressive sensations. Through some superhuman intuition, as one founding a religion
(yet the mantle of “religious” does not suit him — witness his repudiation of all religion and
metaphysics), this man described the world without thinking about it, and created a concept of
the universe — a concept thoroughly resistant to exegesis.
When first confronted with the enterprise of publishing these poems, I thought I would write a
long and discursive critical study of Caeiro’s work, its nature and natural destiny. But I found I
could make no satisfactory study.
It weighs heavily upon me, but reason has compelled me to preface the work of my Master with
a few, null words. Beyond what I have already written, I can write nothing else useful or
necessary, that had not been heartfully said in Ode (...) of Book I of my works, where I weep for
the man who was for me (as he will come to be for a great many others) the unveiler of Reality,
or, as he himself said, “the Argonaut of true sensations” — the great Liberator, he who restores
us, singing, to the luminous nothing we are; who draws us away from death and from life, and
leaves us among simple which, while they last, are ignorant of life and death; who frees us from
hope and despair, so that we might neither seek groundless consolation nor find pointless
sadness; so that we might live unthinking alongside him, fellow guests of the objective necessity
of the Universe.
I give you his work, whose editing was entrusted to me by the ineluctable hazard of the world. I
give it to you, and I say:
•—•
If the critic will apply himself to a careful analysis of these apparently very simple poems, he
will find himself again and again faced with unexpected and increasingly complex elements.
Taking for axiomatic what immediately impresses him — the naturalness and spontaneity of
Caeiro’s poems — he will be surprised to find that they are at the same time rigorously unified
by a thinking which not only coordinates and links them, but which also foresees objections,
anticipates criticism, and explains away flaws by integrating these flaws into the spiritual
substance of the work. Though we think of Caeiro as an objective poet — as indeed he is — in
four of his poems we find him expressing entirely subjective emotions. But we are not allowed
the cruel satisfaction of pointing out his error. In the poem preceding these poems, he explains
that they were written during an illness, and therefore they must be different from his other
poems, because sickness is not health. The critic is unable to raise to his lips the cup of his cruel
satisfaction. When he seeks the slightly less concrete pleasure of ferreting out transgressions
against the work’s own inner theory, he is confronted by poems like Nos. (...) and (...) , where his
objections have already been raised, and his questions answered.
Only someone who reads this work patiently, and with readiness of spirit, can appraise what is
surprising about Caeiro’s foresight and his intellectual coherence (his coherence is in fact more
intellectual than sentimental or emotional).
Caeiro’s work is truly a manifestation of a pagan mind. The order and discipline of paganism
which Christianity caused us to lose, the reasoned intelligence of things, which was paganism’s
most obvious attribute and no longer ours — permeate his work. Because it speaks here its form,
we see the essence, not the exterior shape, of paganism. In other words, I do not see Caeiro
reconstructing the exterior form of paganism. Paganism’s very substance has in fact been
summoned up from Avernus, as Orpheus summoned Eurydice, by the harmelodic magic of
Caeiro’s emotion.
What are, by my own criterion, the faults of this work? Only two, and they do little to dim the
brightness of this brother of the gods.
Caeiro’s poems lack the one thing that would complete them: there is no exterior discipline to
match the strength, coherency, and order reigning in the heart of his work. He chose, as will be
seen, a poetic form which, though strongly personal — as it could not fail to be — is merely the
free verse of the moderns. He did not control his writing with an over-arching discipline
comparable to the discipline with which he nearly always controls his emotion, with which he
always controls his ideas. We may forgive this flaw, because we must forgive much in
innovators, but we must not omit saying that it is a flaw, and not a distinction.
Neither did he fully control the sick emotions (still slightly demi-Christian) out of which his
poet’s soul rose into the world. His ideas, always essentially pagan, are sometimes cloaked in ill-
fitting emotive garb. In “The Keeper of Flocks,” one can follow a gradual perfection taking
place. The final poems — especially the four or five preceding the last two — are perfectly
unified in idea and emotion. I would forgive the poet for remaining burdened by certain
sentimental accoutrements of Christian mentality if he had never, even at the end of the work,
succeeded in ridding himself of that baggage. But since, at a certain point in his poetic evolution,
he did succeed, I do chastise him, and I severely chastise him (as I severely chastised him in
person), for not returning to his earlier poems and adjusting them to his acquired discipline. If he
had been unable to subject any of them to this discipline, he should have crossed them out
entirely. But the courage to sacrifice is a trait seldom found in poets. It is so much more difficult
to remake than it is to make for the first time. Truly, contrary to the old saying, the last step is the
hardest.
And so, I find the (...) poem, so irritating to a Christian, to be absolutely deplorable for an
objective poet in the process of reconstructing the essence of paganism. In this poem he descends
to the utter nadir of Christian subjectivism, even as deep as that admixture of the objective and
the subjective which forms the characteristic malady of the moderns — from certain pages in the
intolerable work of the ill-named Victor Hugo to the near-totality of the amorphous magma
which sometimes passes for poetry among our contemporary mystics.
Perhaps I have exaggerated; perhaps I have abused. Having benefitted from the resurrection of
paganism achieved by Caeiro, and having — as do all beneficiaries — busied myself with the
easy secondary art of development, it is probably ungrateful of me to rail against the defects
inherent in the innovation from which I have so benefited. But, where I find defects, even if I
forgive them, I must name them as such. Magisamicaveritas.
— Ricardo Reis
I
(3/8/1914)
II
(3/8/1914)
III
I felt so sorry for him! He was like a man from the country
And he walked through the city like he was out on bail.
But the way he looked at houses,
And the way he saw the streets,
And the way he had of taking things in,
Was like someone looking at trees,
Or lowering their eyes to the road where they go walking
Or taking in the flowers in the fields...
VI
VII
From my village I see as much in the Universe as you can see from earth...
So my village is as big as any other land
Because I’m the size of what I see,
Not the size of my height...
VIII
•—•
He sleeps in my soul
And sometimes he wakes up at night
And plays with my dreams.
He throws them around in the air,
Puts one on top of the other
And claps his hands all alone
Smiling at my sleep.
•—•
•—•
IX
XI
(4/12/1919)
XIII
XIV
(3/7/1914)
XV
XVI
(3/14/1914)
XVII
(3/7/1914)
XVIII
(1914)
XIX
(3/4/1914)
XX
The Tejo is more beautiful than the river that flows through my village,
But the Tejo isn’t more beautiful than the river that flows through my village,
Because the Tejo isn’t the river that flows through my village.
(3/7/1914)
XXI
(3/7/1914)
XXII
Like someone who opens the door of their house on a summer day
And peers at the heat of the fields with his whole face,
Sometimes, suddenly, Nature smacks me
Right in the face of my feelings,
And I get confused, worried, wanting to perceive
I don’t know how or what...
XXIII
XXIV
(3/13/1914)
XXV
(3/13/1914)
XXVI
(3/11/1914)
XXVII
XXVIII
You need to not know what flowers and stones and rivers are
To talk about their feelings.
XXIX
I’m not always the same when I talk and when I write.
I change, but I don’t change that much.
The color of flowers isn’t the same in the sun
As when a cloud passes over
Or when night falls
And the flowers are the color of shadow.
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
XXXIII
XXXIV
XXXV
(3/11/1914)
XXXVI
I think about this, not like someone thinking, but like someone breathing,
And I look at flowers and I smile...
I don’t know if they understand me
Or if I understand them,
But I know the truth is in them and in me
And in our common divinity
Of letting ourselves go and live on the Earth
And carrying us in our arms through the contented Seasons
And letting the wind sing us to sleep
And not have dreams in our sleep.
XXXVII
XXXVIII
XXXIX
What does a river know about this and what does a tree know?
And I, who am no more than those, what do I know?
Every time I look at things and think about what men think about them,
I laugh like how a brook sounds cool on a stone.
XL
(5/7/1914)
XLI
(5/7/14)
XLII
A stagecoach passed by on the road and went on;
And the road didn’t become more beautiful or even more ugly.
That’s human action on the outside world.
We take nothing away and we put nothing back, we pass by and we forget;
And the sun is always punctual every day.
(5/7/14)
XLIII
(5/7/14)
XLIV
(5/7/14)
XLV
(5/7/14)
XLVI
(5/10/14)
XLVII
XLVIII
XLIX
I am aware of the fact that these two poems are pearls of universal love poetry. We sense a new
kind of love in them, and hear a new music of amorous emotion. Caeiro may have been at times
unfaithful to his principles; he could never be anything but original. These love poems are unique
in the history of love poetry. I recognize this fact without admiration, for I hold my admiration
most high and dear. The very state of love, while natural, is hardly the proper state for the fixing
of impressions we call art. There exist rare artists who manage always to hold onto themselves,
and whose intelligence bridles their emotion; but these same artists certainly do not arrange their
sexual emotions in columns according to some algorithm or another.
Caeiro’s metaphysical temperament was less receptive to those amorous emotions, which,
already disturbing in themselves, would be even more disturbing to a temperament so foreign to
them. Thus the momentary abdication of his principles and his native objectivity in the two
poems of The Amorous Shepherd. How can one in love not look inside himself?
The mental addiction produced by this fruitless and disturbing amorous episode, whose details I
neither know nor wish to know, ran its course in the poet’s mind and left a wake of destruction.
Never again, save in fleeting poetic episodes, would Caeiro return to that supremely serene,
godlike vision that he, as a poet, after gradually cleansing himself of the accretions of Christian
spirituality, attained along the road he called The Keeper of Flocks.
بعد أن، سيعود كاييرو إلى الهدوء المتعالي والرؤية األلوهية، وهذا محفوظ في الوقائع الشعرية العابرة،وليس مجددا
ذلك الذي جعله يسير على الطريق الذي دعي "راعي،طهر نفسه تدريجيا من تراكمات الروحانية المسيحية
"القطيع
I shall dispense with further comment. In abundantly explaining the substance of Caeiro’s work,
I have also implicitly explained what it degenerated into, when degenerate it did. I gladly
dispense with commenting on a point whose consideration so grieves me. I urge the reader to
take my lead, and pass over these two unlikable poems, thus to arrive, with no great increase in
joy, at the many fragments, complete and incomplete, which close this collection of Caeiro’s
works.
— Ricardo Reis
When I wasn’t with you
I loved Nature like a monk contemplating Christ...
Now I love Nature
Like a monk contemplating the Virgin Mary,
Religiously, in my own way, like before,
But in another way more moving and nearer.
I see the rivers better when I go with you
Through the fields to the bank of the rivers;
Sitting at your side looking at the clouds I look at them better—
You didn’t take me from Nature...
You changed Nature...
You brought Nature to my feet,
Because you exist I see it better, but the same,
Because you love me, I love it the same, but more,
Because you chose me to be with you and love you,
My eyes stare at everything more lingeringly.
I don’t regret anything I was before because I still am.
I only regret not having loved you.
Put your hands in mine
And let’s be quiet, surrounded by life.
(7/6/1914)
When I run through the empty fields a light breeze comes to me.
I think of you, I murmur your name and I’m not me: I’m happy.
(7/6/1914)
I spent the whole night without sleeping, seeing her form without a break,
And seeing her always in a different way from meeting her. . .
I make thoughts with the memory of what she is when she talks to me,
And in each thought she changes according to her likeness.
To love is to think.
And I almost forget to feel only from thinking about her.
I don’t know what I want at all, even from her, and I don’t think about anything but her.
I have a great animated distraction.
When I want to meet her,
I almost feel like not meeting her,
So I don’t have to leave her afterwards.
And I prefer thinking about her, because it’s like I’m afraid of her.
I don’t know what I want at all, and I don’t want to know what I want. All I want to do is think
about her.
I’m asking nothing of nobody, not even her, except to think.
(7/10/1930)
Love is companionship.
I don’t know how to walk alone on the roads anymore
Because I can’t walk alone anymore.
A visible thought makes me walk faster
And see less and at the same time really enjoy seeing everything.
Even her absence is a thing that’s with me.
And I love her so much I don’t know how to want her.
If I don’t see her, I pretend I do and I’m as strong as trees are tall.
But if I see her I tremble, I don’t know what happens to what I feel when she’s not there.
All I am is some strength abandoning me.
All reality looks at me like a sunflower with her face in the middle of it.
(7/10/1930)
(7/10/1930)
Whoever loves is different from who they are
They’re the same person without anyone.
(undated)
(7/23/1930)
(undated)
(11/8/1929)
When he got up from the hillside and the false truth, he saw everything:
The great valleys full of the same green as always,
The great distant mountains, more real than any feeling,
All reality, with the sky and the air and the fields that exist, is present.
(And once again the air, that he’d missed for so long, entered coolly into his lungs)
And he felt that the air was opening again, but with pain, a liberty in his chest.
(7/10/1930)
(1923)
(undated)
(4/20/1919)
The way this kid is dirty is different from the way others are dirty.
Play! grasping that stone that fits in your hand,
You know it fits in your hand.
What philosophy comes to greater certainty?
None, and none will ever be able to come to play at my door.
(12/4/1919)
(12/4/1919)
(4/12/1919)
(4/12/1919)
(4/12/1919)
(undated)
(4/12/1919)
(6/4/1922)
(undated)
(6/5/1922)
(6/5/22)
I don’t know what other people will think when they read this;
But I think it must be good because I think it without difficulty
Or the idea of people hearing me think;
Because I think it without thoughts;
Because I say it like my words say it.
(11/7/1915)
(11/7/1915)
If I die young,
Without ever publishing a book,
Without seeing how my poems look in print,
If someone wants to agitate for my cause,
I hope they don’t agitate.
If it happens like that, it happens right.
(11/7/1915)
(11/7/1915)
(11/8/1915)
(11/8/1915)
(11/8/1915)
When the grass grows on top of my grave,
Make that the sign for me to be totally forgotten.
Nature never remembers, that’s why she’s beautiful.
If they have the sick need to “interpret” the green grass on my grave,
Let them say I keep growing green and being natural.
(11/8/1915)
(11/7/1915)
(undated)
(undated)
(undated)
(undated)
(undated)
The green of the blue sky before the sun’s about to rise
And the white blue in the west where the shining sun disappears.
(undated)
I’m glad I see with my eyes and not the pages I’ve read.
(undated)
(undated)
(5/21/1917)
(5/21/1917)
(5/21/1917)
(5/21/1917)
On a whitely cloudy day I get sad, almost afraid,
And I begin to meditate about problems I make up.
The only mystery of the universe is the more and not the less.
We see too much in things — that’s what’s wrong, that’s why we have doubts.
What exists transcends what I believe exists.
Reality is just real and isn’t thought about.
The universe isn’t an idea of mine.
My idea of the universe is that it’s an idea of mine.
Night doesn’t fall for my eyes
But my idea of the night is that it falls for my eyes.
Beyond my thinking and having any thoughts
The night falls concretely
And the shining of stars exists like it had weight.
(10/1/1917)
(10/1/1917)
(10/1/1917)
(10/1/1917)
(10/1/1917)
(10/1/1917)
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.
(10/24/1917)
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?
(10/24/1917)
(undated)
Let’s leave the exterior universe and other men where Nature puts them.
Everything is pride and unconsciousness.
It’s all wanting to shift itself, to make things, to leave a trace.
The exterior universe comes back to the heart
And the commander of squadrons in big chunks.
Humanity is a slave-revolt.
Humanity is a government usurped by the people.
It exists because it usurped, but it’s wrong because usurping means not having the right to.
(undated)
All the opinions there are about nature
Never made a weed grow or a flower bloom.
All the wisdom regarding things
Was never a thing I could hold like a thing;
If science wants to be truthful,
What science is more truthful than the science of things without science?
I close my eyes and the hard earth where I’m lying
Has a reality so real even my back feels it.
I don’t need reason — I have shoulderblades.
(undated)
(undated)
(undated)
(undated)
(undated)
(undated)
That thing over there was more there than it’s there!
Yes, sometimes I cry about the perfect body that doesn’t exist.
But the perfect body is the bodiest body there can be,
And the rest are the dreams men have,
The myopia of someone who doesn’t look very much,
And the way someone who doesn’t know how to stand up wants to sit down.
All Christianity is a dream of chairs.
(4/2/1919)
(undated)
(6/20/1919)
(6/20/1919)
(6/20/1919)
(undated)
(1930)
(undated)
First sign of a thunderstorm day after tomorrow.
The first white clouds hover low in a dimming sky,
Do they belong to a thunderstorm day after tomorrow?
I have certainty, but the certainty is a lie.
To be certain is to not be seeing.
There is no day after tomorrow.
There is only this:
A blue sky, a little gray, some white clouds on the horizon,
A little dirty underneath like they might become black later.
That’s what there is today,
And since today’s all there is for now, that’s everything.
Who knows if I’ll be dead the day after tomorrow?
If I’m dead the day after tomorrow, the thunderstorm day after tomorrow
Will be another thunderstorm than if I hadn’t died.
Of course I know thunderstorms don’t fall because I see them,
But if I weren’t in the world,
The world would be different —
There would be me the less —
And the thunderstorm would fall on a different world and would be another thunderstorm.
No matter what happens, what’s falling is what’ll be falling when it falls.
(7/10/1930)
(undated)
(5/7/1922)
(undated)
I’d left Glasgow about three-quarters of the way through my studies in naval engineering. I’d
traveled in the Orient; on returning, after disembarking at Marseilles, I felt a great weariness at
the thought of continuing by sea, and so went on to Lisbon by land. A cousin of mine met me
one day on a side trip to Ribatejo. He knew one of Caeiro’s cousins, and had business with him. I
met with the man who was to be my master in this cousin’s house. There is no more to tell,
because this, like all fecundations, is a small thing.
I see him still, with a clarity of soul that the tears of remembrance cannot dull, because the vision
is not outward. I see him before me, and perhaps I will eternally see him as when I met him.
First, the blue eyes of a fearless child; then, the slightly prominent cheekbones, the slightly pale
coloring, and the strange Greek air, which came from inside and was an inward calmness, not
outward, because it was caused neither by his expressions nor by his features. His rather thick
hair was blond, but it seemed darker in the shade. He was of medium height, but would have
been taller if he hadn’t stooped; his shoulders were rounded. His gestures were blank, his smile
was as it was, his voice the same, projected in the tone of one who seeks to say nothing but what
he is saying — neither loud nor soft, but clear, free of intent, hesitation, and timidity. His blue
eyes couldn’t stop staring. If our observation found anything strange, it found it in this: his
forehead, without being high, was powerfully white. It was this whiteness, which seemed greater
than that of his pale face, which lent him majesty. His hands would have been delicate if his
palms were not so wide. The expression of his mouth, the last thing I noticed, was as if speaking
were, for this man, less than existing. It was the same smile which is attributed, in poems, to
beautiful inanimate things, simply because they please us — flowers, fields, water in sunlight. It
was a smile of existence, not of speaking to us.
My master, my master, lost so young! I see him again in the shadow I am in me, in the memory I
keep of what is dead in me...
It was during our first conversation... How it came up, I don’t know, but he said, “There’s this
guy, Ricardo Reis — you’d like to meet him because he’s very different from you.” And then he
added, “Everything’s different from us. That’s why everything exists.”
That sentence, said as if it were one of the earth’s axioms, came over me like a tremor in the
earth and, like all first possessions, went to the foundations of my soul. But, unlike material
seduction, the effect in me was one of sudden reception in all my sensations of a virginity I’d
never had before.
Once, referring to the direct conception of things that characterized Caeiro’s sensibility, I quoted,
with friendly perversity, how Wordsworth described an insensitive man:
And I translated it (omitting an exact translation of primrose, because I don’t know the names of
flowers or plants): “A flower on the riverbank was a yellow flower to him, and nothing else.”
My master Caeiro laughed: “That simpleton had it right: a yellow flower isn’t really anything but
a yellow flower.”
“There is a difference,” he continued. “It depends on whether you think of that yellow flower as
one of many yellow flowers, or only that one particular yellow flower.”
“This is what your English poet means. For men like that a yellow flower is an everyday
experience, or a known thing. Now, this is not so good. Everything we see, we should see it for
the first time, because it really is the first time we see it. So then each yellow flower is a new
yellow flower, even if we say it’s the same one we saw yesterday. We aren’t the same and the
flower isn’t the same. Even the yellow itself can’t be the same. It’s a pity people don’t have the
right eyes for knowing this, otherwise we’d all be happy.”
One day Caeiro said something more than astonishing to me. We were speaking, or, rather, I was
speaking of the soul’s immortality. I told him I thought the concept, even if false, was necessary
for existence to be supported intellectually, to be seen as something other than a more or less
conscious pile of stones.
I answered without answering. “Tell me something. What are you to yourself, Caeiro?”
I’ll never forget how that sentence crashed into my mind. It’s useful for many things, including
things contrary to Caeiro’s intention. But it was mostly spontaneous, a beam of sunlight,
illuminating with no intention at all.
My master Caeiro wasn’t a pagan: he was paganism. Ricardo Reis is a pagan, Antonio Mora is a
pagan, I’m a pagan; even Fernando Pessoa would be a pagan, if he weren’t such a tangled skein,
all inside-out. But Ricardo Reis is a pagan by character, Antonio Mora is a pagan by intellect,
and I’m a pagan by rebelliousness — that is, by temperament. There was no explanation for
Caeiro’s paganism: it was consubstantiation.
I will define this the way one defines the indefinable — by the cowardice of example. One of the
things that most clearly distinguishes us from the Greeks is the absence of the concept of infinity
in their thinking. One might even say that the Greeks were repelled by the concept of infinity.
Now, my master Caeiro had that same conception, or, I should say, lack of conception. I will
relate, I believe with great exactitude, the surprising conversation in which he revealed it to me.
While referring to one of his poems in “The Keeper of Flocks,” he told me that someone — I
don’t know who — had called him a materialistic poet. Without finding the phrase applicable,
since my master Caeiro could never be defined by any phrase, I nevertheless told him I didn’t
think that calling him a materialistic poet was by any means absurd, and I explained classical
materialism to him, more or less well.
Caeiro listened closely with a pained expression and then said brusquely, “But that is so stupid.
That’s something for priests — without even the excuse of religion.”
I was astonished, and pointed out all the various similarities between materialism and his
doctrine (but not, of course, his poetry based on that doctrine). Caeiro protested.
“But what you’re calling poetry is what everything is. It’s not even poetry — it’s seeing. These
materialists are blind. You told me they say space is infinite. Where do they see that in space?”
And I, disconcerted: “But don’t you think of space as infinite? Can’t you conceive of space as
infinite?”
“I don’t conceive of anything as being infinite. How could I conceive of anything as being
infinite?”
“But, man,” I said, “Imagine space. Beyond that space is more space, and beyond that more, and
then more, and more... It never ends...“
I underwent a mental earthquake. “Well, suppose it did end!” I shouted. “What would come
after?”
This type of argumentation, at once infantile and feminine, and therefore irrefutable, tied up my
brain for several moments. “But is that really what you believe?” I blurted out.
“Do I believe a thing has limits!? Of course! Nothing exists that doesn’t have limits. Existence
means there’s always something else, and so everything has limits. Why is it so hard to conceive
that a thing is a thing, and that it isn’t always being some other thing that’s beyond it?”
At that moment I felt in my bones not that I was talking to a man, but to another universe. I tried
one last time, from another angle, which I felt compelled to consider legitimate.
“Look, Caeiro... think about numbers... Where do they end? Take any number — say 34. Past it
we have 35, 36, 37, 38 — there can be no end to it. There is no number so big that there is no
number larger...“
There are unexpected sentences, deep because they come from the depths, which define a man,
or rather, with which a man defines himself without trying to do so. I’ll never forget a phrase
with which Ricardo Reis once defined himself to me. We were talking about lies, and he said, “I
abhor a lie, because it is an inexactitude.” All of Ricardo Reis — past, present, future — is in
that sentence.
My master Caeiro, since he only spoke what he was, could be defined by any one of his
sentences, written or spoken, especially after he was about halfway finished writing “The Keeper
of Flocks.” But, among the many sentences he wrote which have been published, and among the
many he said to me which I either have or have not related, the sentence which contains the most
simplicity is one he said to me in Lisbon. I don’t remember exactly what we were talking about
— most likely, as usual, something to do with each person’s relation to themselves. I suddenly
asked my master Caeiro, “Are you at peace with yourself?” and he answered, “No, I’m at peace.”
It was like the voice of the earth, which is everything and no one.
The complexity of Caeiro’s simplicity is very curious. The evolution of his concept of the
universe, or, I should say, his concept of the lack of universe, is also very curious. Being an
absolute sensationist, his sensations are his intellect, with a reason and a critical power all their
own. Starting out as a kind of faithless St. Francis of Assisi, crashing through obstacles, he
slowly crept through the thicket of what he’d learned — which was, happily, very little. In the
end he appeared in his nakedness. It was the culmination of The Keeper of Flocks, of the poems
— so new on the surface of the most ancient function of the world! — of The Amorous Shepherd
and the non-anomalous poems in his Detached Poems. The anomalous poems are death’s
invasion of truth. In some of them his vision is disturbed. The naked man tries on his shroud.
But, all said, taking his work as a whole, it’s nudity itself because his suit covers him poorly, and
the shroud covers nothingness.
His commentary on St. Francis says it all. Once I read him a part of Fioretti, rapidly translating
as I went along. I couldn’t read more than a small part of it because Caeiro, indignant, or nearly
so, crankily interrupted me. “He’s a good man, but he’s drunk,” said my master Caeiro. At the
time, this seemed to me an inappropriately expressed impulse; but, shortly afterward, I saw the
deliquescence of the Saint’s compassion in the innocence of his soul, and I recognized what lay
behind it as one would recognize a photograph. [did C. recognized himself in St. F.’s grotesque
tenderness?]
I never saw my master Caeiro unhappy. I don’t know if he was unhappy when he died, or in the
days preceding his death. It would be possible to know these things, but to tell the truth I’ve
never dared ask those who sat with him anything about his death or how it went for him.
In any case, it was one of my life’s anguishes — one real anguish amidst so many fictitious ones
— that Caeiro died without me at his side. It’s stupid, but it’s human, and that’s how it is.
I was in England. Even Ricardo Reis wasn’t in Lisbon: he’d returned to Brasil. Fernando Pessoa
was there, but he might as well not have been. Fernando Pessoa feels things but he isn’t moved
by them, not even inside himself.
Nothing can console me for having been away from Lisbon on that day, except for the
consolation of thinking spontaneously of my master Caeiro, or of his poems. No one is
inconsolable at the feet of Caeiro’s memory, or of his poems; and the idea of nothingness — the
most terrifying of all ideas, when thought of with feeling — has, in my dear master’s work and in
my memories of him, something as high and luminous as sunlight upon snowy, unscalable peaks.
My master Caeiro was a master of all people able to have a master. No one close to Caeiro, who
spoke with him, who had the physical opportunity to share his mind, didn’t come back changed
from that only Rome from whence one can’t return the way one was — unless that person wasn’t
such a person; that is to say, unless that person was, like most people, incapable of being an
individual except by being a body in space, separated from other bodies, symbolically damaged
by the human form.
No inferior man can have a master, because the master has nothing to be master of. That’s why
definite, strong temperaments are easily hypnotized, and ordinary men are hypnotized with
relative ease, but idiots, imbeciles, weaklings and scatterbrains can’t be hypnotized. To be strong
is to be capable of feeling.
As will have been inferred from these pages, there were primarily three people around Caeiro —
Ricardo Reis, Antonio Mora, and myself. I’m not doing any favors, not even to myself, when I
say we were and are three individuals absolutely distinct from ordinary animal humanity (in
spirit, at least). All three of us owe the better part of the souls we have today to our contact with
my master Caeiro. Since passing through the filter of that fleshly intercession of the Gods, all
three of us are other — in other words, truly ourselves.
Ricardo Reis was a latent pagan. He [n.s. misunderstood] both modern life and the ancient life to
which he should have been born. He [misunderstood] modern life because his intelligence was of
a different quality.He [misunderstood] ancient life because you can’t feel what’s not here.Caeiro,
the reconstructor of Paganism, or, better, the founder of it [?for all time?], brought to Reis the
missing substance of his sensibility. And so Reis discovered in himself the pagan he was before
he discovered himself. Before meeting Caeiro, Ricardo was 25 years old, and hadn’t written a
single line. After meeting Caeiro, and hearing The Keeper of Flocks, Ricardo Reis began to
realize he was organically a poet. Some physiologists say it’s possible to change sex. I don’t
know if that’s true, because I don’t know if anything’s “true.” But Ricardo Reis certainly stopped
being a woman to be a man, or stopped being a man to be a woman — as you like — when he
came into contact with Caeiro.
António Mora was a shadow of speculative velleities. He’d spent his life gnawing on Kant,
trying to see with that thought if life had meaning. Indecisive, like all strong men, he hadn’t
found the truth, or what could have been the truth for him (the same thing, as far as I’m
concerned). He met master Caeiro and he met the truth. My master Caeiro gave Mora the soul he
didn’t have. Caeiro set a center within the periphery Mora had always been. And the outcome
was the reduction of Caeiro’s instinctive thought to a truly logical system.
The triumphal results were those two tracts, both marvels of originality and thought, The Return
of the Gods, and the Prolegomena to a Restructuring of Paganism.
As for me, before meeting Caeiro, I was a nervous machine for making nothing at all. I met my
master Caeiro a little later than Reis and Mora, who had met him in 1912 and 1913, respectively.
I met Caeiro in 1914. I’d already written poems — three sonnets and two longish poems
(“Carnival” and “Opiator”). Those poems and sonnets show me at loose ends. Soon after meeting
Caeiro, I became myself. I returned to London and immediately wrote “Triumphal Ode.” And
I’ve been myself ever since, for better or worse.
Even more curious is the case of Fernando Pessoa, who, properly speaking, doesn’t exist. He met
Caeiro a little before me — on March 8, 1914, according to him. Caeiro came to Lisbon to spend
a week. Fernando met him, and heard him read The Keeper of Flocks. Fernando went home with
a fever (as was his way) and wrote “Oblique Rain” in one go — the six poems in one sitting.
“Slanting Rain” doesn’t seem in the least like one of my master Caeiro’s poems, except in a
certain straightforwardness of rhythmic movement. But Fernando Pessoa would have been
incapable of drawing those extraordinary poems out of his interior world if he hadn’t met Caeiro.
Moments after meeting Caeiro, he underwent the spiritual upheaval that produced those poems.
It was a swift process. Fernando has an overly quick sensibility coupled with an overly quick
intelligence. There was no delay in his reaction to the Great Vaccination — the vaccination
against the stupidity of the intelligentsia. And the most admirable thing in Fernando Pessoa’s
works is that sequence of six poems, “Oblique Rain.” There may be, or may come to be, better
things in his work, but there won’t ever be anything more original, anything newer, and for that
reason I don’t know if he’ll ever do anything better. There will never be anything more really
Fernando Pessoa, more intimately Fernando Pessoa. How could he better express his always
intellectualized sensibility, his intense, heedless attention, the hot subtlety of his cold self-
analysis, than he did in those intersection-poems, where state of mind is simultaneously two,
where subjective and objective are joined, yet are separate; and where real and unreal are
confused, because they remain so very distinct? In those poems Fernando Pessoa took the
definitive photograph of his very soul. In one moment, in a single stroke, he achieved the
individuality he’d never had; and he’ll never have it again, because it isn’t his.
I always treated my master Caeiro as a human being: simply as Caeiro. I never called him master
to his face: such things are said but never spoken: written, in other words, but left unsaid.
Caeiro’s work is divided — not only in his book, but really — into three parts — The Keeper of
Flocks, The Amorous Shepherd, and that third part to which Ricardo Reis set the authentic title,
Detached Poems. The Amorous Shepherd is a fruitless interlude, but those few poems are among
the world’s greatest love poems, because they’re love poems about love, not about being poems.
The poet loves because he loves, not because love exists. That’s what those poems say.
The Keeper of Flocks is Caeiro’s mental life up to the point when the coach tops the hill. In
Detached Poems, it’s descending. I’ll use myself to make a distinction: there are things in
Detached Poems I can imagine having written. No twisting of imagination would even let me
dream of being able to write anything in The Keeper of Flocks.
In Detached Poems fatigue occurs, and therefore difference. Caeiro is still Caeiro, but he’s an
ailing Caeiro. Not always ailing, but at times ailing. The same man, slightly self-estranged. This
applies most of all to the middle poems in this third part of his work.
The woman Caeiro fell in love with. I have no idea who she was, and I intend to never find out,
not even out of curiosity. There are things of which the soul refuses to lose its ignorance.
I’m perfectly aware no one’s obliged to reciprocate love, and great poets have nothing to do with
being great lovers. But there’s a transcendent spite...
I don’t know who the woman was who was shameless enough to be loved by my master Caeiro.
And it’s part of what I am that I don’t want to know. Whoever she was (or pretended to be), I
scorn her from the height of everything I am, in name of the conscience of things. Let her always
remain anonymous, even to herself. Let “god damn” be her passport, and may she never receive
her visa. She deserves nothing but nonsense rhymes! What you can’t read, you rub out with an
eraser.
The non-existent figure of the beloved is an inside-out abstraction in the poems of Ricardo Reis
— or seen in reverse, if you will. They’re not abstractions in the sense of being abstract, but in
the sense of barely having the necessary reality to be thought of as existing. They are Chloes,
Lydias, and other such Latinities, not because they don’t exist, but because they may just as well
be Chloe as Maria Augusta. The latter makes us imagine a seamstress, or something like that,
with the aggravation of verisimilitude, but people readily see Lydia as a pagan.
Reis is lucky enough to be really good at writing with so much compression it’s almost
impossible, even with presumably close attention, to get the complete and exact meaning of what
he’s saying. The ode beginning “A florquetués, não a quedás, euquero” (we are shocked by that
“eu” before the “quero”, so counter to the whole linguistic character of Ricardo Reis!) disguises
its being addressed to a boy. Few will notice the little masculine “o”:
“Se tecolheravarO
A mão da infaustaesfinge,” etc.
because most will get hopelessly lost in the poet’s obscure syntax.
This is a good example of his syntax, which can seem like a veil of fine silk (or whatever else
you want) chastely covering the most private part of the discourse.
Since it was first said, it’s been widely held that to understand a philosophical system, it's
necessary to understand the philosopher's temperament. As all widespread things with an air of
certainty, this is silliness; if it weren't, it wouldn't be widespread. Philosophy gets confused with
its formation. My temperament could lead me to say that two plus two is five, but the affirmation
that two plus two is five is false independent of my temperament, whatever it may be. It might be
interesting to know how I could have come to affirm that falsehood, but that has nothing to do
with falsehood itself, only with the reason for its appearance.
My master Caeiro was a temperament without philosophy, and so his philosophy — which he
had, like all people — isn’t even susceptible to these games of intellectual journalism. There’s no
doubt that, being a temperament — a poet, in other words — my master Caeiro expressed a
philosophy, a conception of the universe. His conception of the universe is, however, instinctive,
not intellectual; it can't be criticized as a concept, because there’s none there, and it can't be
criticized as temperament, because temperament can't be criticized.
The organically hidden ideas in the poetic expression of my master Caeiro have had their
attempts at definition, with more or less logical felicity, in certain theories of Ricardo Reis, in
certain theories of mine, and in the perfectly defined philosophical system of Antonio Mora.
Caeiro is so fertile that each of us, owing all the thought in our minds to our common master,
produced an interpretation of life entirely different from the other two. It really wouldn't be right
to compare my metaphysics with Ricardo Reis's, which is a mere poetic vagueness trying to
clarify itself (unlike Caeiro, whose soul was made of poetic certainties not trying become clear),
or with Antonio Mora's, which is really a system, not an attitude or a reworking. But while
Caeiro affirmed things that, being altogether certain (as we all saw already) in a logic that
exceeds — as a stone or a tree — our comprehension, they were not coherent in their logical
surface, Reis as well as myself (I'm not speaking of Mora, who is far superior to us in this sort of
thing), were trying to find a logical coherency in what we thought, or supposed we thought,
about the World. And what we thought or supposed we thought about the world, we owe to
Caeiro, who discovered the souls we then colonized.
Properly speaking, Reis, Mora and I are three organic interpretations of Caeiro. Reis and I, who
are fundamentally, if differently, poets, still interpret Caeiro with besmirching temperament!
Mora, a pure intellectual, interprets with reason; if he has sentiment, or temperament, they’re
going incognito.
The concept of life formed by Ricardo Reis is seen very clearly in his odes. Whatever his
defects, Reis is always clear. His conception of life is absolutely nil. Caeiro's is also nil, but in an
entirely opposite direction. For Reis, nothing can be known about reality except what's given us
as a real material universe. Without necessarily believing in this universe we must accept it as
such because none other was given us. We have to live in this unmetaphysical amoral universe
without sociology or politics. We adhere to the external universe, the only one we have, as we’d
adhere to the absolute power of a king without discussing whether it's good or bad, but simply
because it is what it is. We should reduce our action to the minimum, enclose ourselves as much
as possible in the instincts we were given, and using our instincts in a way that will produce the
least discomfort in ourselves and others. We’re all equally entitled to avoid discomfort. It's
morality, but it's clear. We eat, drink, and love (without being sentimental about food, drink and
love, since that would later bring on elements of discomfort); life is a day, and night always falls;
we should do neither good nor evil — we don't even know what good and evil are, and we don't
know whether or not we're doing one or the other. The truth, if it exists, is with the Gods, or with
the forces that shape or create or govern the world. Their actions violate all our ideas of morality
or immorality. Their actions are patently beyond any concept of good and evil, and there is
nothing to be hoped for from them, either for good or ill. Nothing: a landscape, a glass of wine, a
little loveless love, and the vague sadness caused by our understanding nothing and having lost
the little we're given. Ricardo Reis' philosophy is Caeiro ripened, falsified by stylization. But it's
absolutely Caeiro, in another way: the concave side of the arch of which Caeiro is the convex
side, the enclosing upon one's self of that thing which in Caeiro was turned toward Infinity —
the very same infinity he denied.
This so fundamentally negative concept of things gives Ricardo Reis' poetry its hardness, its
chill, which no one will deny it has, no matter how much they admire it; and those who admire it
— few people — admire it precisely because of this chill. Caeiro and Reis would actually be
coeval, but Caeiro's chill has no hardness; Caeiro, who is the philosophical childhood of Reis'
attitude, has the chill of a statue or a snowy peak, and Reis has the chill of a beautiful mausoleum
or a marvelous boulder in shadow, untouched by even a speck of moss. And this is why Reis'
poetry, rigorously classical in form, is totally destitute of vibration — even more so than
Horace's poetry, in spite of its greater emotional and intellectual content. Reis' poetry is
intellectual (and therefore cold) to such an extent, that no one can understand a single one of his
poems (a typical situation, given his excessive compression) without learning its rhythm.
What happened to me was much the same thing that happened to Reis, but he and I are antipodal.
Reis is an intellectual. He possesses the minimum sensibility necessary for his intelligence not to
be merely mathematical, the minimum a human being needs so that it can be proven with a
thermometer that he's not dead. I'm exasperatingly sensitive and exasperatingly intelligent. In
this, I seem to myself to be rather like Fernando Pessoa (with a bit more sensibility and a bit less
intelligence); but, whereas in Fernando Pessoa sensibility and intelligence interpenetrate, sink
into one another, intersect, in me they exist in parallel or, better, in superimposition. They’re not
of a piece; they're more like bickering twins. So I formed my philosophy spontaneously from
that part of Caeiro’s teaching from which Reis took nothing. I mean that part of Caeiro integrally
contained in his line, “And my thoughts are all sensations.” Ricardo Reis owes his soul to the
line Caeiro forgot to write: “My sensations are all thoughts.” When I called myself a
“sensationist” or a “sensationist poet” I didn't mean to use the term as the name of a school of
poetry (holy God, schools of poetry!); I meant the word philosophically.
I don't believe in anything except the existence of my sensations; I have no other certainty, not
even of the exterior universe that these sensations present to me. I don't see the exterior universe,
I don't hear the exterior universe, I don't touch the exterior universe. I see my visual impressions;
I hear my auditory impressions; I touch my tactile impressions. I don't see with my eyes, but with
my soul; I don't hear with my ears, but with my soul; I don't touch with my skin, but with my
soul.
And, if you asked me what my soul is, I'd tell you it's me. Here’s my fundamental divergence
from the intellectual foundation of Caeiro and Reis, but not from the instinctive and sensitive
foundation of Caeiro. For me the universe is only one of my concepts, a dynamic projected
synthesis of all my sensations. I make sure, or take care to make sure, that my sensations agree
with the myriad sensations in other souls. This agreement is what I call the exterior universe, or
reality. This proves nothing about the absolute reality of the universe because it exists as a result
of collective hypnosis. I've seen a great mesmerist oblige a crowd of people to see the same
wrong time on clocks that were perfectly right. From that I extrapolate the existence of a
supreme Mesmerist; I call him God because he succeeds in imposing his suggestion on the mass
of souls — however, I have no idea if he did or didn't create these souls, because I have no idea
what creating is, but it's possible he created them, each unto itself, just as a mesmerist could
convince me I'm someone else or that I feel pain I can't say I don't feel, because I do feel it. For
me, being “real” consists in being available to the experience of all souls, not only real souls, but
also possible ones. I'm also an engineer — which is to say, I have no morality, politics, or
religion independent of the real measurable reality of measurable things, and of the virtual reality
of immeasurable things. And, I'm a poet. My aesthetic exists in and of itself. It has nothing to do
with whatever philosophy or morality I ascribe to, or the politics or the religion I'm sometimes
forced to wear.
Antonio Mora, on the other hand — he got Caeiro’s message in its totality, and is making a real
effort to translate it into philosophy by a process of clarification, rethinking, readjusting, altering
here and there. I don't know if Mora's philosophy would have been Caeiro's if my master had had
one. But I do accept that it would be Caeiro's philosophy had he not been, as a poet, unable to
have a philosophy. So as seeds become plants, and the plants aren’t magnified seeds, but
something entirely different in form, so from the germ contained in the totality of Caeiro's
poetry, there naturally flows the very different and complex corpus of Mora's philosophy. But I'll
leave the exposition of Mora's philosophy to the next section. I'm tired of wishing I understood.
I marvel at António Mora’s doctrine, and show my dissent with a delicate gesture of withdrawal.
The bad thing about those men — Ricard Reis, António Mora, Fernando Pessoa, and even,
because I’m beyond idolatry, even my master Caeiro — is that they only see reality. They all see
clearly in their way; they’re all objectivists, even Fernando Pessoa, who’s a subjectivist as well.
But I don’t just see reality — I touch it, too. Those men are more or less declared polytheists. I’m
a monotheist. The world considered with sight has an essential diversity. Considered with touch,
it has no diversity at all. Those men are all in their own ways more intelligent than me, but I’m
more deeply practical than them. So I believe in God. Sometimes I think Milton could only attain
his sublime understanding of Divinity when, bereft of sight, he returned to the great primordiality
of touch, the great unity of matter. And Satan himself (who is nothing but God in His own
deformed shadow), ejected from the light of appearance, couldn’t understand powerfully until his
eyes became night.
The variety of the world is not variety except by perceived contraposition to any unity. And this
divined unity is God.
António Mora’s philosophy is contained in one tract alone — the Prologemena to a Reformation
of Paganism. The Return of the Gods is more a critical study than anything else, and the ultra-
Euclidean geometric system the philosopher discovered or invented, being in fact a part of the
philosophy set forth in the Prologemena, is not properly philosophy. However, I believe that
António Mora planned to integrate the geometric system, as an appendix or a supplementary
chapter, into the Prologemena itself. I don’t know how this stands or how it will stand; only
when these unpublished works cease being so will it be seen clearly.
I believe that there can be no harm in setting forth, now, what is António Mora’s philosophical
system. I even believe some good will come of it. A philosophical system needs to prendre date a
little, since its substance is consubstantial with its form; a literary work, living as it does only by
form (in the fullest sense) can remain unpublished for a long time. I will, then, do what is
possible to set forth, in a clear summation, what makes up the Absolute Dualism of António
Mora.
One of the most interesting conversations my master Caeiro entered into took place in Lisbon,
when we were all together. Somehow, as we were talking, the discussion turned to the concept of
Reality.
If I remember right, that part of the conversation began with FP’s offhand observation about
something that had been said. This was the observation: “The concept of Being does not allow
for parts or gradations; a thing either is or is not.”
“I’m not sure that’s quite right,” I objected. “You’d have to analyze this concept of being. It
seems to me it’s a metaphysical superstition, at least to a point...”
“But the concept of Being is not even susceptible to analysis,” responded FP. “That is the whole
basis of its indivisibility.”
“The concept might not be,” I replied, “but its value is.”
F. responded: “But what is the ‘value’ of a concept independent of the concept itself? A concept,
that is, an abstract idea, is not susceptible to ‘more’ or ‘less’, which means that it is not subject to
value, which is always a question of more or less. There might be value in its use or its
application, but that is the value of its use or its application, not the value of the concept itself.”
At this point my master Caeiro, who with his eyes had been deeply listening to this transpontine
discussion, interrupted. “Where there can’t be more or less, there’s nothing.”
“Because everything that’s real can be more or less, and except for what’s real, nothing exists.”
“Rain,” answered my master. “Rain is a real thing. That’s why it can rain more and it can rain
less. If you said to me: ‘this rain couldn’t be any more or less,’ I’d answer, ‘then this rain doesn’t
exist.’ Unless, of course, you mean the rain exactly as it is at that moment: that rain is what it is,
and if it were any more or less, it’d be a different rain. But what I mean is something else. . . “
“I consider a dream like I consider a shadow,” answered Caeiro, with his usual divine,
unexpected promptitude. “A shadow is real, but it’s less real than a rock. A dream is real — if it
weren’t, it wouldn’t be a dream — but less real than a thing. That’s what being real is like.”
FP has the advantage of living more in his ideas than in himself. He forgot not only what he was
arguing, but even the truth or falsehood of what he was hearing: he was excited by the
metaphysical possibilities of this sudden theory, [. . . ]
“That’s an admirable idea! And completely original! It never occurred to me —” (that “never
occurred to me” so ingenuously suggestive of the natural impossibility of anything occurring to
someone else that had never occurred to Fernando)... “It never occurred to me that reality could
be considered as subject to degrees. In fact, this is the equivalent of considering Being not as an
abstract idea but as a numerical idea...“
“You’re sort of losing me there,” hesitated Caeiro, “but I think that’s it, yes. What I mean is
being real means other things are real, because you can’t be real alone; and since being real is
being a thing that’s not anything else, it means being different from everything else. And since
reality is something like size and weight — if it weren’t, there wouldn’t be reality — and since
everything’s different, there are no two things alike in reality, just like there aren’t any two
things alike in size and in weight. There always has to be a difference, even if it’s really small.
That’s what being real is.”
“This is even more peculiar!” exclaimed FP. “So you consider reality as an attribute of things; so
it would seem, since you are comparing it to size and weight. But tell me something: what is the
thing of which reality is an attribute? What lies behind reality?”
“Behind reality?” repeated my master Caeiro. “There’s nothing behind reality. Just like there’s
nothing behind size, and nothing behind weight.”
“But if something has no reality it cannot exist, and it can exist without having size or weight. . .
“
“Not if it’s a thing that has size and weight by nature. A rock can’t exist without size, and a rock
can’t exist without weight. But a rock isn’t size and a rock isn’t weight. A rock can’t exist
without reality, too, but a rock isn’t a reality.”
“All right, “ answered F., somewhere between impatient, grasping at uncertain ideas, and having
the rug pulled out from under him. “But when you say ‘a rock has reality,’ you’re distinguishing
rock from reality.”
“Yes, I am: a rock isn’t reality, it has reality. A rock is just a rock.”
“I don’t know; it’s just there. A rock is a rock and it has to have reality to be a rock. A man isn’t
a face, but he has to have a face to be a man. I don’t know why it’s like that. I don’t even know if
there’s a ‘why’ for that or anything else . . .”
F. reflected. “You know, Caeiro, the philosophy that you are elaborating is a little contrary to
what you think and feel. You are making a kind of Kantism of your own — creating a
noumenon-rock, a rock-in-itself. I’ll explain, I’ll explain... “ He began to explain the Kantian
thesis and how what Caeiro had said conformed with it or didn’t. Then he noted the difference;
or what he thought was the difference: “For Kant these attributes — weight and size (not reality)
— are concepts imposed on the rock-in-itself by our senses, or, better, by the fact that we
observe it. You seem to be saying that these concepts are just as much things as the actual rock-
in-itself. Now that is what makes your theory hard to understand, while Kant’s theory, true or
false, is perfectly understandable.”
My master Caeiro listened to all this with the utmost attention. He blinked his eyes once or twice
as if to shake off ideas like the way you’d shake off a dream. After thinking a bit, he responded:
“I don’t have any theories. I don’t have any philosophy. I see, but I don’t know anything. I call a
rock a rock to distinguish it from a flower or a tree, or anything else that’s not a rock. Of course,
every rock is different from every other rock, but not because it’s not a rock; because it’s a
different size and a different weight and a different color. And a different thing, too. I call some
things rocks because they resemble each other in the things that make us call a rock a rock. But
what we should really do, is give each rock a different proper name, like we do to men; if we
don’t, it’s because it’d be impossible to find so many words, not because it’d be a mistake . . .”
FP cut in: “Tell me one thing, to make this all clear: do you admit to a ‘rockness’, so to speak, as
you admit to size and weight? Just as you say, this rock is bigger — that is, it has more size —
than that one, or ‘this rock has more weight’ than that other one? In other words, could you say,
‘this rock has more rockness than that one?’”
“Yes, sir, I could, and I do, “ my master soon responded. “I’m always saying, ‘this rock is more
rock than that rock.’ I always say it if it’s bigger than the other, or weighs more, because a rock
needs size and weight to be a rock... but mainly if it has those attributes (as you call them) that
make a rock a rock more completely than another rock.”
“And what do you call a rock you see in your dreams?” — and F. smiled.
Fernando nodded. “I understand. You — how would I say it philosophically? — you do not
distinguish substance from attributes. A rock is something made up of a certain number of
attributes — those necessary to make up that which we call a rock — and of a certain quantity of
each attribute, which is what gives a rock a certain size, a certain hardness, a certain weight, a
certain color, which distinguish it from other rocks, even though both of them are rocks because
they have the same attributes, even though they have these attributes in different quantities. Now
this is like denying the real existence of the rock: a rock becomes simply a sum of other real
things. . . “
“But a real sum! It’s the sum of a real size and a real weight, etc. And that’s why a rock, besides
having weight, size, etc., has reality too... It doesn’t have any reality as a rock: it has reality
because it’s a sum of attributes (as you call them), all of them real. Since each attribute has
reality, the rock has it too.”
“Let us return to the dream,” said F. “You call a rock you see in a dream a dream, or at most, the
dream of a rock. Why do you say ‘of a rock’? Why use the word ‘rock’?”
“For the same reason that when you see my portrait, you say ‘that’s Caeiro’ without meaning it’s
me in flesh and blood.”
We all burst out laughing. “I understand and I give up,” said Fernando, laughing with us. Les
dieuxsontceux qui ne doutentjamais. I never understood that phrase of Villiers de l’Isle Adam as
well as then.
This conversation remained engraved on my soul; I believe I’ve reproduced it with a clarity not
far from tachygraphia, short of tachygraphia itself (I have that intense and clear memory
characteristic of certain kinds of madness). And this conversation had a great result. Of course it
was inconsequential, like all conversations, and it would be easy to prove, through rigorous
logic, that the only ones who didn’t contradict themselves were the ones who didn’t speak. In my
master Caeiro’s always interesting affirmations and responses, a philosophical mind could find
reflections of what are in fact different systems. But, even as I concede this, I don’t believe it.
Caeiro must have been right, even in those points where he wasn’t.
Besides, this conversation did have a great result. It was during it that António Mora drank in his
inspiration for the two most awe-inspiring chapters of his Prolegomena — the chapters on the
idea of Reality. Throughout the course of the conversation, Antonio Mora was the only one who
said nothing. He limited himself to hearing, with his eyes turned inwards on himself, the ideas
that were being said. The ideas of my master Caeiro, exposed in this conversation with the
intellectual chaos of instinct, and therefore in a way that was necessarily imprecise and
contradictory, were converted, in the Prolegomena, into a coherent and logical system.
I don’t intend to diminish the very real value of Antonio Mora. But, just as the base of his entire
philosophical system was born, as he himself says with abstract pride, from a simple phrase of
Caeiro, “Nature is parts without a whole,” so a part of this system — the marvelous concept of
Reality as a “dimension,” and the derived concept of “degrees of reality” — was born, precisely,
from this conversation. To every man what is his, and everything to my master Caeiro.
Ricardo Reis was listening, but he seemed less attentive to what Caeiro was saying than to some
far-off manifestation, some echo of these words. After reading what Reis wrote, I understood.
Sunlight was breaking against the cornices of ancient temples, and blood was draining from the
dry sacrifice made by the haruspices in his soul. In some earlier incarnation — lived or
metaphorical — the ancient gods had been a reality to that being; he was seeing the gods again,
now, revealed by a grown-up child, and Ricardo knew they were real.
All of ancient pagan civilization (the blood of Caeiro’s very soul) was, and is, for Reis, a dear
childhood memory — the education that drove him into being.
This man first disoriented me by joyfully singing things, whether believed or taken for granted,
that give everybody nothing but pain or horror — materiality, death, the nothing beyond. Then
he disoriented me by not only saying all of it with joy, but also by making others feel that joy of
his. When I’m depressed, I read Caeiro — he’s my fresh air. I become very calm, content,
faithful — yes, I find faith in God, and in the soul’s transcendent living smallness, after reading
the poems by that ungodly anti-humanist who goes unsurpassed on earth.
Why? Because of the personality behind the work, the elan vital, and where they plainly manifest
themselves. It’s the poet we love in Caeiro, not the philosopher. What we really get from these
poems is a childlike sense of life, with all the direct materiality of the child’s mind, and all the
vital spirituality of hope and increase that exist in the body and soul of nescient childhood.
Caeiro’s work is a dawn that wakes us up and quickens us; a more that material, more than anti-
spiritual dawn. It’s an abstract effect, pure vacuum, nothingness.
Above and beyond all that, Caeiro’s work has a critical effect. These poems of the direct
sensation in his soul set dead against our unnatural concepts, our artificial mindly civilization
tabulated in double columns and stuffed into filing cabinets — these poems strip us of all our
tatters, and chemically scour our faces and bellies. It’s a pharmaceutical effect — he comes into
our house and shows us that a wooden table is wood, wood, and wood. He shows us that a table
is a necessary hallucination of our industrial will.
If even for an instant in our lives we were able to see the table as wood, to sense the table as
wood — to see the table’s wood without seeing the table — we’d be happy. We’d go back to
“knowing” it’s a table, but for all our lives we’d never forget it’s wood. And we’d love the table
that much more, just for being a table.
Such was Caeiro’s effect on me. I never stopped seeing the appearance of things, the human or
divine integrity in matter’s material soul. I remained free. I’ve been like a Rosicrucian ever since,
[[someone who prays legend or truth]], that, similar on the outside to every human, and
conforming with the customs and manners of the workaday world, holds the secret of the
Universe within him, and always knows the location of the “door of flight” and the magic of
essenciation.
Fernando Pessoa wrote, in one go — in one go, humanly — those complex poems. Fernando
Pessoa, who, when he writes a quatrain, employs strenuous industrial organization to see how he
has to arrange across it the seventeen ratiocinations [**********]; who when he feels
something, sets to cutting it up with a shears made of five critiques, and gets all wrapped up in
the second line having a disyllabic adjective in it, and, seeing that at that point in the poem “but”
wouldn’t be good grammar, he’ll work it so “although” is pronounced monosyllabically.
This man, so fruitlessly well-endowed, living constantly in the parabulia of his complexity, had
at that moment — even he — his liberation. If some day forgetting himself to the point of
publishing a book, if that book were a book of poems, and the little poems were dated, one
would see that there is something different about those poems dated after March 8, 1914.
“I never change what I write,” my master Caeiro once told me. “If I write some way it’s because
that’s how I feel, and the fact that I feel differently today doesn’t mean a thing to me. Sure, my
poems contradict themselves all the time, but so what, if I don’t contradict me? There are things
in some of my poems, you know?, I could never write now, not any time. But I wrote them then,
in the time when I wrote them. So I let them be.”
“Well, just look at my poem about the Boy Jesus. Today I could never say ‘the direction of my
eyes is his pointing finger’ — not even if I were distracted. I could never say he plays with my
dreams, throws his legs in the air and puts my dreams one on top of the other, and other stuff like
that. I couldn’t even write that poem today, anyway. That’s the only thing that has any meaning.”
“I perfectly remember why I wrote that poem. Father B — was sitting there in my house talking
to my aunt and he was saying things that bothered me so much I had to write the poem so I could
breathe. That’s why it’s outside my usual breathing. But a state of irritation is a false state in me;
that’s why that poem isn’t really mine, but my irritation’s, and also the person’s who most feels
the same kind of irritation I felt when I felt it.
“Today, if I were irritated — that’s hard to have happen, these days — I wouldn’t write anything.
I’d let the irritation irritate. Afterwards, when I felt the need to write, I’d write. I’d let the writing
write.
“Even today, sometimes I write poems I don’t agree with. But I write them anyway. I think
people are interesting because they’re not me, so sometimes I’m interested in a moment when
I’m not me. Anyway, today it’s no longer possible for me to draw as far away from myself as I
did when I wrote my poem about the Boy Jesus. I can still draw away from myself, but I can’t
draw away from Reality any more.”
“The poem of today where I draw away from myself the most is the one I wrote last month after
that conversation Ricardo Reis and Antonio Mora had about paganism and the gods.” (He was
referring to Detached Poems, number...)
“I was listening to them, and I started imagining how it would be if I imagined a religion. And it
came to me how it must be. That’s how I wrote the poem, not as a poetic act, but as an act of the
imagination... Yeah, like telling a story. I had to put ‘I know how to makes fairy tales, too’ at the
beginning — but only once, of course . . .”
“There’s another of your poems that’s a little like that,” I said. Caeiro looked at me
questioningly. “It’s the one in which you speak of a man in a lit-up house, far away, and you say
that when you stop seeing the man, he stops existing.”
“I don’t say he stopped being real. I say he stopped being real for me. I don’t mean he’d stop
being visible to someone who was where they could see him. He stopped being visible to me. He
might as well have died.”
“Many more than two,” my master Caeiro unexpectedly replied. “Look... that chair’s a chair and
that chair’s wood and that chair’s the substance wood’s made of — I don’t know what a chemist
would say — and that chair is maybe — definitely — many other things besides. But it’s all of
them at once. If I look at it, it’s basically a chair; if I touch it, it’s basically wood, if I bite it and
taste the flavor of the wood, it’s basically what wood’s made of. It’s like the left and right and
front and back sides of something. Each and every one of its sides is real. The man I stopped
seeing could have been real, but I was on the other side from him. Because I wasn’t on his side,
he stopped being real for me.”
My master Caeiro hated ambition. One day I told him I wanted to be the freest person in the
world. “Álvaro de Campos,” he said,” you’re just what you are and nothing else.”
My master Caeiro detested supposition. “Now suppose,” I once began to say, but he cut me off.
“What’s there to suppose with? The eyes?The ears?” I answered, smiling, “The mind.” My
master retorted [. . . ]
My master Caeiro once told me that, while the material world has one and only one advantage,
its one and only advantage is its visibility. Each time I think of that dictum, I feel it more deeply,
in spite of its simplicity. Think how hard it is to be a charlatan in the material world. If someone
told me he had God in his pocket, I don’t know how I could possibly prove or refute that claim.
But if he told me he weighed five pounds, the proof would be the simplest thing in the world. In
spiritual matters we’re all able to lie at will. All told, the physical is worth more than the
metaphysical.
— You’d prefer...
— But...
— If they take away my testicles, they’re only taking away the possibility of all women. If they
take away my eyes, they’re taking the whole universe from me.
His organically childlike, divine judgement couldn’t conceive of the complexities of virile
humanity. Yes. My master didn’t know that when our testicles are taken from us, so is our
chastity — the very chastity that was meant to be preserved.
My master Caeiro couldn’t see the spiritual ramifications of spermatic fluid.
If children don’t understand adults — because, otherwise, they have nothing to understand
because they’re all the same, and nothing exists that’s the same as something else —, it’s more
certain that adults don’t understand children. Being adult is forgetting that you were once a child,
so parents punish their children for doing what they themselves did at the same age. When
parents remember what they were, and do not punish their children, it’s because they’re
proceeding rationally: if they remember what they were, they believe they shouldn’t punish their
children. In reality they don’t remember. If they remembered, they’d still be children.
This apropos the appalling result that, in a certain aspect, the influence of Caeiro had on the
susceptible Ricardo Reis. The absence of metaphysical preoccupation in Caeiro, natural in one
who thinks like a child, became, in Reis’ adult interpretation, a monstrous thing. Like Caeiro,
Ricardo Reis faced life and death naturally, but, unlike Caeiro, he thought about it. It gave his
poems an anguished materiality, even for he who wrote them. When Reis speaks of death, he
seems to foresee being buried alive. He considers it nothing, except for the dispensable effect of
feeling over himself “moist earth piled on,” and other equally suffocating ways of saying the
same thing. The sentiment which in Caeiro is a field with nothing else in it is for Reis a tomb,
also with nothing in it. He adopted Caeiro’s nothingness but didn’t know how to keep it free of
decay.
For Reis, growing old and dying seem to be the sum and sense of life. For Caeiro, there is no
aging, and dying is over there, by the hills. This comes apropos of influences, I believe.
Reis has no metaphysics. He adopted Caeiro’s, and such was the result. I don’t deny that he has
aesthetic sapience; [I do deny that one can decently read]. We should all have our own
metaphysics; each of us is each of us. If we take on influences, let’s take them in our rhythms,
our images, in the structure of our poems. Let’s not take them into our very own souls.
Disciple, as I am, and very moved to be, of my master Caeiro, I am a disciple with my
intelligence, and therefore critically. He wouldn’t have wanted to be followed in any other way:
he didn’t like keeping pets.
I’ve never accepted one of Caeiro’s most original judgements — that there is some distinction
between the natural and the artificial. There is no such distinction, because both are real. I
understand the distinction between dreams and life, while yet conceding that a good metaphysics
can confound it. But the distinction between a tree and a machine has always seemed false to me.
It seems that a tree and a machine are distinct because the first is a natural product and the
second is a product which appeared by the intermediation of human intelligence. But, in reality,
every product is mediated: the tree appears through its seed, the machine through intelligence.
And intelligence is just as much an element of reality as a seed. When we allow that the tree rises
out of the seed and the machine out of the mind, we have reduced everything to material terms
and have established the equal rights of matter.
No, I’ve never accepted Caeiro’s criterion about the artificial, norCaeiro’s criterion about
humanitarianism. Caeiro disdained the artificial because it is not born of the earth, and he
disdained humanitarianism because it is not born of egoism. But a tree’s flower isn’t born from
the earth, and the love of humanity isn’t born from egoism, but from the relaxation of egoism.
Everything is natural, but with a greater circumference.
I still hear, in my heart’s memory, that cold and placid voice — yet so filled by all the inner heat
of reality! — tell me, “Álvaro de Campos, I believe in what I have to accept.” How imbued with
simplicity was Caeiro’s voice. I’ve adopted that sentence to the letter. I believe in a machine
because I have to accept it in that same way as I accept a tree.
I know very well that Nature is the refuge, that the countryside swaddles the consumptive in all-
embracing shelter, that the wind blowing through foliage, etc., etc.. But I’ve isolated myself in a
great factory, among its noises; I’ve fled from the world to a grand international café. I’ve long
been a hermit in the wilderness where nobody knows who I am, in a provincial villa whose name
I don’t know and never will.
My master Caeiro taught me clarity and balance. He taught me to be organic in delirium and in
hallucination; and to seek to have no philosophy at all, but with soul.
“If I knew English, I wouldn’t be me, I’d be someone else,” answered my master Caeiro.
Superior poets say what they really feel. Mediocre poets say what they decide to feel. Inferior
poets say what they think they should feel.
This has nothing to do with sincerity. In the first place, no one knows what they really feel: it’s
possible to feel relief at the death of a loved one and suppose it’s grief because that’s what we
think we should feel on such occasions. Most people feel conventionally, though with the
greatest human sincerity; what they don’t do is feel with any kind or degree of intellectual
sincerity, and that’s what matters in a poet. So much so, that I don’t believe that there have been,
in all the long history of poetry, more than four or five poets who say what they really and truly
feel. Some very great poets never said it; they may have been incapable of saying it. In so many
poets there are certain passages where they say what they feel. Coleridge said it once or twice:
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kublai Khan are more sincere than all Milton put together.
I’d even say more than all Shakespeare. Hardly a reservation when it comes to Shakespeare: he
was essentially and structurally factitious, so much so that his constant insincerity became
constant sincerity. Thus his enormous grandeur.
When inferior poets feel, they always feel by rote. They may be emotionally sincere, but what
does that matter if they’re not poetically sincere? There are poets who spew line after line about
what they feel: they never check to see whether they’re feeling it or not. Camões wails the loss of
his gentle soul; ultimately, it’s Petrarch crying. If Camões had had one emotion that was
sincerely his, he would have found new forms, new words — anything but the sonnet or
decasyllabic verse. No: in verse he was a sonneteer, as in life, a whiner.
•—•—•—•—•
The Manuscripts