46 [101]

To live is to be other. Even feeling is impossible if one feels today what one felt yesterday, for that is not to feel, it is only to remember today what one felt yesterday, to be the living corpse of yesterday’s lost life.

To wipe everything off the slate from one day to the next, to be new with each new dawn, in a state of perpetually restored virginity of emotion - that and only that is worth being or having, if we are to be or to have what we imperfectly are.

This dawn is the first the world has seen. Never before has this pink light dwindling into yellow then hot white fallen in quite this way on the faces that the window paned eyes of the houses in the west turn to silence that comes with the growing light. Never before have this hour, this light, my being existed. What comes tomorrow will be different, and what I see will be seen through different eyes, full of new vision.

Tall mountains of the city! Great buildings, rooted in, raised up upon steep slopes, an avalanche of houses heaped indiscriminately together, woven together by the light out of shadows and fire - you are today, you are me, because I see you, you are what [...] and as if leaning against the rail on a ship, I love you as ships passing one another must love, feeling an unaccountable nostalgia in their passing.

Fernando Pessoa from The Book of Disquiet