uncertain joys of the mind

"I too was happy, because I exist. I left the house with a great goal, which was, finally, to get to the office on time. But on this day the very compulsion of life participated in that other good compulsion which makes the sun shine in the hours stipulated by the almanac, according to the longitude and latitude of the places on the earth. I felt happy for not being able to feel unhappy. I walked down the street in a leisurely fashion, full of certainty, because, after all, the office was a known factor, the people in it known factors, all certainties. It shouldn't be surprising that I felt free, without knowing what I might be free of. In baskets set on the sidewalk along the Rua da Prata, the bananas for sale under the sun were of a grand yellow.

It takes very little to make me happy: that the rain had stopped, that the sun is shining brightly in this happy South, bananas that are more yellow for having black spots on them, the people selling them because they talk, the sidewalks of the Rua da Prata, the Tagus in the background, blue streaked with green turning to gold, this entire domestic corner of the Universal system.

The day will come when I will not see this any more, when the bananas on the side of the street will outlive me, the wisecracking women who sell them, and the day's newspapers, which the little man has spread out from one side of the corner to the other. I know very well that they will be different bananas, that the women will be different, and the newspapers will have, for anyone who bends over to look, a date different from today's. But they, because they do not live, last, even if they are different, while I, because I am alive, pass away even if I am the same.

I could make this moment more solemn by buying bananas, since it seems to me that all of the day's sun is projected into them as if it were a spotlight without a lamp. But I'm ashamed of rituals, symbols, of buying things on the street. The women might not wrap them properly or sell them as they should be sold because I don't know how to buy them as they should be bought. They might find my voice bizarre when I ask the price. It's better to write than to dare to live, even if living is nothing more than buying bananas in the sunlight, as long as the sun lasts and there are bananas for sale.

Later on perhaps... Yes, later on... Another man, perhaps... I don't know..."

from Fernando Pessoa's "The Book of Disquiet"