From a Notebook that Never Was

From a Notebook that Never Was, by Fernando Pessoa [via 3:AM Magazine]:

"Believing in nothing firmly and therefore accepting as equally valid, in principle (which is as far as they go), all opinions, and considering that a theory is worth only as much as the theorist, an emotion as much as the emotion’s expresser, I could never take seriously the literary dogma that consists in the use of a personality. Personality is a form of belief and, like all belief, impossible for the reasoner.

"It’s a short step from believing in outer truth to believing in inner truth, from accepting a concept of the world as true to accepting a concept of our self as true. I don’t affirm that everything is fluid, since that would be an affirmation, but to our understanding everything is indeed fluid, and the truth, unfolding for us into various truths, disappears, since it cannot be multiple.

* * *

"Thank God for that ironic element in human destinies that makes dreams the mode of thought for the poor in life, even as it makes life the mode of thought—or thought the mode of life—for the poor in dreams.

"But even dreaming channeled through thinking ends up making me weary. At which point I open my eyes from dreaming, go to the window, and transfer my dream to the streets and rooftops. And it’s in my distracted and profound contemplation of so very many roof tiles divided into rooftops, covering the astral contagion of people organized into streets, that my soul becomes truly detached from me, and I don’t think, I don’t dream, I don’t see, I don’t need to. Then I truly contemplate the abstraction of Nature—of Nature, the difference between man and God."

This series of quotes, particularly the line about personality being a belief impossible to the reasoner, seemed an interesting response to a recent and frustrated rant from Black Sun Gazette on the struggle between rationalists and believers. As I keep pointing out, faith is about telling a story to contextualize our experiences, and what kind of story do rational atheists tell to cover the horror and randomness of being movements of particles? Are they even logically allowed to tell such stories?