Love, sleep, drugs and intoxicants are elementary forms of art or rather elementary forms of producing the same effect as art. But love, sleep and drugs all bring with them their own disappointments. One grows sated or disillusioned with love. We wake from sleep and whilst we slept, we did not live. The price of drugs is the ruin of the very body they were used to stimulate. But there is no disillusion in art because its illusory nature is clear from the start.
– Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Margaret Jull Costa, pp. 258-259
At this moment I have so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say that I feel suddenly tired and decide not to write anymore, not to thing anymore, but to let the fever of saying lull me to sleep whilst, with closed eyes, I gently stroke as I would a cat all the things I might have said.
– Ibid., p. 260
Nothing, nothing, just part of the night and the silence and of whatever emptiness, negativity and inconstancy I share with them, the space that exists between me and me, a thing mislaid by some god…
– Ibid., p. 262
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