Cecilia Peng

“Anyone who wants to be understood will never know the delight of being understood, because this happens only to the complex and misunderstood; simple souls, the ones whom other people can understand, never feel a desire to be understood.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“An anxiety for being me, forever trapped in myself, floods my whole being without finding a way out, shaping me into tenderness, fear, sorrow and desolation.
An inexplicable surfeit of absurd grief, a sorrow so lonely, so bereft, so metaphysically mine...”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I don’t know how many souls I have.
I’ve changed at every moment.
I always feel like a stranger.
I’ve never seen or found myself.
From being so much, I have only soul.
A man who has soul has no calm.
A man who sees is just what he sees.
A man who feels is not who he is.

Attentive to what I am and see,
I become them and stop being I.
Each of my dreams and each desire
Belongs to whoever had it, not me.
I am my own landscape,
I watch myself journey -
Various, mobile, and alone.
Here where I am I can’t feel myself.

That’s why I read, as a stranger,
My being as if it were pages.
Not knowing what will come
And forgetting what has passed,
I note in the margin of my reading
What I thought I felt.
Rereading, I wonder: “Was that me?”
God knows, because he wrote it...”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“النفس الإنسانية تتجه إلى النقد بدافع من إحساسها لا من تفكيرها.”
― فرناندو بيسوا, The Book of Disquiet