Pessoa and His Poets

I had been reading Alberto Caeiro again when these lines stopped me:

The astonishing reality of things
Is my daily discovery.
Everything is what it is,
And it’s difficult to explain to someone how much this delights me,
And how much this suffices me.
Simply existing is enough to be complete.

That last thought stayed with me. How much this suffices me.

It seemed familiar—not because I remembered having read it before, but because it felt like something I had been circling for a long time. The world does not always need to be explained. Sometimes the fact that something exists, and that we have noticed it, is enough.
Caeiro could say this with an ease that the others could not. And perhaps that is why Pessoa made him their master.

Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos were extraordinarily different men, yet both looked toward Caeiro with admiration. He had somehow achieved what they could only approach from their very different directions: the ability to encounter the world without demanding that it become something else.

Reis comes close, but in his own way. Where Caeiro simply looks, Reis seems to construct a discipline for living.

Wise is he who is content with the spectacle of the world.
And then there are the lines I have always loved:

To be great, be whole: nothing
Of yours exaggerates or excludes.
Be all in everything. Put all that you are
Into the smallest thing you do.
Then in every lake the whole moon
Shines, because it lives high above.

There is something wonderfully complete in that image. The lake need not be large to contain the reflection of the whole moon. The smallest thing can contain us wholly if we bring our whole selves to it.

Caeiro says that simply existing is enough to be complete. Reis seems to answer: then be complete in the way you exist.

And then there is Campos.
Campos cannot leave anything alone.
He can be traveling along the road to Sintra and the road immediately becomes memory, consciousness, longing, and deception. He can look through a window at an ordinary tobacco shop and find himself confronted by the unbearable mystery of being Álvaro de Campos.

The tobacconist exists. Caeiro might have been content with that.

Campos looks at it—and an entire universe opens between himself and the shop across the street.
Perhaps that is why his admiration for Caeiro feels so poignant. Caeiro possesses naturally what Campos cannot achieve. Campos thinks, dreams, remembers, imagines, multiplies himself. He cannot simply see the world because he is always there too, standing between himself and what he sees.

And perhaps that is where I recognize something of myself. I love Caeiro’s sufficiency. I love Reis’s wholeness. But I understand Campos’s inability to stop wondering.

Then, many years after Pessoa had created all three of them, José Saramago entered their conversation.

He chose Ricardo Reis.

In The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Saramago returns Reis to Lisbon in 1936. And suddenly that beautiful proposition--Wise is he who is content with the spectacle of the world—becomes more difficult.

What if the spectacle is dictatorship? What if Spain is descending into civil war? What if fascism is spreading through Europe? What does it mean then to remain a spectator?

Saramago admired Reis. That is important. He did not bring him back merely to ridicule him or defeat him. But he did something Pessoa had never done: he placed Reis’s philosophy inside a particular historical moment and asked it to live there.
And he did more than test Reis against history. He tested him against lived experience.

Lídia enters Reis’s life not as an idea but as another human being, with a life and understanding of the world quite different from his own. Her brother’s political involvement brings the turmoil outside the hotel into her family. Reis can regard political events with the detachment of a spectator; for Lídia, their consequences are personal. His responses to her ideas, and to her brother, become more revealing once we recognize the philosophy behind them. He is not simply standing apart. He is trying to remain Ricardo Reis.

At Fátima, Saramago places him amid another kind of lived experience: faith, suffering, hope, ritual, commerce, crowds—the untidy intensity of human beings believing and needing. Again Reis observes. Again the question quietly presents itself: how long can one remain content with the spectacle of the world when one is standing in the middle of it?

Even Pessoa’s ghost complicates the distinction between spectator and participant. Reis has returned to Lisbon because Pessoa has died, yet the dead man continues to appear while Reis, supposedly the living one, must decide how fully he intends to participate in life.
The spectator could no longer contemplate the spectacle without becoming part of it.

This may be what becomes clearer with each return to Saramago’s novel. He is not merely asking what happens to Ricardo Reis in Lisbon in 1936. He is asking what happens to a philosophy when it has to become a life.
And so the conversation grows: a conversation among Pessoa’s invented poets, joined by Saramago and, eventually, by the reader who listens in.

Caeiro tells us to look.

Reis tells us to be whole.

Campos shows us how nearly impossible either of those things can become once consciousness intervenes.

And Saramago asks what happens when looking is no longer enough.

I don’t think I want to choose among them.

Perhaps that is the pleasure of Pessoa’s extraordinary invention. These are not simply competing philosophies from which we must select the correct one. They are different voices in a conversation about the same astonishing fact: that we are here, in a world that exists independently of us, trying to discover how to live within it.

Some mornings I can walk outside and think, with Caeiro, that the astonishing reality of things is enough.

Sometimes I want Reis’s whole moon in the smallest lake.
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And sometimes, inevitably, I am standing with Campos at the window, looking across the street—and thinking about everything.