John Gray makes an interesting point or two about the deftly beautiful and fragmented writing of Fernando Pessoa - whose The Book of Disquiet - not that it can be called a book, more a fragmented collection of observations on emptiness that may, or may not, have been intended for publication - is possibly one of the most haunting 'books' I have ever read. Pessoa's emptiness is important because it reveals the abyss we all fear in Literature: that it is merely an illusion:
"Fernando Pessoa invented at least 72 fictive identities. His jostling aliases, argues John Gray, expressed his belief that the individual subject -- the core of European thought -- is an illusion"
And from Fernando Pessoa [pictured right] himself:
"To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost."
