“The City and the Mountain” by Jose Maria de Eca de Queiros (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

This novel splits time between nineteenth century Paris and the mountains of Portugal. It is narrated by Ze Fernandes, the close friend of Jacinto, the heir to a fortune with vast estates across the Portugese countryside and a mansion in Lisbon. He was, nonetheless, born and raised in Paris, never having visited his homeland, the grandson of a self-exiled royalist noble. Jacinto spends his time indulging in food and wine, attending the theater and masked balls, perusing books from his 30,000 volume library, and tinkering with the newest mechanical inventions. “Jacinto had come up with an idea, namely, that “a man can only be superlatively happy when he is superlatively civilized.” And by “civilized” my friend meant the kind of man who, by honing his thinking skills on all the philosophy acquired since Aristotle onwards and multiplying the physical strength of his organs using all the mechanisms invented since Theramenes created the wheel, could make of himself a magnificent, near-omnipotent, Adam ready to reap—within a particular society and within the limits of Progress (at least as far as Progress had gotten in 1875)—all the pleasures and all the advantages that spring from Knowledge and Power.” Jacinto was also, as befits a man of his station, a dandy. “He always wore a flower in his buttonhole, not a real flower, but one skillfully concocted by his florist from the petals of several different flowers—carnations, azaleas, orchids, or tulips—all bound together on one stem, along with a sprig of fennel.”

Despite his wealth and position, the city of Paris gradually began to bore Jacinto. “He never openly confessed his feeling to me. Jacinto, elegant and reserved, did not wring his hands and moan: “Oh accursed life!” It was more the look of satiety on his face: a gesture angrily dismissing the importunate nature of things; the way in which he would sometimes sit immobile, as if in protest, on a divan from which he would not stir, as if he wished those moments of repose to be eternal; then there were the yawns, the gaping yawns with which he underlined everything he did.” All his books of political and economic philosophy and the modish salons, where they discussed the newest utopian fads, could not cure him. “Hardened in sin, the bourgeois revels in his strength, and against him all the tears of the Humanitarians, the reasoned arguments of the Logicians and the bombs of the Anarchists are impotent.”

Ever-tired of his routine in Paris, Jacinto spontaneously decides to journey to his family estate, spurred by the news of a ceremony to reinter the bones of his ancestors, displaced when a mudslide destroyed their resting place in the ancient familial chapel. “Those hairy Jacintos who returned to their high lands in Tormes, back from defeating the Moor at Salado or the Spaniard at Valverde, did not even bother taking off their battered armor to tend their fields and to train their vines to the elms, building their kingdom with lance and spade.” In the countryside, Jacinto finally finds himself, his calling, and his home. “Jacinto had put down strong loving roots in his rough mountain home. It was as if he had been planted, like a cutting, in the ancient soil from which his race had sprung and as if the ancient humus were seeping in and penetrating him, transforming him into a rustic, almost vegetable Jacinto, as much a part of the earth and as rooted in the earth as the trees he so loved.”

“The Complete Works of Alvaro de Campos” by Fernando Pessoa (translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari)

Pessoa wrote under many heteronyms. Campos was a poet and a sensualist. He did not intellectualize, but felt. “May God either change my life or end it.” In another poem, Campos again pontificates on death, “Once the session is over and we leave,/ There’s no house to go home to, no car to take us anywhere,/ but only Absolute Night and God perhaps like a Vast Moon/ signifying”

Campos was also a subjectivist, “Everything we’ve ever seen is us, we alone experience the world./ We have only ourselves inside and outside,/ We have nothing, we have nothing, we have nothing…” He was a dreamer, not a doer, “No, I don’t believe in me./ The lunatic asylums are full of madmen brimming with certainties!/ And since I have no certainty, am I more right than them or less?/ No, I don’t even believe in me… The world is for those born to conquer it/ And not for those who dream they might conquer it, even if they’re right./ I’ve dreamed far more than Napoleon ever did./ I’ve clutched to my hypothetical bosom more humanities than Christ ever did./ I’ve secretly written philosophies that no Kant ever wrote./ But I am, and perhaps always will be, a tenant in one of those garrets,/ even if I don’t live in one;/ I will always be one of those not born to do this.”

In his poetry, Campos also stressed the reality of the mind, “We all have two lives:/ The real one, which is the one we dreamed when we were children,/ And which we continue to dream as adults, in a substratum of mist;/ The false one is the life we live in the company of others,/ Which is the practical, the useful life,/ The one where they end up, putting us in a coffin./ In the other life there are no coffins, no deaths./ There are only illustrations from childhood:/ Big colored books, to look at rather than read;/ Big colorful pages to remember later on./ In that other life, we are us,/ In that other life, we live;/ In this one we die, which is what living means.”

Finally, Campos also wrote prose, which justified and explained both his poetry and the differences between himself and Pessoa, along with the other heteronyms. Campos expressed his own philosophy to life, “No age can pass its sensibility on to another age; it can only pass on the intelligence implicit in that sensibility. It is through emotion that we become ourselves, whereas through intelligence we become other…. Each age gives to subsequent ages only what it was not.” In prose, Campos also gave his literary opinions, “The superior poet says what he actually feels. The average poet says what he decides to feel. The inferior poet says what he thinks he should feel…. Most people feel conventionally, albeit with great human sincerity, not, however, with any kind or degree of intellectual sincerity, that is what matters to the poet.”

“The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro” by Fernando Pessoa (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

Pessoa said of his heteronym, Caeiro, “If there is a part of my work that bears the ‘stamp of sincerity,’ that part is the work of Caeiro.” Caeiro, himself, writes in one of his first poems, “I have no ambitions or desires./ Being a poet is not my ambition./ It’s my way of being alone.” Most of Caeiro’s poems dealt with the concreteness of nature. “But if God is the flowers and the trees/ And the hills and the sun and the moonlight,/ Then I do believe in him,/ I believe in him at all hours./ And my whole life is one long prayer and mass,/ And a communion with the eyes and ears.” He also wrote obliquely about the craft of poetry. “And I, if they come and ask me what I have done,/ Will say: I looked at things, nothing more.” Many of his poems deal with the peace associated with being in the moment and the futility of humanity. In a short poem, quoted in full, he states, “A carriage passed along the road, and was gone;/ And the road wasn’t anymore beautiful, or any uglier./ So it is with human actions in the world./ We take nothing away and we add nothing; we pass and we forget;/ And the sun is always the same sun every day.” In another poem, he claims, “Nature never remembers, which is why it’s beautiful.” He is a materialist, who doesn’t search in nature for metaphors or anthropomorphic qualities. “Because everyone loves flowers for being beautiful, but I’m different./ And everyone loves the trees for being green and giving shade, but/   I don’t./ I love the flowers for being flowers, that’s all./ I love the trees for being trees, without the addition of my thoughts.” Caeiro is decidedly apolitical. “I accept injustice as I accept a stone not being round,/ And a cork tree not having been born a pine or an oak./ I cut an orange in two, and the halves, of course, were unequal./ To which half was I being unjust—I, who will eat both, given that I am going to eat them both.”

Caeiro’s oeuvre comes complete with interviews with him, conducted by Alexander Search, a British polyglot, who translated many of Caeiro’s poems into English. Search was another one of Pessoa’s heteronym creations. Search introduces Caeiro, “The poet speaks of himself and his works with a sort of lofty religiosity which, in anyone with less right to speak in such a manner, would be frankly unbearable. Caeiro always speaks in succinct, dogmatic phrases, censuring or admiring (although it’s rare for him to admire) in such absolute, despotic terms, as if he were offering not a mere opinion, but rather stating an inviolable truth.” Caeiro later interjects, “To teach is to destroy. The only worthwhile thing in anyone is what he or she doesn’t know.” In one of his last poems, Caeiro states, “If, after I die, someone should choose to write my biography,/ nothing could be simpler./ There are only two dates—that of my birth and that of my death./ Between one and the other all the days were mine.”

“The Maias” by Jose Maria de Eca de Queiros (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

This novel, set in nineteenth century Portugal, transports one back to a different age at the tail end of nobility, chivalry, and honor. It is a tale of three generations of one of the richest families in Portugal, the Maias. The grandfather, Afonso, represents the old aristocracy: learned, simple, honorable, pious, and noble. The son is a romantic, who commits to a tragic marriage, and, finally, commits suicide in a valiant display of despair and honor. He leaves Afonso to raise a grandson, Carlos, who grows up educated, modern, athletic, literary, scientific, cosmopolitan, but above all, a dandy. The novel depicts scenes of upperclass life in Portugal from the artistic, political, religious, and landed classes. There is a bit of philosophy, a bit of poetry, and social commentary in general. The plot is at turns humorous, romantic, tragic, and didactic. The author leads one gently along, showing off a Portugal that is at once modernizing and in moral decline. The age is both one of urgency and flippancy. Contradictions abound. Tragedy is all but inevitable for both the family of the Maias and for Portugese society at large.

“The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

This is one strange book. On the surface it is an autobiography written by two people, neither of them real. Pessoa’s mind inhabited many characters, personas whom he called his heteronyms. They had their own fictional biographies, philosophies, and writing styles. Pessoa created complete imaginary worlds for each of these writers. In “The Book of Disquiet” Pessoa begins writing as Vicente Guedes and then switches over to Bernardo Soares, a semi-heteronym, because he is a mere mutilation of Pessoa’s own personality. The book itself is more treatise of philosophy than memoir. Pessoa pontificates on the meaning of life and other big questions through the heteronyms Guedes and Soares. Pessoa despises banality, even as he observes the everyday in Lisbon. His prose reads like poetry. With flowery verse, Pessoa gallantly describes the world he inhabits, while you get the feeling he is not quite of this world. There is a mysticism and a remove, though not an asceticism by any means. He begins, as Vicente Guedes, by describing his soul, “My soul is a hidden orchestra. I do not know what instruments, what violins and harps, drums and tambours, sound and clash inside me. I know myself only as a symphony.” Life’s purpose is a constant theme, "Some have a great dream in life, and fall short of it. Others have no dream, and also fall short of it.” And the banality of the mundane, "The only thing that prevents the everyday greeting of "How are you?" from being an unforgivable insult is the fact that in general it is utterly empty and insincere.” Even as he describes the commonplace, Guedes despises it, "Practical life always seemed to me to be the least comfortable of suicides.” He thinks of himself as a man above the masses, “All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does.” Soares, Pessoa reveals, is more like his real self, in style if not in content. Soares, although a humble bookkeeper, also lives apart from the world, “For me, everything that is not my soul is, whether I like it or not, mere scenery, mere decor. Even if I recognize intellectually that a man is a living being like myself, my real instinctive self has always felt him to be of less importance than a tree, if the tree is more beautiful than him.” He ruminates on the escape of death often, “Perhaps death will wake us up, but there is no answer to that either, apart from faith, for which it is enough to believe, and hope, for which to desire is to have, and charity, for which to give is to receive.” Life for him is a living death, “We are death. This thing we consider to be life is the sleep of a real life, the death of what we truly are. The dead are born, they do not die. The two worlds have been switched. When we think we are alive, we are dead; let us live while we are dying.” Soares lives in his writing, not in his life, “I am, for the most part, the very prose that I write. I shape myself in periods and paragraphs, I punctuate myself and, in the unleashed chain of images, I make myself king, as children do, with a crown made from a sheet of newspaper or, in finding rhythms in mere strings of words, I garland myself, as madmen do, with dried flowers that in my dreams still live.” He barely touches on politics, except to decry its pettiness, “I always find it hard to admit that anything done collectively can possibly be sincere, since the only true sentient being is the individual.” For Soares, art and literature are the highest of pursuits, “The value of art is that it takes us away from here.” He is not tired by life, but seeks to live apart from it, “Tedium is not a sickness brought on by the boredom of having nothing to do, but the worse sickness of feeling that nothing is worth doing.” His metaphysics is one of disrespect, “The Gods are the incarnation of what we can never be. The weariness of all hypotheses….” He lives an unfulfilled existence in the knowledge that his personality could never properly be fulfilled, “I was more of a genius in dreams than in life. That is my tragedy.” Perhaps what Soares is seeking no man has found, “Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are only free if you can withdraw from men and feel no need to seek them out for money, or society, or love, or glory, or even curiosity, for none of these things flourish in silence and solitude. If you cannot love alone, then you were born a slave…. To be born free is Man’s greatest quality; it is what makes the humble hermit superior to kings, superior even to gods, who are sufficient unto themselves only by virtue of their power but not by virtue of their disdain for it.”