Existential Confusion
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Stunning!
Proper Non-dual treatise!
Amazing!
An elevated atma understands the unsaid and the subtle reality!
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Of course I will respond from a Buddhist viewpoint. All he pondered was helpless confusion. He didn’t see a way out of his philosophical depression and pointlessness and seems to be a nihilist in alluding that it all ends in death. Later generations may appreciate his writings but he says that as a dead man he wouldn’t be around to enjoy their kinship.
To the contrary, the Buddha expounded on impermanence and not-selfness while stressing the crucial importance of one’s actions which shape future existences and when done skillfully, enable one to escape rebirth and dive into the state of eternal peace.
Pessoa didn’t see a way out. I found the whole presentation to be depressing and neurotic.
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A bit less disquieting. Fernando Pessoa did have company born just a couple of years before his own death. Maybe a certain conscious of the time.
Albert Camus was also from a different nation from where he lived, Algeria, as such he was a “Black Foot”, Algerian French born there.
It is the philosophy of existentialism: man’s attempt to define himself by his own mean. Therefore, the total disquietude and abject desolation.
They profess atheism onto nihilism. To them life feels mostly meaningless, senseless (emotionally void).and absurd. That must be painful and even dreadful, a sort of a long nightmare tunnel.
One of his most known books is the Stranger. The book starts by simply stating that “today mom died”. He might have been on his way to the funeral. But he was incapable of attaching any feelings or emotions to the event. It’s life bare of all of the other stuff (that make us human?) to include God himself, since they decided that he is dead (as well).
Another one of his books “the Scum of the Days” is geared towards resuscitating in the reader, a disgust or nauseous of life, just as the scum of sea that washes ashore, little by little, and foams up on the beach like vomit. It is all together dark, from the depths of the abyss.
I don’t think there is much appreciation for their kind of mindset in these modern times, maybe by the very depressed and suicidal, whom typically are not deeply thoughtful of their condition, I think. But suffer enough simply to want to end it.
Also, it should be mentioned that many of those liberal artists back then abused absinthe, a highly etheric spirit drink (to this day liquor stores are called wine & spirits). They also likely opium: melancholy and languishing as well as emotional flat affect.
It is my intuition that absinthe, an extremely distilled substance conveyed that type of consciousness of the nothingness from the innards of the (real existential) abyss. They may not be aware of this themselves, as they were observers/ describers of their experiences and lives, but non objective.
In a sense, IMO, these are literally geniuses (according to some) born out of their addictions to some serious substances!Rehab could bring them salvation from torment, emptiness/voidism and darkness.
