Diary in the shade

Diary in the shade

Do you still remember me?
You knew me a long time ago.
I was that sad child you didn’t care for
But then gradually got to be interested in
(In his anguish, his sadness, and something else)
And ended up liking, almost without realizing it.
Remember? The sad Child who played on the beach
By himself, quietly, far away from the others,
And he sometimes looked over at them sadly but without regret...
I see that you occasionally steal a glance at me.
Do you remember? Do you want to see if you remember? Ah, I understand...
Don’t you still sense in my sad and calm face
The sad child who always played far away from the others
And sometimes looked at them with sad eyes but without regret?
I know you’re watching and don’t understand what sadness it is
That makes me look sad.
It isn’t regret or nostalgia, disappointment or resentment.
No...It’s the sadness
Of one who, in the great prenatal realm,
Must have received from God the Secret—
The secret of the world’s illusion,
Of the absolute emptiness of things—
The incurable sadness
Of one who realizes that everything’s pointless, worthless,
That effort is an absurd waste,
And that life is a void,
Since disillusion always follows on the heels of illusion
And Death seems to be the meaning of Life...
It’s this, but not only this, that you see in my face
And that makes you steal an occasional glance at me.
There is, besides this,
That grim astonishment, that black chill,
Which comes from the soul
Having been told a secret of God
In the prenatal realm, when life
Had still shown no sign of dawning
And the whole of the complex, luminous Universe
Was an inevitable destiny yet to be fulfilled.
If this doesn’t define me, nothing defines me.
And this doesn’t define me—
Because the Secret that God told me wasn’t only this.
There was something else, which led to my embracing
The unreal dimension, my delighting in it so much, my knack
For grasping the ungraspable and for feeling what can’t be felt,
My inward dignity of an emperor, though I have no empire,
My world of dreams fashioned in broad daylight...
Yes, that is what gives
My face an oldness even older than my childhood,
And my gaze an anxiety within my happiness.
You occasionally steal a glance at me,
And you don’t understand me,
And you steal another glance, and another, and another...
Without God there’s nothing but life
And you’ll never be able to understand...

(Fernando Pessoa)

EF-L zoom lens.