A Shrug of the Shoulders

We generally give to our ideas about the
unknown the color of our notions about
what we do know: If we call death a sleep
it's because it has the appearance of
sleep; if we call death a new life, it's
because it seems different from life. We
build our beliefs and hopes out of these
small misunderstandings with reality and
live off husks of bread we call cakes, the
way poor children play at being happy.
But that's how all life is; at least
that's how the particular way of life
generally known as civilization is.
Civilization consists in giving an
inappropriate name to something and then
dreaming what results from that. And in
fact the false name and the true dream do
create a new reality. The object really
does become other, because we have made it
so. We manufacture realities. We use the
raw materials we always used but the form
lent it by art effectively prevents it
from remaining the same. A table made out
of pinewood is a pinetree but it is also
a table. We sit down at the table
not at the pinetree. ...

Fernando Pessoa

An excerpt from "The Book of Disquiet," written in the 1920's, first published in 1982 by Atica in Lisbon.