Another Pessoan page

"Literature -- which is art married to thought, and realization
untainted by reality -- seems to me the end towards which all
human effort would have to strive, if it were truly human and
not just a welling up of our animal self. To express something
is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are
greener in their description than in their actual greenness.
Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the
air of the imagination, will have colours with a durability
not found in cellular life.

What moves lives. What is said endures. There's nothing in
life that's less real for having been well described.
Small-minded critics point out that such-and-such poem,
with its protracted cadences, in the end says merely that
it's a nice day. But to say it's a nice day is difficult,
and the nice day itself passes on. It's upto us to conserve
the nice day in a wordy, florid memory, sprinkling new
flowers and new stars over the fields and skies of the
empty, fleeting outer world.

Everything is what we are, and everything will be, for
those who come after us in the diversity of time, what
we will have intensely imagined -- what we, that is, by
embodying our imagination, will have actually been. The
grand, tarnished panorama of History amounts, as I see
it, to a flow of interpretations, a confused consensus
of unreliable eyewitness accounts. The novelist is all
of us, and we narrate whenever we see, because seeing is
complex like everything.

Right now I have so many fundamental thoughts, so many
truly metaphysical things to say that I suddenly feel
tired, and I've decided to write no more, to think no
more. I'll let the fever of saying put me to sleep
instead, and with closed eyes I'll stroke, as if petting
a cat, all that I might have said.

Chapter (?) 27, page 30, The Book of Disquiet by
Fernando Pessoa (Tr. Richard Zenith)