Sleep and the Meaning of Life: Fernando Pessoa on the Existential Dimension of the Horizontal Hours
This may be so because meaning is so often muddled by interpretation, but sleep disables the whipping hand of the analytical mind, quells all the rationalizations that pass for reason, returns us to a state of pure being before the storying of identities and opinions. Pessoa writes:
When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the... See more
Maria Popova • Sleep and the Meaning of Life: Fernando Pessoa on the Existential Dimension of the Horizontal Hours
Nicely summarized by Popova, Pessoa on sleep and its ability to return us to innocence and consciencelessness
It is sleep, Pessoa comes to believe, that most readily allows us to empty ourselves of our selves and touch the infinite:
There are moments when the emptiness of feeling oneself live attains the consistency of a positive thing. In the great men of action, namely the saints, who act with all of their emotion and not just part of it, this sense of... See more
Maria Popova • Sleep and the Meaning of Life: Fernando Pessoa on the Existential Dimension of the Horizontal Hours
sleep as untethering the “self” from…?
The clock in the back of the deserted house (everyone’s sleeping) slowly lets the clear quadruple sound of four o’clock in the morning fall. I still haven’t fallen asleep, and I don’t expect to. There’s nothing on my mind to keep me from sleeping and no physical pain to prevent me from relaxing, but the dull silence of my strange body just lies... See more
Maria Popova • Sleep and the Meaning of Life: Fernando Pessoa on the Existential Dimension of the Horizontal Hours
Pessoa on sleep
Pessoa recognizes that, more than a biological impediment, all those unsolved disquietudes and subtle estrangements from ourselves that keep the eyelids from closing the curtain on the day are emissaries of our existential angst. Wrestling with his own, he writes:
I’m going to life’s bed wide awake, unaccompanied and without peace, in the ebb and... See more
Sleep and the Meaning of Life: Fernando Pessoa on the Existential Dimension of the Horizontal Hours
sleep and its complexities