The irony of self
One's self is arguably the one entity of reality which a person knows most intimately. One's experience of reality is typically always mediated by the self and ego, so when this word artist, Fernando Pessoa, discusses the self as the greatest mystery, he comments on one of the essential ironies of the human experience. He is able to isolate the painful, anguishing feelings of his existence only in verbal suggestions, so that his art never feels quite forceful enough to correctly capture his own essence, learned through his experience of time. The irony is that he already is so much more than he himself can fathom.
"Factless" memoir
Much like later memoirist, Karl Ove Knausgaard, this writer raised quite a stir in the artistic community with this book, because although he never published it in his lifetime, the book is clearly a deviation from reality in many ways. He explains that it is a "factless autobiography" that he is intending to capture, which explains the rather creative form of the vignettes. The factless nature of the memoir points the reader to another kind of order besides narrative, temporal plot; the reader sees the rise and fall of various emotional effects or qualities in a sequence that was designed by editors to highlight the musical quality of this aging man's writing.
The posthumous publication
Ironically, little can be said about this work of art's artistic purpose, because it was published only after the author died, so far after the author died that there can be no mistaking that the publication was not related to the author's desire or intention, but rather to preserve a great work of art. That irony is astonishing because of the book's sometimes spiritualistic or religious reflections. If not for an audience of human readers, for whom could this work have been intended? The posthumous nature of the publication leaves room for the epic idea that perhaps it was never about audience for him. Perhaps the book was truly existential reflection.
The drama of aging
The man in his old age has something helpful to teach about aging. Namely, he isolates the irony of aging, namely this: A person does not know about aging until they are aging already. That means that only sixty year olds know what it actually feels like to live each day with an aging and breaking vehicle of a body. The irony is highly dramatic, escalating the stakes of daily life by weakening the author over time so that instead of going about some sort of business in his daily life, he spends longer stretches of time reflecting, remembering the past, and trying to understand his own nature.
Association as synchronicity
This irony is the aspect of the book which connects most closely to Pessoa's confession that memoir-crafting has been a painful and emotionally complicating process, something that he feels has made something of a martyr of him. The pain he reports is the emotional sincerity he is able to accomplish by having such an intelligent and long-informed experience of reality. He complains that his mind is so overwhelmingly powerful that any small trigger could send him into spirals of associations and thoughts, many of which would be beautiful if he had the language to capture them. Not only beautiful, but also synchronous. The irony of that would be that although the brain is associating at random, perhaps there is still an order to his thoughts. Perhaps even his experience of consciousness is part of some greater conspiracy. His feelings of insanity and paranoia seem to be due to his chronic awareness of the absurdly narrative quality of human experience.
