“My past is everything I failed to be.”
This especially critical view of his own personal history reveals Pessoa's struggle with guilt. Looking backward, he is disappointed in himself. He believes the past was full of wasted opportunity.
“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while."
Pessoa writes about how difficult it is to exist within his own mind. It feels to him as if his soul knows what he is capable of becoming, but it's preventing him from transformation by chastising him over not already having becoming that person. Consequently Pessoa has become apathetic, preferring his own version of events to reality because his mind has such a heavy weight on it at all times.
“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”
Again with the pessimism, Pessoa views love as a lie. People construct images of their loves ones in their minds, without every really bothering to know the person. They fall in love with the capabilities of their own mind in inventing a new character with which to play. To Pessoa, the only real love is self-love.
“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”
Often preoccupied with his own thoughts, Pessoa has noticed that the complexity with which his mind functions is unknowable. He can see the manifestations of different mental and physical processes, but he cannot identify the individual parts. If he could stop and recognize each of the pieces, he might have more control.
“I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.”
In this quotation, Pessoa describes his anxiety. He lives with the constant, self-imposed expectation that he's missing something important. He feels like he's always just about to accomplish it, so he thinks he's asleep, and he longs to wake up.
“Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.”
As he ages, Pessoa changes his convictions. This leads him to feel disassociated with his younger self, unable to feel the same way he did or even think the same way he did. Partially due to deteriorating memory and partially due to wisdom, he can't relate to who he used to be. Oddly enough, his current reality leads him to believe that the point of all those ideas and feelings is culminating rapidly into self-analysis. Maybe he was supposed to live through everything he did so that he could look back and enjoy it all abstractly, like a drama about somebody else.
