I often wonder what I would be like if, shielded from the winds of fate by the screen of wealth, I’d never been brought by the dutiful hand of my uncle to an office in Lisbon, nor risen from it to other offices, all the way up to this paltry pinnacle as a competent assistant bookkeeper, with a job that’s like a siesta and a salary that I can live on. I realize that if I’d had this imagined past, I wouldn’t now be able to write these pages, which are at least something, and therefore better than all the pages I would only have dreamed of writing in better circumstances.
The happiest Pessoa ever is, at least when he thinks about real things. (I'm treating Pessoa's characters, not even his central characters, as though they were him, but it's almost impossible not to)
