Night Train to Lisbon

the dreary railroad station lamps slid past one after another into the dark.

It is a mistake to believe that the crucial moments of a life when its habitual direction changes forever must be loud and shrill dramatics, washed away by fierce internal surges. This is a kitschy fairy tale started by boozing journalists, flashbulb-seeking filmmakers and authors whose minds look like tabloids. In truth, the dramatics of a life-determining experience are often unbelievably soft. It has so little akin to the bang, the flash, or the volcanic eruption that, at the moment it is made, the experience is often not even noticed. When it deploys its revolutionary effect and plunges a life into a brand-new light giving it a brand-new melody, it does that silently and in this wonderful silence resides its special nobility.

To be able to part from something, he thought as the train started moving, you had to confront it in a way that created internal distance. You had to turn the unspoken, diffuse self-understanding it had wrapped around you into a clarity that showed what it meant to you.

“Do wrong to thyself, do wrong to thyself, my soul; but later thou wilt no longer have the opportunity of respecting and honoring thyself. For every man has but one life. But yours is nearly finished, though in it you had no regard for yourself but placed thy felicity in the souls of others. . . . But those who do not observe the impulses of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy.”

Later, he had sometimes felt guilty about this accusation. The safety and self-confidence he didn’t have weren’t something a person could control or be accused for lacking. You had to be lucky with yourself to be a self-confident person. And his father hadn’t had much luck, either with himself or with others.

Sleepless people were bound by a wordless solidarity.

Of the thousand experiences we have, we find language for one at most and even this one merely by chance and without the care it deserves. Buried under all the mute experiences are those unseen ones that give our life its form, its color, and its melody.

He loved the Latin sentences because they bore the calm of everything past. Because they didn’t make you say something. Because they were speech beyond talk. And because they were beautiful in their immutability. Dead languages—people who talked about them like that had no idea, really no idea, and Gregorius could be harsh and unbending in his contempt for them.

How much life they still have before them; how open their future still is; how much can still happen to them; how much they can still experience!

Cada um de nós é vários, é muitos, é uma prolixidade
de si mesmos. Por isso aquele que despreza o ambiente
não é o mesmo que dele se alegra ou padece. Na vasta
colónia do nosso ser há gente de muitas espécies,
pensando e sentindo diferentemente.

Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves.
So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same
as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast
colony of our being there are many species of people
who think and feel in different ways.

Fernando Pessoa, Livro Do Desassossego