Free The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa by Fernando Pessoa Page A

everything. And it’s not even poetry: it’s seeing. Those materialists are blind. You say they say that space is infinite. Where did they ever see that in space?”
    And I, confused: “But don’t you conceive of space as being infinite? Can’t you conceive of space as being infinite?”
    “I don’t conceive of anything as infinite. How can I conceive of something as infinite?”
    “Just suppose there’s a space,” I said. “Beyond that space there is more space, and then more space, still more, and more, and more.... It never ends....”
    “Why?” asked my master Caeiro.
    I reeled in a mental earthquake. “Then suppose it ends!” I shouted. “What comes after?”
    “If it ends,” he replied, “nothing comes after.”
    This kind of argumentation, which is both childish and feminine, and therefore unanswerable, stumped my brain for a few moments, until finally I said, “But do you
conceive
of this?”
    “Conceive of what? Of something having limits? Small wonder! What doesn’t have limits doesn’t exist. To exist means that there’s something else, which means that each thing is limited. What’s so hard about conceiving that a thing is a thing and that it’s not always some other thing that’s beyond it?”
    At this point I had the physical sensation that I was arguing not with another man but with another universe. I made one last attempt, with a far-fetched argument that I convinced myself was legitimate.
    “All right, Caeiro, consider numbers.... Where do numbers end? Let’s take any number—34, for example. After 34 comes 35, 36, 37, 38, etc., and it keeps going like that forever. No matter how large the number, there’s always a still larger one....”
    “But that’s all just numbers,” objected my master Caeiro. And then he added, looking at me with a boundless childhood in his eyes: “What is 34 in Reality?”
    One day Caeiro told me something absolutely astonishing. We were talking, or rather, I was talking, about the soul’s immortality. I felt that this concept, even if false, was necessary for us to be able to tolerateexistence intellectually, to be able to see it as something more than a heap of stones with greater or lesser consciousness.
    “I don’t know what it means for something to be necessary,” said Caeiro.
    I answered without answering: “Just tell me this. What are you to yourself?”
    “What am I to myself?” Caeiro repeated. I’m one of my sensations.”
    I’ve never forgotten the shock that phrase produced in my soul. It has many implications, some of which are contrary to what Caeiro intended. But it was after all spontaneous—a ray of sunshine that shed light without any intention.
    One of the most interesting conversations with my master Caeiro was the one in Lisbon where everyone in the group was present and we ended up discussing the concept of Reality.
    If I remember correctly, we got on to this subject because of a tangential remark made by Fernando Pessoa apropos something that had been said. Pessoa’s remark was this: “The concept of Being does not admit of parts or degrees; something is or it isn’t.”
    “I’m not sure it’s that simple,” I objected. “This concept of being needs to be analyzed. It seems to me like a metaphysical superstition, at least to a certain extent.”
    “But the concept of Being isn’t open to analysis,” replied Fernando Pessoa, “due precisely to its indivisibility.”
    “The concept may not be open to it,” I said, “but the value of that concept is.”
    Fernando answered, “But what is the ‘value’ of a concept independently of the concept? A concept—an abstract idea, that is—is never ‘more’ or ‘less’ than it is, and so it cannot be said to have value, which is always a matter of more or less. There may be value in how a concept is used or applied, but that value is in its usage or application, not in the concept itself.”
    My master Caeiro, who with his eyes had been attentively