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one of three alter egos, all of whom came into being in 1914, shortly before the outbreak of World War I. The first to emerge was Alberto Caeiro, an unlettered but philosophically minded man who lived in a simple white house in the country, where he wrote free-verse poems proclaiming that things must be seen for what they are, without interpretation. Ricardo Reis, a trained medical doctor and an ardent classicist, composed Horace-inspired odes recommending stoical acceptance of whatever the gods give us. A third bundle of force and feeling took shape as Álvaro de Campos, a dandyish naval engineer who traveled around the world, was charmed by young men as easily as by women, aspired to live to the extreme, and signed unbridled poems that vented his exalted sensations but betrayed, at the same time, his melancholy awareness that life, no matter how intensely he lived it, was never enough. — location: 1006 ^ref-40009
And so did Fernando Pessoa, who invented the prodigious trio, providing them all with biographies, individualized psychologies, religious and political points of view, and distinctive literary styles. Too radically different from him to be considered simple pseudonyms, as if only their names had changed, Pessoa called them “heteronyms,” and in a “Bibliographical Summary” of his works published in 1928 he explained the conceptual distinction: “Pseudonymous works are by the author in his own person, except in the name he signs; heteronymous works are by the author outside his own person. They proceed from a full-fledged individual created by him, like the lines spoken by a character in a drama he might write.” — location: 1017 ^ref-62340
his 35 Sonnets and Antinous: A Poem, both issued in 1918, garnered a favorable review in The Times Literary Supplement. — location: 1026 ^ref-15994
Fernando Pessoa, who might have said “I are many others,” described himself as a “secret orchestra” made up of numerous instruments—strings, harps, timpani, bass drums. — location: 1061 ^ref-60491
But no writer can rival Pessoa’s achievement of configuring, through his heteronyms, radically different poetic and philosophical attitudes that formed a glorious if not always harmonious musical ensemble. — location: 1066 ^ref-46442
Besides his many poems, his plays, short stories, and detective fiction, Pessoa produced translations, political commentary, history texts, sociological treatises, philosophical studies, linguistic theory, economic theory, essays on religion and on psychology, self-analyses, automatic writing, and hundreds of astrological charts. — location: 1075 ^ref-53974
If we include his childhood riddlers and humorists, Pessoa created more than one hundred fictitious authors in whose name he wrote or at least planned to write something. About thirty of these pseudo-authors signed at least one significant literary work, but there were only three full-fledged heteronyms: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. — location: 1099 ^ref-62624
In defiance of his undisciplined personality and writing habits, Pessoa managed to produce a substantial number of perfect poems and prose pieces, but this biography will just as often be quoting from the rubble of his fragmentary and half-finished works, which in their ensemble form a kind of literary Pompeii, concealing an untold number of curious ideas, luminous observations, and unexpected confessions waiting to be discovered. — location: 1108 ^ref-63142
In notes recorded in English when he was twenty-one years old, he remarks on his instinctive hatred “for decisive acts, for definite thoughts.” As soon as anything crosses his mind, “ten thousand thoughts and ten thousand interassociations of those ten thousand thoughts arise, and I have no will to eliminate or to arrest them, nor to gather them into one central thought, where their unimportant but associated details might be lost.”5 — location: 1113 ^ref-41557
“The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves,” observes Bernardo Soares, who refuses to adapt to the world. He also, thankfully, refuses to indulge in self-pity, and he even jokes, a little grimly, about his condition: “I’m suffering from a headache and the universe.”6 — location: 1135 ^ref-8457
Pessoa copulated with no man or woman, prayed to no god, and joined no political party. — location: 1223 ^ref-26530
