The Deliciously Fascinating Fernado Pessoa

Sometimes the New York Times has some really delicious articles. I mean, the kind of interesting writing that makes me literally salivate and sparks my mind to fifteen different directions of thought. The latest example is Michael Kimmelmans article on Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese writer and poet.

How on earth he whittled down this positively fascinating subject into two pages is quite beyond me. Pessoa, dead from cirrhosis in 1937, at the age of just 47 is a character who has so many layers it is almost unimaginable that even the surface could be scratched. In point of fact, Kimmelman lays the foundation for readers like me to find the foot and finger holds into the face of the story and begin to do our own exploration.

A lot of people find Pessoa fascinating because of his multi-year penpal relationship with the notorious Aleister Crowley. What must this quiet, spectacle clad, celibate have found to say to the British mystic, mountaineer, writer and practitioner of black magic?

I personally find him so fascinating because his mind is like an intricate labrynth-different people and lives living inside one man. While not psychotzophrenic, he literally had invented characters that he would write as-for example-Alexander Search, a Scottish engineer, Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Alvaro de Campos, a retired bisexual naval engineer and melancholic with an addiction to drugs. Delicous! Pessoa’s name literally describes him. In Portuguese Pessoa means “person.”

And what a person he must have been.