L ETTER TO HIS MOTHER , Fernando Pessoa

My health has been good and my state of mind, oddly enough, has improved. Even so, I’m tortured by a vague anxiety that I don’t know what to call but an intellectual itch, as if my soul had chicken-pox. It’s only in this absurd language that I can describe what I feel. But what I’m feeling isn’t the same as those sad moods I sometimes tell you about, in which the sadness has no cause. My present mood has a definite cause. Everything around me is either departing or crumbling. I don’t use these two verbs with gloomy intent. I simply mean that the people I associate with are or will be going through changes, marking an end to particular phases of their lives, and all of this suggests to me – as when an old man, because he sees his childhood companions dying all around him, feels his time must be near – that in some mysterious way my life likewise should and will change. Not that I think this change will be for the worse. On the contrary. But it’s a change, and for me a change – to pass from one state to another – is a partial death; something in us dies, and the sadness of its dying and its passing on cannot help but touch our soul.