Fernando Pessoa
One of my mental complications...
One of my mental complications — horrible beyond words — is a fear of insanity, which itself is insanity. I am partly in that state betrayed as his by Rollinat in the opening poem (I think) of his Névroses. Zmpises, criminal some, insane others, reaching, amid my agony, a horrible tendency to action, a terrible muscularity, felt in the muscles, I mean — these are common with me and the horror of them and of their intensity — greater than ever now both in number and in intensity — cannot be described.
s.d.
Páginas Íntimas e de Auto-Interpretação. Fernando Pessoa. (Textos estabelecidos e prefaciados por Georg Rudolf Lind e Jacinto do Prado Coelho.) Lisboa: Ática, 1966.
- 6.