The feelings that hurt the most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are. I don’t know if these feelings are a slow madness born of disconsolation or if they’re reminiscences of some other world in which we’ve lived— jumbled, criss-crossing rememberences, like things seen in dreams, absurd in the form they come to us but not in their origin, if we knew what it was. I know these thoughts of the emotion ache bitterly in the soul. Our inability to conceive of anything they could correspond to, the impossibility of finding a substitute for what they embrace in our imagination. But what remains from feeling all this is an inevitable disaffection with life and all its gestures, a foretasted weariness of all desires in all their manifestations, a generic distaste for all feelings. In these times of acute grief, it is impossible - even in dreams - to be a lover, to be a hero, to be happy. All of this is empty, even in our idea of what it is. Life is hollow, the soul hollow, the world hollow. All gods die a death greater than death. All is emptier than the void. All is a chaos of things that are nothing. And in the bottom of my soul, as the only reality of this moment - there’s an intense and invisible grief, a sadness like the sound of someone crying in their room. In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I indifferently narrate my factless autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it’s because I have nothing to say.  

-fernando pessoa, the book of disquiet