Amiel said that a landscape is a state of mind, but the phrase is the feebly felicitous one of a feeble dreamer. A landscape is a landscape and therefore cannot be a state of mind. To objectify is to create and no one says of a finished poem that it is a state of thinking about writing a poem. To see is perhaps to dream but if use the word see rather than the word dream, its because we distinguish between seeing and dreaming. Anyway, whats the point of these speculations on the psychology of words? Quite independently of me the grass grows, the rain waters the grass as it grows and the sun turns to gold the whole field of grass that has grown or will grow; the mountains have been there since ancient times and the wind that blows sounds just as it did to Homer (even if he never existed). It would be more correct to say that a state of mind is a landscape; that would have the advantage of containing not the lie of theory but the truth of a metaphor. These random words were dictated to me by the great expanse of city I saw lit by the universal light of the sun, from high up on São Pedro de Alcântara. Every time I look out like this on a vast landscape and free myself of the 1 metre 70 and 61 kilos of which I am physically constituted, I smile a great metaphysical smile at those who dream that a dream is just a dream and, with a noble virtue born of understanding, I love the truth of the absolute exterior world. --Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 13:42:02 +0000
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