Notes for the Baron of Teive
(Pessoa, *The Education of the Stoic*)
1
As he had watched the preceding steps,
he now, having finished with her,
watched as she brushed and buttoned her clothes,
gathered whatever eggs remained unbroken,
replaced them in her basket and,
not looking at or speaking to him, left.
If she had lain, stunned or languorous,
if she had wept,
or smiled shyly or brazenly, if she had tried
to exact some price or favor after the fact;
if in her walk
he had noted some particular loss
of mind or pride, a show
of unconcern or genuine unconcern,
he would have been displeased,
the day and his estate mysteriously troubled.
But the day was hot and still.
He had read that heat is the sign
of turbulence in the small components of matter.
That can’t be true, he thought;
it is cold from which all things and creatures shy:
they mill about distracted to escape it.
Outside, on the path to the huts,
the girl rearranged her basket.
He remembered “*L’infinito” by Leopardi,
in which a peasant girl
passes the poet without interaction and vanishes
at the vanishing point.
Perhaps this one would have the same effect
at a distance of fifty yards.
2
The sun sank but the heat increased.
Impeccable towards evening he walked in the village.
The sun is a wrestler
by whom one is inevitably defeated,
by whom it is no shame to be defeated;
whose invitation to a match
cannot be refused although one will be defeated.
By day it is the color of walls;
at dusk, of roof-tiles.
He walked between the rows of old women in black
seated on benches, wondering if silence
or muttered blessings show more respect.
He knew that the sun gives life
to the fields around and beneath
the hill on which the village stood, but is that
(he considered) in fact true?
Perhaps the springs of life
lie elsewhere, with its fate.
Perhaps it is these widows
who keep the sun aloft
and float it gracefully down
with their labored breath,
not the church on which it balances a moment.
Who will do so, sitting here
long after stones from that church
have gone to serve some other faith,
as once they were a part of a pagan temple.
3
*Philosophy, he wrote, *is the unwanted,
uncertain extension of a poem*.
After a while he crossed out
“philosophy” and put “reason.”
On another page he wrote “stasis”
and, after a hyphen, “peace.”
Then he returned to his first thought,
replacing, without confidence or interest,
the word “philosophy” with “hope.”
The pen dropped from his hand,
or else he let it fall.
Some celebration of poverty
had ended in the village.
Silence lay in all directions.
He reminded himself that he knew
the *Letter of Lord Chandos*,
the agonies of Mallarmé and Coleridge
at the inaccessibility
of the original and perfect word,
they now residing somewhere with it … Suddenly
(insofar as these things are sudden)
he understood the condition
whereby he would fill his notebook:
that except, at last, for himself, he would finish nothing.
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