Fernando Pessoa #05 - Lisbon With Its Houses

Using his hometown as the main image of the poem, Pessoa here touches on the feeling of nostalgia which arises out of insomnia: "I want to imagine anything, & something else always comes up". In our modern vocabulary, we might say that he suffers from anxiety, but, what does this really mean? Might this not just be a way to bury a profound act of consciousness under the sod of a clinic definition? The speaker wants to go to sleep, but can't because there is always another image, another sound, another thought to be contemplated; another feeling, another memory, another sensation to be perceived. Insomnia, in this sense, points toward a heightened state of awareness, a continual peeling off of the self from itself (i.e. Sartre's being-for-itself) which aims with all its might at sleep, here a symbol for a kind of being that simply "is" or that "is and is nothing else".