`Everything Is in Everything'

Computer access will remain unreliable for several days. We’ll live in motels and airplanes, and touch down in another world. One of the masters of alternate worlds, who hardly seemed of ours, was the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. In his prose work The Book of Disquiet, one of the most enchanting books I know, he writes these words of encouragement:

“It’s a rule of life that we can, and should, learn from everyone. There are solemn and serious things we can learn from quacks and crooks, there are philosophies taught us by fools, there are lessons in faithfulness and justice brought to us by chance and by those we chance to meet. Everything is in everything.

“In certain particularly lucid moments of contemplation, like those of early afternoon when I observantly wander through the streets, each person brings me a novelty, each building teaches me something new, each placard has a message for me.

My silent stroll is a continual conversation, and all of us – men, buildings, stones, placards and sky – are a huge friendly crowd, elbowing each other with words in the great procession of Destiny.”