The road to Enthepful

Fernando Pessoa, THE Portuguese poet, died mostly unknown.

Killed by his own drinking habit, having published four unremarkable books—of which only one was written in Portuguese—and leaving behind a wooden trunk containing over 27.000 pages, notes, scraps of paper, and an unfinished masterpiece written under one of his over seventy heteronyms: Livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet).

What is travel and what use is it? One sunset is much like another; you don’t have to go to Constantinople in order to see one. And what of the sense of freedom that travel brings? I can enjoy that just going from Lisbon to Benfica and I can feel it more intensely than someone journeying from Lisbon to China because, in my opinion, if that sense of freedom is not in me, then it’s nowhere. “Any road,” said Carlyle, “this simple road to Entepfuhl, will lead you to the end of the world.” But the road to Entepfuhl, if followed right to the end, would lead straight back to Entepfuhl, which means that Entepfuhl, where we started, is that “end of the world” we set out to find in the beginning.

—Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet

Pessoa in 1929, drinking a glass of wine in a tavern of Lisbon's downtown.