319 [14/9/1931]
In my thoughts, I already walk among the leaves and dust of the atrium, caught up in this senseless orbit around nothing, my footsteps the only human sound on the clean flagstones that an angular sun — from where I know not — burnishes with death. The autumn will take everything, everything I ever though or dreamed, everything I I did or did not do, spent matches scattered at random on the ground, discarded scraps of paper, great empires, all the religions and philosophies that the drowsy children of the abyss play at making. The autumn will take everything, everything that is that made up my soul, from my noblest aspirations to the ordinary house in which I live, from the gods I once worshiped to my boss Vasques. The autumn will take everything, will sweep everything up with tender indifference. The autumn will take everything. (295)
Fernando Pessoa, edited by Jeronimo Pizarro, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (deserves all the commendations she’s been getting)