Synchronicity

In my last post I included a quotation from the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Looking him up on Wikipedia (what would I do without it?), I came across The Book of Disquiet, a series of lyrical and melancholy observations from the perspective of one of Pessoa's alternate selves, Bernardo Soares – an obscure, philosophically inclined office clerk in 1920’s Lisbon – which was compiled from Pessoa’s papers after his death. The book is discussed on The Blog of Disquiet, in commentaries on individual passages in the book, contributed by several writers, which is now on my daily feed list. I have a theory, based only on my own experience, that the random acquisition of books, based on pure chance, or certainly nothing more than oblique hints, is often very fruitful. So at lunchtime last Friday (incidentally, the anniversary of Pessoa’s death) I went down the road to Dillon’s bookshop (the original one in Gower Street which is actually now part of the Waterstone’s chain, but will always be Dillon’s to me) and picked up a copy of The Book of Disquiet, which I have been reading ever since. I bought the translation by Margaret Jull Costa, whose name I recognised from her translations of other Portuguese and Spanish writers, but there is another translation by Richard Zenith, in which the text appears to be differently organised. Maybe I shall have to get both.

Anyway, on the train into London this morning, I read a beautiful passage on the age-old philosophical problem of recognising the existence of souls other than one’s own. The narrator (Soares) reflects on the death of a passing acquaintance, the tobacconist’s assistant:

I suppose no-one truly admits the existence of another person. One might concede that the other person is alive and feels and thinks like oneself, but there will always be an element of difference, a perceptible discrepancy, that one cannot quite put one's finger on.
..............
On certain days, at certain times, with an awareness wafted to me on some unknown breeze, revealed to me by the opening of some secret door, I am suddenly conscious that the grocer on the corner is a spiritual being, that his assistant at the door, bending down over a sack of potatoes, truly is a soul capable of suffering.

Yesterday, when they told me that the assistant in the tobacconist's had committed suicide, I couldn't believe it. Poor lad, so he existed too!

The train was delayed, and when I reached Liverpool Street Underground station the platform was closed through overcrowding. As it was a bright sunny morning, I decided to walk through the City to Moorgate, to catch the Northern Line from there. The street was thick with crowds of commuters emerging from the station, and it was a while before I reached the entrance. At the moment when I got to the stairs down into the tube station, a woman leaning on crutches was slowly and painfully making her way up the steps towards me. I paused to wait for her (I didn’t really have much choice). At the top she stopped for breath, and smiled.