Pessoa's heteronym, Alvaro Coehlo de Athayde, the 20th Baron of Tieve takes his life, leaving a manuscript in a desk drawer.
These pages are not my confession; they're my definition. And I feel, as I began to write it, that I can write with some semblance of truth.
And who is the Baron more than what is defined, enacted by the text Pessoa has him write? A text that is, with respect to the Baron, posthumous - the remnant of that literary ambition burned up when he threw his other fragmentary manuscripts onto the fire.
In the past the loss of my manuscripts - of my life's fragmentary but carefully wrought oeuvre - would have driven me mad, but now I viewed the prospect as a casual incident of my fate, not as a fatal blow that would annihilate my personality by annihilating its manifestations.
But the he still needs, does he not, the manifestation of The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive, as Pessoa subtitles it ...? Burning up literature, he is still dependent upon it - upon its remnants, upon what still attests to its demand.
To think that I considered this incoherent leap of half written scraps a literary work! To think, in this decisive moment, that I believed myself capable of organising all these pieces into a finished, visible whole!
So now the Baron throws it all into the fire. Honour and silence, he says, are left to him; this is what his reason confirms, this 'millimetric' thinker. A thinker who also says that it is by thinking that he remains like Buridan's ass 'at the mathematical midpoint between the water of emotion and the hay of action'; and that 'temperament is a philosophy'. Then thinking cannot think past temperament; the Baron's character is his fate; what remains is the Stoic amor fati, that acceptance of the order of the world as it measures out our destinies. Whence, I suppose, the title The Education of a Stoic Pessoa gives these pages.
Amor fati? Was it the Baron's fate to burn his manuscripts and take his own life? Or was his suicide a fatal leap towards action, his last chance, his rebellion? Ah, The Impossibility of Producing Superior Art (another of Pessoa's subtitles) ...! but it is impossible only for one who prefers, he says, to suffer alone 'without metaphysics or sociology' what led Leopardi, de Vigny and de Quental - 'three great pessimistic poets' to make 'universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes'. Perhaps it is only the Baron's discretion, his sense of honour that leads him to the impossibility of realising his works and - short step - to suicide.
Richard Zenith, editor of the volume, quotes an excerpt from another text by a Pessoa heteronym, Bernardo Soares:
I weep over my imperfect pages, but if future generations read them, they will be more touched by my weeping than by any perfection I might have achieved, since perfection would have kept me from weeping and, therefore, from writing. Perfection never materialises.
Soares weeps, but the Baron does not. No consolation for him in readers who were touched sufficiently to forget the imperfection of his work. And yet there's this book, The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive ... How are we supposed to read it? We are not to be touched. It is a monument to the absence of weeping, to the Baron's honour. He saved us, he says in these pages, from an oeuvre born of a sublimated suffering.
Compare Soares, author of The Book of Disquiet happy with his tears and happy to write of his suffering. Soares who produced a manuscript far larger than that left by the Baron of Teive. Neither author produced a book that was published in Pessoa's lifetime. And yet I wonder whether The Education of the Stoic was a way of short circuiting Soares' sprawling The Book of Disquiet - of delimiting that impulse that led Pessoa to produce so many fragments. To die honourably, discretely; to die like an aristocrat: was this what Pessoa wanted in the Baron of Teive? As, meanwhile, the bookkeeper Soares, prolix and weeping survived in him, and The Book of Disquiet grew longer and less manageable still ...