Weekend reading list

Most of us believe that there are many characters residing within one living character. In colloquial conversations, we often hear people saying things like, "that's just one side of me". You can have a lot of shades to your character but you are one person encompassing them all. And while portraying each of those shades you are most likely to behave differently, react differently and be perceived differently as well. But there's something spellbinding about each of these shades, isn't it?

So, this weekend, spend some time exploring those multiple shades, physiques, and writing style, all etched on hard bound paper by one person, a Portuguese bard, Fernando Pessoa, in what he called as his 'factless autobiography'.

'The Book of Disquiet', acclaimed to be Pessoa's greatest work in writing, was published after his death. But it's not this part, or the part that it was left unedited by him, that should catch your attention. It is the heteronyms that will certainly steal your heart and have a lasting impression on your mind.

There's something intoxicating about each of these (almost 70) heteronyms' writing style that will epitomise the concept of 'reading pleasure'.

Here are a few quotes from the book:

"Could it think, the heart would stop beating."

"To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost."

“I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect”

“My past is everything I failed to be.”

“If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.”

If this has got you tempted enough to read through all the pages of this book, then get hold of this piece of literature right this instant, because at the moment, besides this, "everything is unimportant", indeed.