Alberto Caeiro

Fernando Pessoa, assigning as Alberto Caeiro, makes a kind of "philosophic poetry" that remains a pure and naked vision of reality, a non-sick looking on nature, things, people and happenings. Some say he is an anti-philosophical type, an anti-romantic, anti-methaphysical, even anti-poet! He has been called a materialist too, a pagan or the "paganism itself".

There are some interesting similarities between that singular knowledge and Wittgenstein's thinkings on some matters, and, as strange as it can possibly look, the poems sometimes sounds like the zen and the prajna experience.

I'm with the folks who think Caeiro simply "is".
(As things, for him, simply "are")

My glance is clear like a sunflower

My glance is clear like a sunflower.
I use to walk on the roads,
Looking to my right and to my left,
And, sometimes, looking behind me...
And what I see at each moment
Is something I'd never seen before,
And I can do it pretty well...
I know how to feel the essential wonder
That a child feels if, on being born,
it could note that it really has been born...
I feel that I am being born on each moment
for the eternal newness of the World...

I believe in the World as in a daisy
Because I see it. But I don't think about it
Because thinking is not to understand...

The World was not made for us to think about it
(To think is to be eye-sick)
But for us to look at and to be in tune with it...

I have no philosophy: I have senses...
If I speak of Nature, it's not because I know what it is,
But because I love it, and that's why I love it,
Because the lover never knows what he loves,
Neither why he loves, nor what love is...
Loving is the eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not to think...


- Alberto Caeiro
[from "The keeper of Sheep"]

Translation by Fábio
[I've done my best!;)]