Travis Hallenbeck

Both poems by Fernando Pessoa are about noticing the paradox of human life. However you look at life, it is a result of the greatest force in the universe, equally apt to be known or unknown for now. But, humans face a special predicament in their lives as a result of individual differentiation and capacity for language. Since individual human personalities, intricately communicated to other humans, can be so strange and seem quite rare in regard to their lifespan, humanity grasps for a structure to give superficial meaning to individual lives. However, Fernando Pessoa understood that there is no metaphysical meaning specifically to human life. To him, humans, like all other lifeforms and even non-lifeforms, are equally meaningful in the sense that they exist and possibly experience for reasons innately tied to whatever the universe came from or is. The value of human life is that it takes place in a context.

In "The startling reality of things", Fernando Pessoa takes great joy in this realization. Every experience he has, facing a day, writing poems, looking at a stone, hearing the wind blow, thinking about people, he places in context of his existence, and that helps him to see how he is a part of the world rather than seperate from it.

In "We Took the Town After a Heavy Bombing", Fernando Pessoa looks at human life in the most fragile form, that of a child horribly mangled and killed accidentally by the abstract practicality of his own kind. In this form, humanity is most desperate for reconciliation of meaninglessness. Here, it is harder for Fernando Pessoa to have any resolve about whether the future will make any sense if part of it was so senselessly removed. But, he realizes, at least, that it makes perfect sense for him to be distraught at this point in context of him being human.