Saramago, Pessoa


Saramago's _The Year of the Death of Ricardo
Reis_, etc.

so, three "moments" so far.

1. Which is it? Over the great nakedness of truth, the diaphonous
cloak of imagination or Over the great nakedness of imagination, the
diaphonous cloak of truth?

2. When he "meets" dead Pessoa, he's told about death: "the usual period
(of death) is nine months, the same length of time we spend in our
mother's womb...Before we are born no one can see us yet they think
about us every day, after we are dead they cannot see us any longer and
every day they go on forgetting us a little more...

3. "You wrote yourself that a poet is someone who pretends. We utter
such intuitions without knowing how we arrive at them...is it the poet
who pretends to be a man or a man who pretends to be a poet."....?

(that's only within the first 100 pages...)