Yes, it’s the sunset. Slowly and distractedly I reach the end of the Rua da Alfândega and see, beyond the Terreiro do Paço,* a clear view of the sunless western sky. It’s a blue sky tinged green and tending towards light grey, and on the left, over the hills of the opposite bank, there’s a cowering mass of brownish to lifeless pink fog. An immense peace that I don’t have is coldly present in the abstract fall air. Not having it, I experience the feeble pleasure of imagining it exists. But in reality there is no peace nor lack of peace, just sky, a sky with every fading colour: light blue, blue-green, pale grey between green and blue, fuzzy hues of distant clouds that aren’t clouds, yellowishly darkened by an expiring red. And all of this is a vision that vanishes as soon as it occurs, a winged interlude between nothing and nothing that takes place on high, in shades of sky and grief, diffuse and indefinite.

I feel and forget. A nostalgia – the same one that everyone feels for everything – invades me as if it were an opium in the cold air. I have an inner, pseudo-ecstasy that comes from seeing.

Towards the ocean, where the sun’s ceasing becomes increasingly final, the light dies out in a livid white which is blued by greenish cold. In the air there’s a torpor of what is never achieved. The panorama of the sky loudly hushes.

In this moment when I’m bursting with feeling, I wish I had the gift of ruthless self-expression, the arbitrary whim of a style as my destiny. But no: this remote, lofty sky that’s disintegrating is everything right now, and the emotion I feel, which is many confused emotions bunched together, is merely this useless sky’s reflection in a lake in me – a lake secluded among steep rugged rocks, perfectly still, a kind of dead man’s gaze in which the heights distractedly observe themselves.

So many times, so many, like now, it has oppressed me to feel myself feel – to feel anguish just because it’s a feeling, restlessness because I’m here, nostalgia for something I’ve never known, the sunset of all emotions, myself yellowing, subdued to grey sadness in my external self-awareness.

Ah, who will save me from existing? It’s neither death nor life that I want: it’s that other thing shining in the depths of longing, like a possible diamond in a pit one can’t descend. It’s all the weight and sorrow of this real and impossible universe, of this sky like the flag of an unknown army, of these colours that are paling in the fictitious air, where the imaginary crescent of the moon, cut out of distance and insensibility, now emerges in a still, electric whiteness.

It all amounts to the absence of a true God, an absence that is the empty cadaver of the lofty heavens and the closed soul. Infinite prison – since you’re infinite, there’s no escaping you!