Crossings With Pessoa (June25)

Easy on the girl serving, nervous with a white guy particularly. Tip-toe smiling & nodding. Those chairs are too hard honey, sorry. Bench seat always the preference at Crossings, pillow behind making a fair perch, especially when there’s no managerial Christian table within earshot. Where in the heck do they source those blue striped shirts in the name of the Lord?! Pearl ear-ring with the bob cut was the fem. counterpart for these soldiers. Don’t show a long or tight face whatever you do. Charitable & kindly. Show ‘em how it’s done, Buster… The archbishop (a pal probably)... the spiritual whatever. Go with the flow, easy does it. Nothing to do with you. Ah, made the dear smile, immediately understood the good sense in declining sugar and replacing it at the counter, no sense wasting. Sores around the mouth from picking. A very good initiative certainly; they did the same with the waiting staff at Hanis at the library, customers often taken unawares needing time to cotton on. Year or two ago they were up the other end near the Art Museum with more dressing up, table-cloths, &etc. Oh shiite! Bloke starting in with social responsibility, Eco. grad initially cutting teeth at City Bank CAL and no doubt finding that soulless, only for the faint-hearted. Giving out grants was more in his line; corporate responsibility... Never occurred to him how that spruiking accent might grate, not in a million years. Do they think in Singapore they’re on safe ground?... In the garden of St. Pete & Paolo’s just now a question for Gabby what the INRI acronym above the marble crucifixion might denote. Rather better that than the filigree trumpet-blowing angels in the gardens of the cathedral a stone’s throw away. Man oh man!... Pessoa certainly was the perfect companion within these walls, a providential choice. Excellent purchase no regrets, almost every page a spurt of energy and insight of some kind. The Gods Grant Nothing More Than Life; Ah, you believers in Christs and Marys; From Here, With No Other Apollo Than Apollo: 

         “....far from Christian sensuality
         May the chaste calm of ancient beauty
         Restore to us the ancient
         Feeling of life.”
Fernando! Justly were you celebrated in royal style by the old Swedish choristers. A dozen years ago puzzling finding you in the list of Harold Bloom, wondering what in the heck a complete unknown like that could be doing among the elect. Blue-Striped interviewee gives Pearl & the Blue-Striped co-interviewer topmost sequence: vision first and foremost; unity of purpose; decisiveness... and trala-di-da. Later chap bemoans the common problem of divisions & sects: people wanting to grow the organisation, while others want to tear it down. The trials of doing good and delivering outcomes.

NB. Fernando Pessoa & Co., transl. by Richard Zenith; pp. 102 – 107