Crossing the divide: A website about Literature, Art & Philosophy by Venkat Ramanan

My essay  The Exile of Pessoa & Camus  was published in  The Punch Magazine  in May 2019 - and here is the  link. Poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) describes himself as someone who is an “exile from the country of which he had always considered himself a citizen…” Is it apposite to associate exile with someone who — apart from spending nine years in South Africa during his youth — essentially never stirred out of his native Portugal? This essay examines this question by comparing Pessoa to another famous exile, Albert Camus.

This is perhaps the irony of life: we would like our lives to last as long as possible: but how do we live with its exhausting continuity? M ost of us have a Janus-like approach to the temporality of our lives: we have one eye on the past and one on the future with no time for the present. With the past, we have this persistent urge to dissect it and in the process are swayed by a whole gamut of feelings and emotions. We recall with evident pleasure some of these past events. Some of us are so proud of our journey so far and our previous ports of call – and confident that others will wish to celebrate this voyage and emulate it even – that we publish memoirs or at least ask others peep into our private lives via things like social media. And we may regret too that some events had not happened and attempt to suppress these memories whenever they try to escape their hiding places in our minds. In his magnificent novel, The Towers of Silence , Paul Scott uses the tin-trunk that M...