the portuguese poet and the fallen can

An article on The Guardian about memorable but forgotten books led me to The Book Of Disquiet by Portuguese wordsmith Fernando Pessoa. Having a thin affinity for Portuguese culture and after perusing the summary, I gravitated towards the work. I visited, for the first time, the brand new complex that is the downtown central library of San Diego. I'm not far into the book. Pessoa was clearly a depressed man. In some books, particularly in Modern Library publications, they include a chronology of the author's life that details significant personal and contemporaneous historical events. A cursory glance of this chronology reveals the life of a man who lived in artistically vibrant times. He lived the death of Nietzsche, the births of Dalí and Jean-Paul Sartre. He lived the publications of Marcel Proust's A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu and James Joyce's A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man and Ulysses. He was breathing when Proust stopped breathing. He was breathing and seeing the sky and eating when Faulkner was writing, when Lenin died, Kafka... He was a human when Hitler became chancellor of Germany. In the chronology of his life it says, "1933: February: Experiences severe depression. [paragraph] Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany." A man in Lisbon, Portugal feeling and not feeling at the mercy of his miswired brain.
He pretended to be other people and tried hard to have other peoples' thoughts. He seems to be a man who loved the idea of dreaming but was constantly oppressed by the weight of reality. He felt like a foreigner in his homeland. But he loved his native language, and the majesty of words.

"To feel everything in all ways; to know how to think with emotions and to feel with intellect; not to desire much except through imagination; to suffer coquettishly; to see clearly in order to write properly; to know myself through pretending and guile; to become a naturalized citizen, a different one, but with all the appropriate documents; in sum, to use within me all sensations, peeling them down to the limit, but wrapping them all up again and putting them on the counter just as that cashier I'm watching from here is doing with the small cans of a new brand of shoe polish.
"All these ideals, possible or impossible, now are ended. I have reality before me --- it isn't even the cashier, it's his hand (I don't see him), the absurd tentacle of a soul with a family and a destiny who gesticulates like a spider picking things up and putting them down.
"And one of his cans fell down, just like everyone else's Destiny."