"ten steps from my dream"

I went to the library today. Picked up a copy of The End Of The Affair by Graham Greene. Twelve pages in and it's good, albeit depressing. I read in the shade of a tree while the grass was being cut around me. Then I switched to Pessoa (who I can only read in small doses) and read the following passage multiple times:

"I have witnessed, incognito, the gradual death of my life, the slow wreck of everything I wanted to be. I can say, with a truth that doesn't need flowers to know it's dead, that there is nothing I've ever loved or in which I have invested even for a moment the dream of that moment that has not disintegrated under my window like a dust resembling stone fallen from a vase up on a high floor. It seems, even, that Destiny has always tried, first, to make me love or desire things it had arranged that I would see on the next day that I did not or would not have.
"Ironic spectator of myself, I still haven't lost the courage to witness life. And since I know, today, in advance of every vague hope, that it will be disillusioned, I suffer the special pleasure of enjoying my disillusionment with my hope... I am a somber strategist, who, having lost all battles, is already sketching out on his pad, and enjoying the plan, the details of his fatal retreat, on the evening before each new battle he fights.
"The destiny of not being able to desire without knowing that I shall have to not-have has persecuted me like a malignant being. If I see a nubile young girl's face, no matter how indifferent it may be, I have only a moment to imagine what it would be like if she were mine because it always happens that ten steps from my dream the girl meets the man I can see is her husband or lover. A romantic would make a tragedy of this; a stranger would sense it to be a comedy: I, however, mix the two things, since I am romantic in myself and strange to myself, and I turn the page to get to yet another irony.
"Some say that without hope life is impossible, others that even with hope life is empty. As far as I'm concerned, since today I neither hope nor despair, hope is a simple outdoor picture that includes me, and I attend it, as if it were a play without a plot made only to amuse the eyes-- a dance without connection, a shaking of leaves in the wind, clouds in which the sunlight changes colors, old strolls through streets at dusk in strange parts of the city.
"I am in very large measure the very prose I write. I unfold in sentences and paragraphs, I punctuate myself, and, in the unchained distribution of images, I wear the newspaper hats, the way children do when they play at being king; by making rhythm out of a series of words, I crown myself the way mad people do, with dried flowers that remain alive in my dreams...
"Within me I return to what I am even if that's nothing. And something like tears without weeping burn in my immobile eyes, something like an anguish I'd never had impels me harshly with a dry throat. But there, I don't know what I cried, if in fact I did cry, or why it was that I didn't cry. Fiction accompanies me like my own shadow. And what I want to do is sleep." - Fernando Pessoa

And then amidst the cutted scent of freshly conquered grass Graham Greene said to me: "What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love, I would be another man: I would never have lost love."

A failure walked back to his car and typed a journal entry into the largest cesspool mankind has ever created. Thoughts and feelings have lost all their value.

Trust... Truth... Love... just punchlines to jokes that get told over and over again.