“The man of action”

“The world belongs to those who don’t feel,” says Bernardo Soares:


Fernando Pessoa, from text 303, The Book of Disquiet, trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2003).

When I read this passage a few weeks ago, I thought of a certain politician who seems to regard other people as things. This morning I’m seeing it in a new way.

Simone Weil called the Iliad the poem of force, force being that which turns a human being into a thing. Pessoa’s man of action is the figure of force, one who treats people as things.

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