During an adolescence of academic excellence at Durban High School, likewise acquainting himself with what would be a lifelong wellspring of isolation, even winning various school prizes, Pessoa’s most formative literary experiences occurred in English, in the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Carlyle, Browning, of course, Keats, a veritable brother, long lost in the ether. This cultivation of a second language set the course for his career as a commercial correspondent, translating documents from Portuguese to English in various firms throughout Lisbon, where he would return to complete university in 1905, thus beginning his affair with the city of his birth.

His life as a poet is well documented. Lesser known is the fateful day, 29 March 1931, his singular unconsummated romance with secretary Ophélia Queiroz came to a terminal end, on account of Pessoa’s recurring bouts of perceived madness, once remarking, ‘One of my mental complications—horrible beyond words—is a fear of insanity, which itself is insanity,’ and his preoccupation with the ‘hopeful darkness’ of the occult, namely, alchemy, in his words, ‘the hardest and most perfect path of all, since it involves a transmutation of the very personality that prepares it.’ Initiation, he claimed, entailed belonging ‘to no Initiatic Order.’

Had his effort to secure a permanent librarian position at the Archive-Museum in Cascais, a position unlikely to encroach upon his forays into the occluded sciences, had his application been successful at precisely this very moment in his life, perhaps the withdrawal, the complete abandonment of society, could have been averted. His madness culminated in a retreat underground, searching for an unknown word, the epitome of a poetic predicament, one could say, this search for a paradoxical word, by turns vaguely comprehensible, this word, of, by, for, the universe.

Following the staggering circumstances of his death, fire engulfing a basement laboratory at Rua do Alecrim 40-42, a street-level location popularly in our footpath, and yet, how could we have known.