“Look: Tomorrow my best, my most intimate friend is going to Paris to stay. Aunt Anica (take a look at her letter) in all likelihood is soon going off to Switzerland with her daughter, who’s married now. Another one is going to Galicia for a long time. My second-best friend is moving to Porto. So in my human environment everything is organizing (or disorganizing) itself to drift away, and I don’t know if it’s to isolate me or to lead me to another path I cannot as yet see. Even the fact that I am going to publish a book is going to change my life. I am losing something – being unpublished. And so changing for the better, because change is bad, is always changing for the worse. And losing a defect or a deficiency or a negation is always losing something. Imagine Mother not living with her painful, daily feelings, a creature who is so sensitive!”

(Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (trans. Alfred Mac Adam), from fragment 2)