My humble attempt to say at least who I am, to record like a machine of nerves the slightest impressions of my subjective and ultra-sensitive life—this was all emptied like a bucket that got knocked over, and it poured across the ground like the water of everything. I fashioned myself out of false colors, and the result is an attic made out to be an empire. My heart, out of which I spun the great events of prose I lived, seems to me today—in these pages written long ago and reread now with a different soul—like a water pump on a homestead, instinctively installed and pressed into service.

FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet