Great library finds!

Had a whole day to waste yesterday so I bagged these from my all-time fave hangout:

1. Collected Novellas - by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2. Poems of Fernando Pessoa
3. How to travel with a salmon - by Umberto Eco
4. The House in the Sand - by Pablo Neruda

I'd wanted to find 'Love in the time of cholera' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, having heard great reviews about it, but the library didn't have it, so i got his collected novellas instead. Hope it'd be good.
I've been feeling abit divided and confused the last few days, perhaps that's what's responsible for making me attempt reading 2 books at once; the Pessoa poems and Umberto Eco's writings. Now, here's a useful tip: when you're already as addle-brained as me, attempting to read 2 books at once is not likely to help illuminate the state of your mind. Anyway, I've given hoping that I will ever get there, so I'm just enjoying my present state of confusion or trying to live with it. Despite things being the way they are, I'm enjoying Eco's quirky sense of humour and often strange observations of his travels and the quirks that comes from travelling or living in a strange country.

Poems of Fernando Pessoa, I chose this book because I'm quite easily persuaded by hard-sell reviews of the book on the back cover. This one claims Pessoa to be one of the very great poets of the 20th century..."one of the fascinating figures of all literature, with his manifold identities, his amazing audacities, his brilliance and his shyness. One of the great originals of the European poetry of the first part of this century and has been one of the last poets of comparable stature, in the European languages, to become known in English. Fernando Pessoa is the least known of the masters of 20th century poetry."

From the Highest Window of my House

From the highest window of my house
With a white handkerchief I say goodbye
To my poems leaving for humanity.

And I’m neither happy or sad.
That’s the destiny of poems.
I wrote them and I should show them to everybody
Because I can’t do any different,
Like a flower can’t hide its color,
Or a river hide its flowing,
Or a tree hide that it gives fruit.

There they are, going away like in a stagecoach
And without wanting to I feel sad
Like a pain in my body.

Who knows who’ll read them?
Who knows whose hands they’ll go to?

Flower, my destiny plucked me for their eyes.
Tree, they picked my fruit for their mouths.
River, my water’s destiny was to not stay with me.
I give in and feel almost happy,
Almost happy like someone tired of feeling sad.

Go, go from me!
A tree dies and stays, scattered throughout Nature.
A flower withers and its dust endures forever.
A river runs and flows into the sea and its water will always be what it was.

I pass and I stay, like the Universe.

(extracted from - Poems of Fernando Pessoa)