Yes, if I had been rich, protected, brushed, ornamental, I wouldn’t even have been this brief episode of pretty paper amid bread crumbs; I would have remained on a plate of the kind “No, thank you very much,” and I would have taken myself to the sideboard to grow old. Thus, rejected after they’d eaten my practical core, I go with the dust that remains of Christ’s body to the trash bin, and I don’t even imagine what happens next, and among what stars; but it’s always a matter of going on.

— Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet