"At first, it's unfamiliar, then it strikes root"
About this Quote
Unfamiliarity is Pessoa's preferred doorway: not a glitch in perception but the first stage of belonging. "At first, it's unfamiliar" sets a cool, observational tempo, as if the speaker is watching some new idea, city, love, or self arrive with a slight delay. Then comes the turn: "it strikes root". The phrasing is botanical and abrupt, swapping the mind's unease for the body's certainty. Rooting is not a decision; it's a quiet takeover.
Pessoa, the master of divided selves, is rarely interested in epiphanies that resolve neatly. His heteronyms and masks treat identity as something you try on until, disturbingly, it starts to fit. The subtext here is that the things that end up defining us rarely enter with fanfare. They come as oddness, as dissonance, as a foreign rhythm in your days. You don't fully recognize them until they're already entangled with your habits and language.
The line also hints at a more unsettling possibility: what takes root isn't always chosen, or even wanted. Modernity, with its migrations, new technologies, political moods, and urban loneliness, plants itself the same way. Pessoa wrote from early 20th-century Lisbon, a city absorbing change while still haunted by nostalgia. The quote captures that psychological lag: the self notices the strange late, and only later understands it has been colonized.
It works because it's compressed and patient. No moral, no self-help uplift. Just a two-beat truth about how the unfamiliar becomes fate.
Pessoa, the master of divided selves, is rarely interested in epiphanies that resolve neatly. His heteronyms and masks treat identity as something you try on until, disturbingly, it starts to fit. The subtext here is that the things that end up defining us rarely enter with fanfare. They come as oddness, as dissonance, as a foreign rhythm in your days. You don't fully recognize them until they're already entangled with your habits and language.
The line also hints at a more unsettling possibility: what takes root isn't always chosen, or even wanted. Modernity, with its migrations, new technologies, political moods, and urban loneliness, plants itself the same way. Pessoa wrote from early 20th-century Lisbon, a city absorbing change while still haunted by nostalgia. The quote captures that psychological lag: the self notices the strange late, and only later understands it has been colonized.
It works because it's compressed and patient. No moral, no self-help uplift. Just a two-beat truth about how the unfamiliar becomes fate.
Quote Details
| Topic | New Beginnings |
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