I just read the following passage in Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. I was fascinated by how much it reminded me of Artaud’s idea of cruelty: that is, the cruelty of an implacable natural force that, once aware of it, shatters our illusions of control and knowability. Of course, in our culture such ideas are rapidly rejected, as we desperately want to stay in the shallow dream that lets us believe we can know and shape the world. And metaphysical cruelty? We prefer artificial kindness and vacuous hope.

“Metaphysical theories that can give us the momentary illusion that we’ve explained the unexplainable; moral theories that can fool us for an hour into thinking we finally know which of all the closed doors leads to virtue; political theories that convince us for a day that we’ve solved some problem, when there are no solvable problems except in mathematics… May our attitude towards life be summed up in this consciously futile activity, in this preoccupation that gives no pleasure but at least keeps us from feeling the presence of pain.

There’s no better sign that a civilization has reached its height than the awareness, in its members, of the futility of all effort, given that we are ruled by implacable laws, which nothing can repeal or obstruct. We may be slaves shackled to the whim of gods who are stronger than us, but they’re not any better, being subject- like us- to the iron hand of an abstract Fate, which is superior to justice and kindness, indifferent to good and evil.”