This is a direct translation of the article that originally appeared in Arabic.
There is a small moment known to those who choose solitude of their own accord: a moment when the screen goes dark, and the sound of the city softens, and silence appears as a new space inside the room, as if the walls had suddenly expanded. Breathing slows, the rhythm calms, and simple sounds emerge: a clock, a distant footstep, the rustle of a curtain. The outer scene remains unchanged, yet the feeling inside shifts: a deeper layer of awareness begins to move, receiving this opening with breadth and clarity, stepping out of the crowd of thoughts and allowing accumulated fatigue to finally speak, before the heart settles back into place.
At that very moment, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa appears as an unexpected companion. His presence is understandable, for he wrote of solitude from within it. He lived it as an everyday room, then turned it into a lens through which he observed the self and the world, catching the faintest tremors of feeling before they faded.
Pessoa presents solitude as a “space” for the self, where the voice fractures and multiplies. He writes as if more than one person lives within him, each with a distinct tone and mood, as if the page were a table of dialogue where visions sit side by side and disagree. On the other shore, Sufism offers a meaning close to common human intuition, what we may call “luminous solitude”: a retreat that calms the inner self, purifies it, and brings its voices into order, leaving the individual lighter and more sincere, better able to return to others with a clear mind and a steadier heart.
In Pessoa’s experience, solitude appears as a fullness that overflows even in silence. Solitude, in his view, opens the door to more than one voice and more than one possibility, making the interior vast enough to accommodate contradiction and astonishment at once.
By contrast, luminous solitude in Sufism proposes another form of aloneness: a lightness born from disciplining inner noise and organising the movement of the heart until silence becomes a clear energy rather than an ambiguous void. Between these two tendencies, solitude sometimes appears as a small daily habit: a moment of regained attention and a skill that protects awareness from dispersal, returning the individual to himself with practical clarity while maintaining a living and flexible connection to the world.
Pessoa’s solitude slips from any attempt to grasp it from a single angle. Whenever one approaches its meaning, that meaning seems to open another door. Solitude becomes a room whose architecture shifts from within. It expands, contracts, then expands again according to the pulse of thought. In this way, solitude in his world becomes a fullness disguised as silence: a silence that functions like a calm surface beneath which constant movement unfolds, an inner life that never ceases and a desire to rename things again and again.
In The Book of Disquiet (Livro do Desassossego), Bernardo Soares needs only the details of an ordinary day to feel either the heaviness or the lightness of life: an office, a street, a room. Then the interior begins to expand, as though it had finally drawn breath. Soares writes like someone observing himself from a short distance, for the self in his world shifts rapidly and seldom settles into one form.
Disquiet takes on the shape of a permanent dwelling, a way of seeing that rearranges things. Daily detail becomes the material for long contemplation, and the silent moment becomes the womb of a new voice. Solitude works here like a delicate magnifying instrument: it leaves reality almost unchanged yet amplifies its impact inside until the interior becomes the truest stage, the most densely inhabited and most present.
Then comes the poem Tobacco Shop (Tabacaria) by Álvaro de Campos, like a gentle slap. The poem appears simple in its scene: a window, a street, a tobacco shop, a man looking out. Yet what occurs behind this frame becomes a silent explosion, because solitude here turns into an immediate awareness of the fragility of feeling and the excess of consciousness. Campos is fully present in the world, yet the distance between him and things widens.
Solitude becomes an inner separation rather than a physical withdrawal: a sharp vision with unsettling clarity, a pause before life, as though it passes a step away before slipping from reach. This solitude multiplies its owner: thoughts proliferate, possibilities crowd together, and ways of reading a single moment multiply until the moment becomes larger than the capacity to bear it and heavier than can be carried easily.
Pessoa writes solitude and then grants it faces that walk across the page, as though a single voice were too narrow to bear the burden of life. Multiple names emerge as a literary way of living: one writer writes with near-natural coolness, another with burning nerves, a third with a simplicity resembling awakening. Each possesses a different angle of vision and rhythm of feeling. This multiplicity gives solitude its true texture; the solitude of a being who multiplies himself in order to endure himself, then finds in that multiplication a form of truth.
At this point, the concept of “polyphony” articulated by Mikhail Bakhtin emerges with striking clarity: the text becomes a field where multiple voices coexist, each retaining its individuality and pushing meaning into motion rather than stillness. With Pessoa, that field expands beyond the limits of the novel and settles within the writer himself, where meaning disperses across layers of perception and sensation and visions intertwine without the need for a single governing voice.
