I Got Off the Train by Fernando Pessoa

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

I got off the train And said goodbye to the man I’d met. We’d been together for eighteen hours And had a pleasant conversation, Fellowship in the journey, And I was sorry to get off, sorry to leave This chance friend whose name I never learned. I felt my eyes water with tears . . . Every farewell is a death. Yes, every farewell is a death. In the train we call life We are all chance events in one another’s lives And we all feel sorry when it is time to get off. All that is human moves me, because I am a man. All that is human moves me, not because I have an affinity With human ideas or human doctrines But because of my infinite fellowship with humanity itself. The maid who hated to go, Crying with nostalgia For the house where she’d been mistreated . . . All of this, inside my heart, is death and the world’s sadness. All of this lives, because it dies, inside my heart. And my heart is a little larger than the entire universe.

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