The more I contemplate the spectacle of the world and the ever-changing state of things, the more profoundly I’m convinced of the inherent fiction of everything, of the false importance exhibited by all realities. And in this contemplation (which has occurred to all thinking souls at one time or another), the colourful parade of customs and fashions, the complex path of civilizations and progress, the grandiose commotion of empires and cultures – all of this strikes me as a myth and a fiction, dreamed among shadows and ruins.

—Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet.

I've been looking at this one from the front the sides, the back, trying to find an angle from which to disagree with it. I can't. I don't.

Myself, I don't think it's all a fiction. No. It's right there. But a dream? A shadow? Sure. The world as an image in a distorted mirror. All of the things that we see, from a certain point of view, processed through our own understanding and bias. But that's the fiction of seeing, not of being.

There's the fiction of acting or projecting. Hmm. If enough of us do that—outright making things up or just putting on a face—then the real is eroded, replaced by a brace of fictions. Maybe that's the meaning. Every day a new composite of not real this and not real that—every day forever and ever.