“Civilization consists in giving something a name that doesn’t belong to it and then dreaming over the result. And the false name joined to the true dream does create a new reality. The object does change into something else, because we make it change. We manufacture realities. The raw material remains the same, but our art gives it a form that makes it into something not the same. A pinewood table is still pinewood, but it’s also a table. We sit at the table, not at the pinewood.”
—Fernando Pessoa, from chapter 66 “With a Shrug” in The Book of Disquiet, edited and translated by Richard Zenith (Penguin Modern Classics, 2002)
