'Navegar é preciso; viver não é preciso': the Impossible Journeys of Kierkegaard and Pessoa

The task of this essay is to analyse and compare the impossible journeys of Søren Kierkegaard and Fernando Pessoa as pioneers of a new form of exploration – the voyage in the interiority of the self. They appropriate many of the motifs of the traditional explorer, engaging in espionage, disguise, daring, shipwrecks and bordering on madness, to forge an authorship exploding into multiplicity in their voyage of the human self. The title - “Navegar é preciso; viver não é preciso” (“to sail is necessary; to live is not’) - is a term borrowed by Pessoa from the Portuguese navigators of the fifteenth century and the fourteenth century poet Plutarch, now transformed into an interior journey. Kierkegaard and Pessoa are joined together as paradoxical, polyphonic writers for paradoxical times in coming to distrust the onslaught and disintegration of modernity as well as being its most profound and enduring exponents, opening up new forms of narrative in the journey of the elusive self as subject.