This chronicle by Fernando Pessoa about celebrity is both a philosophical meditation and a code of ethics. In his essay, whose title Vanitas is taken from Ecclesiastes, the poet Manuel de Freitas uses Pessoa’s text to make a claim about our age: ‘We live in a time when celebrity is almost invariably based on aesthetic misconceptions or crass promotional campaigns.’ ‘As for myself,’ he asserts, ‘now that I am a bit older than Fernando Pessoa, I am quite happy with the one or two hundred readers that closely follow my every book.’