The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

  It’s still not autumn, there’s still no yellow of fallen leaves in the air, still none of that damp sadness that marks the weather when it’s on its way to becoming winter. But there is a hint of expected sadness – a sorrow dressed for the journey – in our hazy awareness of colours being smattered, of the wind’s different sound, of that ancient stillness which spreads in the falling night across the ineluctable presence of the universe.

  Yes, we will all pass, we will pass everything. Nothing will remain of the man who wore feelings and gloves, who talked about death and local politics. Just as one and the same light illumines the faces of saints and the gaiters of pedestrians, so too the same lack of light will cause darkness to engulf the nothing that remains of some having been saints and others having used gaiters. In the vast whirlwind where the whole world listlessly turns like so many dry leaves, kingdoms count no more than the dresses of seamstresses, and the pigtails of blonde girls go round in the same mortal whirl as the sceptres that stood for empires. All is nothing, and in the entrance hall to the Invisible, whose open door reveals merely a closed door beyond, all things dance, servants of the wind which churns them without hands – all things, big and small, which for us and in us formed the perceptible system of the universe. All is shadow mixed with dust, and there’s no voice but in the sounds made by what the wind lifts up or sweeps forward, nor silence except from what the wind abandons. Some of us, light leaves, and therefore less earthbound, ascend high in the hall’s whirl and fall farther away from the circle of the heavy. Others, almost invisible but still equally dust, different only if seen close up, form their own layer in the whirlwind. Still others, tree trunks in miniature, are dragged around and come to a halt here and there. One day, when everything is finally and fully revealed, that other door will open and all that we were – rubbish of stars and souls – will be swept outside the house, so that what exists can start over.

  My heart hurts me like a foreign body. My brain sleeps all that I feel. Yes, it’s the beginning of autumn which brings to the air and to my soul that unsmiling light whose lifeless yellow tinges the irregular, rounded edges of the sunset’s several clouds. Yes, it’s the beginning of autumn and the clear awareness, in the limpid hour, of the anonymous inadequacy of everything. Autumn, yes, autumn, the one that’s here or that’s yet to come, and the foretasted weariness of all acts, the foretasted disillusion of all dreams. What can I hope for and where would it come from? Already, in what I think of myself, I’m there among the leaves and dust of the entrance hall, in the meaningless orbit of nothing at all, making sounds of life on the clean flagstones gilded by the last rays of a sun setting I don’t know where.

  All that I’ve thought, all that I’ve dreamed, all that I have or haven’t done – all will go in autumn, like used matches strewn over the floor and pointing various ways, or papers crumpled into fake balls, or the great empires, all religions, the philosophies that the drowsy children of the abyss invented for sport. All that constituted my soul, from my lofty ambitions to my humble rented room, from the gods I had to the boss – Senhor Vasques – that I also had, all will go in autumn, all in autumn, in the tender indifference of autumn. All in autumn, yes, all in autumn.

  203

  We don’t even know if what ends with daylight terminates in us as useless grief, or if we are just an illusion among shadows, and reality just this vast silence without wild ducks that falls over the lakes where straight and stiff reeds swoon. We know nothing. Gone is the memory of the stories we heard as children, now so much seaweed; still to come is the tenderness of future skies, a breeze in which imprecision slowly opens into stars. The votive lamp flickers uncertainly in the abandoned temple, the ponds of deserted villas stagnate in the sun, the name once carved into the tree now means nothing, and the privileges of the unknown have been blown over the roads like torn-up paper, stopping only when some object blocked their way. Others will lean out the same window as the rest; those who have forgotten the evil shadow will keep sleeping, longing for the sun they never had; and I, venturing without acting, will end without regret amid soggy reeds, covered with mud from the nearby river and from my sluggish weariness, under vast autumn evenings in some impossible distance. And through it all, behind my daydream, I’ll feel my soul like a whistle of stark anxiety, a pure and shrill howl, useless in the world’s darkness.

  204

  Clouds… Today I’m conscious of the sky, but there are days when I just feel it and don’t look at it, when I just live in the city and not in the world of nature that includes it. Clouds… Today they are the main reality, worrying me as if an overcast sky were one of the imminent dangers of my destiny. Clouds… They pass from the sea to the Castle, from west to east, in a scattered and naked tumult: white when they raggedly proceed at the forefront of who knows what; half-black when they linger, waiting for the purring wind to blow them away; and black with a dirty whiteness when – as if wishing to stay – they darken with their arrival more than with their shadow the illusory space opened up by the streets between the impassable rows of buildings.

  Clouds… I exist without knowing it and will die without wanting to. I’m the gap between what I am and am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me, the fleshly and abstract average of things that are nothing, I being likewise nothing. Clouds… Such disquiet when I feel, such discomfort when I think, such futility when I desire! Clouds… They’re still passing, some of them so huge it seems they’ll fill the whole sky (though the buildings prevent us from seeing if they’re really as large as they appear), while others are of indefinite size, being perhaps two together or one that’s going to split in two, meaningless in the heights of the exhausted sky, and still others are small, as if they were playthings of powerful beings, odd-shaped balls of some absurd game and now placed to one side of the sky, in cold isolation.

  Clouds… I question myself and don’t know me. Nothing I’ve done has been useful, and nothing I do will be any different. I’ve wasted part of my life in confusedly interpreting nothing at all, and the rest of it in writing these verses in prose for my incommunicable sensations, which is how I make the unknown universe mine. I’m objectively and subjectively sick of myself. I’m sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything. Clouds… They’re everything: disintegrated fragments of atmosphere, the only real things today between the worthless earth and the non-existent sky, indescribable tatters of the tedium I ascribe to them, mist condensed into colourless threats, dirty wads of cotton from a hospital without walls. Clouds… They’re like me, a ravaged passage between sky and earth, at the mercy of an invisible impulse, thundering or not thundering, whitely giving joy or blackly spreading gloom, stray fictions in the gap, far from the earth’s noise but without the sky’s peace. Clouds… They continue to pass, passing always, they will always continue, in a discontinuous rolling of dull-coloured skeins, in a scattered prolongation of false, broken sky.

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  The day’s fluid departure ends in exhausted purples. No one would be able to say who I am, nor know who I’ve been. I came down from the unknown mountain to the unknown valley, and in the languid evening my steps were tracks left in the woods’ clearings. Everyone I loved had forgotten me in the shade. No one knew when the last boat was. The post office had no information about the letter that nobody would ever write.

  But it was all false. They told none of the stories that nobody told them, and no one knows anything for sure about the one who departed long ago, placing his hope in the false voyage, son of the fog and indecision to come. I have a name among those who tarry, and that name is shadow, like everything.

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  FOREST

  Ah, but not even the alcove was genuine – it was the old alcove of my lost childhood! It withdrew like a fog, passing materially through the white walls of my real room, which emerged from the shadows distinct and smaller, like life and the day, like the creaking of the wagon and the faint sound of the whip that puts muscles for standin
g up into the prone body of the tired animal.

  207

  How many things that we consider right or true are merely the vestiges of our dreams, the sleepwalking figures of our incomprehension! Does anyone know what’s right or true? How many things we consider beautiful are merely the fashion of the day, the fiction of their time and place? How many things we consider ours are utterly foreign to our blood, we being merely their perfect mirrors or transparent wrappers!

  The more I meditate on our capacity for self-deception, the more my certainties crumble, slipping through my fingers as fine sand. And when this meditation becomes a feeling that clouds my mind, then the whole world appears to me as a mist made of shadows, a twilight of edges and corners, a fiction of the interlude,* a dawn that never becomes morning. Everything transforms into a dead absolute of itself, into a stagnation of details. And even my senses, to where I transfer my meditation in order to forget it, are a kind of slumber, something remote and derivative, an in-betweenness, variation, by-products of shadows and confusion.

  In times like these – when I could readily understand ascetics and recluses, were I able to understand how anyone can make an effort on behalf of absolute ends or subscribe to a creed that might produce an effort – I would create, if I could, a full-fledged aesthetics of despair, an inner rhythm like a crib’s rocking, filtered by the night’s caresses in other, far-flung homelands.

  Today, at different times, I ran into two friends who’d had a fight. Each one told me his version of why they’d fought. Each one told me the truth. Each one gave me his reasons. They were both right. They were both absolutely right. It’s not that one of them saw it one way and the other another way, or that one saw one side of what happened and the other a different side. No: each one saw things exactly as they’d happened, each one saw them according to the same criterion, but each one saw something different, and so each one was right.

  I was baffled by this dual existence of truth.

  208

  Just as, whether we know it or not, we all have a metaphysics, so too, whether we like it or not, we all have a morality. I have a very simple morality: not to do good or evil to anyone. Not to do evil, because it seems only fair that others enjoy the same right I demand for myself – not to be disturbed – and also because I think that the world doesn’t need more than the natural evils it already has. All of us in this world are living on board a ship that is sailing from one unknown port to another, and we should treat each other with a traveller’s cordiality. Not to do good, because I don’t know what good is, nor even if I do it when I think I do. How do I know what evils I generate if I give a beggar money? How do I know what evils I produce if I teach or instruct? Not knowing, I refrain. And besides, I think that to help or clarify is, in a certain way, to commit the evil of interfering in the lives of others. Kindness depends on a whim of our mood, and we have no right to make others the victims of our whims, however humane or kind-hearted they may be. Good deeds are impositions; that’s why I categorically abhor them.

  If, for moral reasons, I don’t do good to others, neither do I expect others to do good to me. When I get sick, what I hate most is if someone should feel obliged to take care of me, something I’d loathe doing for another. I’ve never visited a sick friend. And whenever I’ve been sick and had visitors, I’ve always felt their presence as a bother, an insult, an unwarranted violation of my wilful privacy. I don’t like people to give me things, because it seems like they’re obligating me to give something in return – to them or to others, it’s all the same.

  I’m highly sociable in a highly negative way. I’m inoffensiveness incarnate. But I’m no more than this, I don’t want to be more than this, I can’t be more than this. For everything that exists I feel a visual affection, an intellectual fondness – nothing in the heart. I have faith in nothing, hope in nothing, charity for nothing. I’m nauseated and outraged by the sincere souls of all sincerities and by the mystics of all mysticisms, or rather, by the sincerities of all sincere souls and the mysticisms of all mystics. This nausea is almost physical when the mysticisms are active – when they try to convince other people, meddle with their wills, discover the truth, or reform the world.

  I consider myself fortunate for no longer having family, as it relieves me of the obligation to love someone, which I would surely find burdensome. Any nostalgia I feel is literary. I remember my childhood with tears, but they’re rhythmic tears, in which prose is already being formed. I remember it as something external, and it comes back to me through external things; I remember only external things. It’s not the stillness of evenings in the country that endears me to the childhood I spent there, it’s the way the table was set for tea, it’s the way the furniture was arranged in the room, it’s the faces and physical gestures of the people. I feel nostalgia for scenes. Thus someone else’s childhood can move me as much as my own; both are purely visual phenomena from a past I’m unable to fathom, and my perception of them is literary. They move me, yes, but because I see them, not because I remember them.

  I’ve never loved anyone. The most that I’ve loved are my sensations – states of conscious seeing, impressions gathered by intently hearing, and aromas through which the modesty of the outer world speaks to me of things from the past (so easily remembered by their smells), giving me a reality and an emotion that go beyond the simple fact of bread being baked inside the bakery, as on that remote afternoon when I was coming back from the funeral of my uncle who so loved me, and I felt a kind of sweet relief about I’m not sure what.

  This is my morality, or metaphysics, or me: passer-by of everything, even of my own soul, I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing – just an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a fallen sentient mirror reflecting the world’s diversity. I don’t know if I’m happy this way. Nor do I care.

  209

  To join in or collaborate or act with others is a metaphysically morbid impulse. The soul conferred on the individual shouldn’t be lent out to its relations with others. The divine fact of existing shouldn’t be surrendered to the satanic fact of coexisting.

  When I act with others, there’s at least one thing I lose – acting alone.

  When I participate, although it seems that I’m expanding, I’m limiting myself. To associate is to die. Only my consciousness of myself is real for me; other people are hazy phenomena in this consciousness, and it would be morbid to attribute very much reality to them.

  Children, who want at all costs to have their way, are closest to God, for they want to exist.

  As adults our life is reduced to giving alms to others and receiving them in return. We squander our personalities in orgies of coexistence.

  Every spoken word double-crosses us. The only tolerable form of communication is the written word, since it isn’t a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.

  To explain is to disbelieve. Every philosophy is a diplomacy dressed up as eternity..... Like diplomacy, it has no real substance, existing not in its own right but completely and utterly on behalf of some objective.

  The only noble destiny for a writer who publishes is to be denied a celebrity he deserves. But the truly noble destiny belongs to the writer who doesn’t publish. Not who doesn’t write, for then he wouldn’t be a writer. I mean the writer in whose nature it is to write, but whose spiritual temperament prevents him from showing what he writes.

  To write is to objectify dreams, to create an outer world as a material reward [?] of our nature as creators. To publish is to give this outer world to others; but what for, if the outer world common to us and to them is the ‘real’ outer world, the one made of visible and tangible matter? What do others have to do with the universe that’s in me?

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  AESTHETICS OF DISCOURAGEMENT

  To publish – the socialization of one’s self. A vile necessity! But still not a real act, since it’s the publisher who makes money, the printer who produces. It at least has the merit of
being incoherent.

  When a man reaches the age of lucidity, one of his main concerns is to actively and thoughtfully shape himself into the image and likeness of his ideal. Since inertia is the ideal that best embodies the logic of our soul’s aristocratic attitude vis-à-vis the bustle and clamour of the modern world, our Ideal should be the Inert, the Inactive. Futile? Perhaps. But this will only trouble those who feel attracted to futility.

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  Enthusiasm is a vulgarity.

  To give expression to enthusiasm is, above all else, to violate the rights of our insincerity.

  We never know when we’re sincere. Perhaps we never are. And even if we’re sincere about something today, tomorrow we may be sincere about its complete opposite.

  I myself have never had convictions. I’ve always had impressions. I could never hate a land in which I’d seen a scandalous sunset.

  We externalize impressions not so much because we have them but to convince ourselves that we do.

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  To have opinions is to sell out to yourself. To have no opinion is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.

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  Everything slips away from me. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and all it contains, my personality: it all slips away. I constantly feel that I was someone different, that a different I felt, that a different I thought. I’m watching a play with a different, unfamiliar setting, and what I’m watching is me.