The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

  So many times, so many, like now, it has oppressed me to feel myself feel – to feel anguish just because it’s a feeling, restlessness because I’m here, nostalgia for something I’ve never known, the sunset of all emotions, myself yellowing, subdued to grey sadness in my external self-awareness.

  Ah, who will save me from existing? It’s neither death nor life that I want: it’s that other thing shining in the depths of longing, like a possible diamond in a pit one can’t descend. It’s all the weight and sorrow of this real and impossible universe, of this sky like the flag of an unknown army, of these colours that are paling in the fictitious air, where the imaginary crescent of the moon, cut out of distance and insensibility, now emerges in a still, electric whiteness.

  It all amounts to the absence of a true God, an absence that is the empty cadaver of the lofty heavens and the closed soul. Infinite prison – since you’re infinite, there’s no escaping you!

  226

  Ah, what transcendental sensuousness when at night, walking along the city streets and staring from within my soul at the building façades, all the structural differences, the architectural details, the lit windows, the potted plants that make each balcony unique – yes, looking at all this, what instinctive joy I felt when to the lips of my consciousness came this shout of redemption. But none of this is real!

  227

  I prefer prose to poetry as an art form for two reasons, the first of which is purely personal: I have no choice, because I’m incapable of writing in verse. The second reason applies to everyone, however, and I don’t think it’s just a shadow or disguised form of the first. It’s worth looking at in some detail, for it touches on the essence of all art’s value.

  I consider poetry to be an intermediate stage between music and prose. Like music, poetry is bound by rhythmic laws, and even when these are not the strict laws of metre, they still exist as checks, constraints, automatic mechanisms of repression and censure. In prose we speak freely. We can incorporate musical rhythms, and still think. We can incorporate poetic rhythms, and yet remain outside them. An occasional poetic rhythm won’t disturb prose, but an occasional prose rhythm makes poetry fall down.

  Prose encompasses all art, in part because words contain the whole world, and in part because the untrammelled word contains every possibility for saying and thinking. In prose, through transposition, we’re able to render everything: colour and form, which painting can render only directly, in themselves, with no inner dimension; rhythm, which music likewise renders only directly, in itself, without a formal body, let alone that second body which is the idea; structure, which the architect must make out of given, hard, external things, and which we build with rhythms, hesitations, successions and fluidities; reality, which the sculptor has to leave in the world, with no aura of transubstantiation; and poetry, finally, to which the poet, like the initiate of a secret society, is the servant (albeit voluntary) of a discipline and a ritual.

  I’m convinced that in a perfect, civilized world there would be no other art but prose. We would let sunsets be sunsets, using art merely to understand them verbally, by conveying them in an intelligible music of colour. We wouldn’t sculpt bodies but let them keep for themselves their supple contours and soft warmth that we see and touch. We would build houses only to live in them, which is after all what they’re for. Poetry would be for children, to prepare them for prose, since poetry is obviously something infantile, mnemonic, elementary and auxiliary.

  Even what we might call the minor arts have their echoes in prose. There is prose that dances, sings and recites to itself. There are verbal rhythms with a sinuous choreography, in which the idea being expressed strips off its clothing with veritable and exemplary sensuality. And there are also, in prose, gestural subtleties carried out by a great actor, the Word, which rhythmically transforms into its bodily substance the impalpable mystery of the universe.

  228

  Everything is interconnected. My readings of classical authors, who never speak of sunsets, have made many sunsets intelligible to me, in all their colours. There is a relationship between syntactical competence, by which we distinguish the values of beings, sounds and shapes, and the capacity to perceive when the blue of the sky is actually green, and how much yellow is in the blue green of the sky.

  It comes down to the same thing – the capacity to distinguish and to discriminate. There is no enduring emotion without syntax. Immortality depends on the grammarians.

  229

  To read is to dream, guided by someone else’s hand. To read carelessly and distractedly is to let go of that hand. To be only superficially learned is the best way to read well and be profound.

  How shoddy and contemptible life is! Note that, for it to be shoddy and contemptible, all it takes is you not wanting it, it being given to you anyway, and nothing about it depending on your will or even on your illusion of your will.

  To die is to become completely other. That’s why suicide is a cowardice: it’s to surrender ourselves completely to life.

  230

  Art is a substitute for acting or living. If life is the wilful expression of emotion, art is the intellectual expression of that same emotion. Whatever we don’t have, don’t attempt or don’t achieve can be possessed through dreams, and these are what we use to make art. At other times our emotion is so strong that, although reduced to action, this action doesn’t completely satisfy it; the leftover emotion, unexpressed in life, is used to produce the work of art. There are thus two types of artist: the one who expresses what he doesn’t have, and the one who expresses the surplus of what he did have.

  231

  One of the soul’s great tragedies is to execute a work and then realize, once it’s finished, that it’s not any good. The tragedy is especially great when one realizes that the work is the best he could have done. But to write a work, knowing beforehand that it’s bound to be flawed and imperfect; to see while writing it that it’s flawed and imperfect – this is the height of spiritual torture and humiliation. Not only am I dissatisfied with the poems I write now; I also know that I’ll be dissatisfied with the poems I write in the future. I know it philosophically and in my flesh, through a hazy, gladiolated* foreglimpse.

  So why do I keep writing? Because I still haven’t learned to practise completely the renunciation that I preach. I haven’t been able to give up my inclination to poetry and prose. I have to write, as if I were carrying out a punishment. And the greatest punishment is to know that whatever I write will be futile, flawed and uncertain.

  I wrote my first poems when I was still a child. Though dreadful, they seemed perfect to me. I’ll never again be able to have the illusory pleasure of producing perfect work. What I write today is much better. It’s even better than what some of the best writers write. But it’s infinitely inferior to what I for some reason feel I could – or perhaps should – write. I weep over those first dreadful poems as over a dead child, a dead son, a last hope that has vanished.

  232

  The more we live, the more convinced we become of two truths that contradict each other. The first is that next to the reality of life all the fictions of literature and art pale. It’s true that they give us a nobler pleasure than what we get from life, but they’re like dreams which, though offering us feelings not felt in life and joining together forms that never meet in life, are none the less dreams that dissipate when we wake up, leaving no memories or nostalgia with which we could later live a second life.

  The other truth is that, since every noble soul desires to live life in its entirety – experiencing all things, all places and all feelings – and since this is objectively impossible, the only way for a noble soul to live life is subjectively; only by denying life can it be lived in its totality.

  These two truths are mutually exclusive. The wise man won’t try to reconcile them, nor will he dismiss one or the other. But he will have to follow one or the other, yearning at times for the one he didn’t choose; or he’ll dismiss th
em both, rising above himself in a personal nirvana.

  Happy the man who doesn’t ask for more than what life spontaneously gives him, being guided by the instinct of cats, which seek sunlight when there’s sun, and when there’s no sun then heat, wherever they find it. Happy the man who renounces his personality in favour of the imagination and who delights in contemplating other people’s lives, experiencing not all impressions but the outward spectacle of all impressions. And happy, finally, the man who renounces everything, who has nothing that can be taken from him, nothing that can be diminished.

  The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic – these three are happy in life, for these three types of men all renounce their personalities: one because he lives by instinct, which is impersonal, another because he lives by the imagination, which is forgetting, and the third because he doesn’t live but merely (since he still hasn’t died) sleeps.

  Nothing satisfies me, nothing consoles me; everything that has been and that hasn’t been jades me. I don’t want to have my soul and don’t want to renounce it. I want what I don’t want and renounce what I don’t have. I can’t be nothing nor be everything: I’m the bridge between what I don’t have and what I don’t want.

  233

  … the solemn sadness that dwells in all great things – in high mountains and in great men, in profound nights and in eternal poems.

  234

  We can die if all we’ve done is love.

  235

  Only once was I truly loved. I’ve always been treated in a friendly manner, and even people I hardly know have rarely been rude or brusque or cold to me. In certain people that friendly manner, with my encouragement, might have been converted into love or affection, but I’ve never had the patience or mental concentration to even want to make the effort.

  At first I thought (so little do we know ourselves!) that shyness was to blame for my soul’s apparent apathy in this matter. But I came to realize that it actually had to do with the tedium I felt vis-à -vis emotions – not to be confused with the tedium of life. I didn’t have the patience to commit myself to an ongoing feeling, especially when it would require an ongoing effort. ‘What for?’ thought the part of me that doesn’t think. I have enough intellectual subtlety and psychological insight to know ‘how’; the ‘how of the how’ is what has always escaped me. My weakness of will has always begun as a weakness of will to have any will. This was the case in my emotions as well as in my intellect, and in my very will, and in all my dealings with life.

  But on that occasion when circumstances mischievously led me to suppose that I loved and to verify that the other person truly loved me, my first reaction was of bewildered confusion, as if I’d won a grand prize in an unconvertible currency. And then, because no human can avoid being human, I felt a certain vanity; this emotion, however, which would seem to be the most natural one, quickly vanished. It was followed by an uncomfortable feeling that’s hard to define but that was composed of tedium, of humiliation, and of weariness.

  Of tedium, as if Fate had obliged me to occupy my free evenings with some strange and unfamiliar labour. Of tedium, as if a new duty – that of a hideous reciprocity – had been ironically foisted on me as a privilege for which I was expected to thank Fate profusely. Of tedium, as if the irregular monotony of life weren’t enough, so that on top of that I needed the obligatory monotony of a definite feeling.

  And of humiliation – yes, humiliation. It took me a while to understand the presence of this feeling that seemed not at all justified by its cause. I should have loved being loved. It should have piqued my vanity that someone had heaped attention on me as a lovable human being. But apart from my brief feeling of actual vanity (and even that may have consisted of surprise more than of vanity itself), what I experienced was humiliation. I felt that I’d been given someone else’s prize – a prize that was worth something only to the person who rightfully deserved it.

  But most of all I felt weariness – a weariness beyond all tedium. I finally understood a phrase of Chateaubriand whose meaning, because of my lack of personal experience, had always eluded me. Chateaubriand writes of René, his personification, ‘it wearied him to be loved’ – on le fatigait en l’aimant. I realized with astonishment that this experience was identical to my own, and so I couldn’t deny its validity.

  The weariness of being loved, of being truly loved! The weariness of being the object of other people’s burdensome emotions! Of seeing yourself – when what you wanted was to remain forever free – transformed into a delivery boy whose duty is to reciprocate, to have the decency not to flee, lest anyone think that you’re cavalier towards emotions and would reject the loftiest sentiment that a human soul can offer. The weariness of your existence becoming absolutely dependent on a relationship with someone else’s feeling! The weariness of having to feel something, of having to love at least a little in return, even if it’s not a true reciprocity!

  As it came, so it went, and today nothing of that shadowy episode remains in my intellect or in my emotions. It brought me no experience that I couldn’t have deduced from the laws of human life, which I instinctively know because I’m human. It gave me no pleasure to look back on with regret, nor sorrow to remember with equal regret. It all seems like something I read somewhere, like an incident that happened to someone else, a novel I read halfway through and whose second half was missing, but I didn’t care that it was missing, because the first half of the story was all there, and although it made no sense, I realized that no sense could ever be made of it, regardless of what happened in the part that was missing.

  All that remains is my feeling of gratitude towards the one who loved me. But it’s an abstract, bewildered gratitude, more intellectual than emotional. I’m sorry that I caused someone to feel sorrow; I’m sorry about that, and only about that.

  It’s unlikely that life will bring me another encounter with natural emotions. I almost wish it would, to see how I’d react the second time, after having thoroughly analysed the first experience. I might feel less emotion, or I might feel more. If Fate should bring it, then well and good. I’m curious about my emotions. Whereas I don’t have the least curiosity about facts, whatever they are or will yet be.

  236

  To submit to nothing, whether to a man or a love or an idea, and to have the aloof independence of not believing in the truth or even (if it existed) in the usefulness of knowing it – this seems to me the right attitude for the intellectual inner life of those who can’t live without thinking. To belong is synonymous with banality. Creeds, ideals, a woman, a profession – all are prisons and shackles. To be is to be free. Even ambition, if we take pride in it, is a hindrance; we wouldn’t be proud of it if we realized it’s a string by which we’re pulled. No: no ties even to ourselves! Free from ourselves as well as from others, contemplatives without ecstasy, thinkers without conclusions and liberated from God, we will live the few moments of bliss allowed us in the prison yard by the distraction of our executioners. Tomorrow we will face the guillotine. Or if not tomorrow, then the day after. Let us stroll about in the sun before the end comes, deliberately forgetting all projects and pursuits. Without wrinkles our foreheads will glow in the sun, and the breeze will be cool for those who quit hoping.

  I throw my pen against the slanted desk top and watch it roll down without bothering to catch it. I felt all of this without warning. And my happiness consists in this gesture of rage that I don’t feel.

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  NOTES FOR A RULE OF LIFE

  To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.

  Enlarge your personality without including anything from the outside – asking nothing from others and imposing nothing on others, but being others when you need them.

  Reduce your necessities to a minimum, so as not to depend on anyone for anything.

  It’s true that such a life is impossible in the absolute. But it’s not impossible relatively.

  Let’s consider a man
who owns and runs an office. He should be able to do without his employees; he should be able to type, to balance the books, to sweep the office. He should depend on others because it saves him time, not because he’s incompetent. Let him tell the office boy to put a letter in the post because he doesn’t want to lose time going to the post office, not because he doesn’t know where the post office is. Let him tell a clerk to take care of a certain matter because he doesn’t want to waste time on it, not because he doesn’t know how to take care of it.

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  There is no sure prize for virtue, and no sure punishment for sin. Nor would it be right for such prizes and punishments to exist. Virtue and sin are inevitable manifestations in organisms which, condemned to one thing or the other, serve their sentences of being good or of being bad. That’s why all religions place rewards and punishments – deserved by people who were nothing and could do nothing, and therefore can deserve nothing – in other worlds, which no science can verify and no faith describe.

  So let us renounce all sincere beliefs, along with all concern to influence others.

  Life, said Tarde,* is the search for the impossible by way of the useless. Let us always search for the impossible, since that is our destiny, and let us search for it by way of the useless, since no path goes by any other way, but let us rise to the consciousness that nothing we search for can be found, and that nothing along the way deserves a fond kiss or memory.