The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

  We weary of everything, said the scholiast, except understanding. Let us understand, let us keep understanding, and let us make ghostly flowers out of this understanding, shrewdly entwining them into wreaths and garlands which are also doomed to wilt.

  239

  ‘We weary of everything, except understanding.’ The meaning of the phrase is sometimes hard to grasp.

  We weary of thinking to arrive at a conclusion, because the more we think and analyse and discern, the less we arrive at a conclusion.

  And so we fall into that passive state in which we want to understand only the explanation of whatever is being proposed. It’s an aesthetic attitude, since we don’t care in the least whether what’s proposed is or isn’t true, and all we see in what we understand are the details of the explanation, the type of rational beauty it has for us.

  We weary of thinking, of having our own opinions, of trying to think in order to act. But we don’t weary of temporarily having other people’s opinions, just to feel their intrusion and not follow their lead.

  240

  RAINY LANDSCAPE

  Hour after hour, all night long, the patter of the rain rained down. All night long, as I tossed and turned, its cold monotony beat against the windows. A gust of wind sometimes whipped overhead, and the rain would wave with sound, passing its quick hands over the panes; at other times there was just a muffled sound that made everything sleep in the dead exterior. My soul, as always, whether among bedclothes or among people, was painfully conscious of the world. The day, like happiness, kept procrastinating – indefinitely, it seemed.

  If happiness and the new day would never come! If at least we could never have the disillusion of getting what we wait and hope for!

  The chance sound of a late-night car, jostling roughly over the cobblestones, became steadily louder, clacked rudely beneath my window, and faded away at the far end of the street, at the far end of my fitful sleep that never became true slumber. Now and then a neighbour’s door would slam. At times there was a splashing of footsteps, a swishing sound of wet clothes. Once or twice, when the steps were numerous, they made a louder sound. Then they died out, the silence returned, and the rain relentlessly continued.

  If I opened my eyes from my pretended slumber I could see, on the darkly visible walls of my room, floating snatches of dreams to be dreamed, dim lights, black lines, hazy shapes climbing up and down. The various pieces of furniture, larger than in the daytime, indistinctly blotted the dark’s absurdity. The door was distinguishable as something no whiter or blacker than night, just different. The window I could only hear, not see.

  Again, fluid and uncertain, the rain pattered. Time dragged to its accompaniment. My soul’s solitude grew and spread, invading what I felt, what I wanted, and what I was going to dream. The room’s hazy objects, which shared my insomnia in the shadows, moved with their sadness into my desolation.

  241

  TRIANGULAR DREAM

  The light had become an extremely sluggish yellow, a yellow that was filthy white. The distance between things had increased, and sounds were spaced differently, disconnectedly, and farther apart. As soon as they were heard, they suddenly ceased, as if cut short. The heat, which seemed to have intensified, was cold, though it was still heat. Through the crack between the window’s two shutters, the only visible tree displayed an exaggeratedly expectant attitude. It had a different kind of green, which infused it with silence. The atmosphere, like a flower, had closed its petals. And in the composition of space itself, a different interrelationship of something like planes had changed and fragmented the way that sounds, lights and colours use space.

  242

  Even apart from our ordinary dreams – those abominations from the soul’s sewers that no one would dare confess and that oppress our nights like foul phantoms, grimy bubbles and slime of our repressed sensibility – what ridiculous, frightening and unspeakable things the soul, with a little effort, can recognize in its corners!

  The human soul is a madhouse of the grotesque. If a soul were able to reveal itself truthfully, if its shame and modesty didn’t run deeper than all its known and named ignominies, then it would be – as is said of truth – a well, but a sinister well full of murky echoes and inhabited by abhorrent creatures, slimy non-beings, lifeless slugs, the snot of subjectivity.

  243

  All it would take to make a catalogue of monsters is to photograph in words the things the night brings to drowsy souls unable to sleep. These things have all the incoherence of dreams without the alibi of sleeping. They hover like bats over the soul’s passivity, or like vampires that suck the blood of submission.

  They’re larvae from the debris on the hillside, shadows that fill the valley, remnants left by destiny. Sometimes they’re worms, loathsome to the very soul that cradles and breeds them; sometimes they’re ghosts that sinisterly skulk around nothing at all; sometimes they pop out as snakes from the absurd hollows of spent emotions.

  Ballast of falseness, they’re useful for nothing but to render us useless. They are doubts from the abyss that drag their cold and slithery bodies across the soul. They hang on as smoke, they leave tracks, and they never amounted to more than the sterile substance of our awareness of them. One or another is like an inner firework, sparking between dreams, and the rest is what our unconscious consciousness saw of them.

  A dangling, untied ribbon, the soul doesn’t exist in and of itself. The great landscapes belong to tomorrow, and we have already lived. The conversation was cut short and fizzled. Who would have thought life would turn out like this?

  I’m lost if I find myself; I doubt what I discover; I don’t have what I’ve obtained. I sleep as if I were taking a walk, but I’m awake. I wake up as if I’d been sleeping, and I don’t belong to me. Life, in its essence, is one big insomnia, and all that we think or do occurs in a lucid stupor.

  I’d be happy if I could sleep. This is what I think now, because I’m not sleeping. The night is an enormous weight beyond the silent blanket of dreams under which I smother myself. I have indigestion of the soul.

  After this is over, morning will come as always, but it will be too late, as always. Everything sleeps and is happy except me. I rest a little, without even trying to sleep. And huge heads of non-existent monsters rise in confusion from the depths of who I am. They’re Oriental dragons from the abyss, with their red tongues hanging outside of logic and their eyes deadly staring at my lifeless life that doesn’t stare back.

  The lid, for God’s sake, the lid! Close the lid on unconsciousness and life! Fortunately, through the open shutters of the cold window, a bleak thread of pale light begins to chase darkness from the horizon. Morning, fortunately, is what’s going to break. The disquiet that so wearies me has almost quieted down. A cock crows absurdly in the middle of the city. The wan day begins in my vague slumber. Eventually I’ll sleep. The noise of wheels tells me there’s a cart. My eyelids sleep, but not I. Everything, finally, is Destiny.

  244

  To be a retired major seems to me ideal. Too bad it’s not possible to have eternally been nothing but a retired major.

  My longing to be whole put me into this state of useless regret.

  The tragic futility of life.

  My curiosity – sister to the skylarks.

  The treacherous anxiety of sunsets; the dawn’s timid shroud.

  Let’s sit down here. From here we can see more of the sky. The vast expanse of these starry heights is soothing. Life hurts less as we look at them; a whiff of air from an invisible fan refreshes our life-wearied face.

  245

  The human soul is so inevitably the victim of pain that is suffers the pain of the painful surprise even with things it should have expected. A man who has always spoken of fickleness and unfaithfulness as perfectly normal behaviour in women will feel all the devastation of the sad surprise when he discovers that his sweetheart has been cheating on him, exactly as if he’d always held up female fidelity and constancy as a dogm
a or a rightful expectation. Another man, convinced that everything is hollow and empty, will feel like he’s been struck by lightning when he learns that what he writes is considered worthless, or that his efforts to educate people are in vain, or that it’s impossible to communicate his emotion.

  We need not suppose that those who have experienced these and similar disasters were insincere in what they said or wrote, even if the disasters they suffered were foreseeable in their words. The sincerity of intellectual affirmation has nothing to do with the naturalness of spontaneous emotion. Strangely or not, it seems the soul may be given such surprises merely so that it won’t lack pain, so that it will still know disgrace, so that it will have its fair share of grief in life. We are all equal in our capacity for error and suffering. Only those who don’t feel don’t experience pain; and the highest, most notable and most prudent men are those who experience and suffer precisely what they foresaw and what they disdained. This is what is known as Life.

  246

  To see all the things that happen to us as accidents or incidents from a novel, which we read not with our eyes but with life. Only with this attitude can we overcome the mischief of each day and the fickleness of events.

  247

  The active life has always struck me as the least comfortable of suicides. To act, in my view, is a cruel and harsh sentence passed on the unjustly condemned dream. To exert influence on the outside world, to change things, to overcome obstacles, to influence people – all of this seems more nebulous to me than the substance of my daydreams. Ever since I was a child, the intrinsic futility of all forms of action has been a cherished touchstone for my detachment from everything, including me.

  To act is to react against oneself. To exert influence is to leave home.

  I’ve always pondered how absurd it is that, even when the substance of reality is just a series of sensations, there can be things so complexly simple as businesses, industries, and social and family relationships, so devastatingly unintelligible in light of the soul’s inner attitude towards the idea of truth.

  248

  My abstention from collaborating in the existence of the outside world results in, among other things, a curious psychic phenomenon.

  Abstaining entirely from action and taking no interest in Things, I’m able to see the outside world with perfect objectivity. Since nothing interests me or makes me think it should be changed, I don’t change it.

  And thus I’m able .....

  249

  Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, a terrible disease progressively swept over civilization. Seventeen centuries of consistently frustrated Christian aspirations and five centuries of forever postponed pagan aspirations (Catholicism having failed as Christianity, the Renaissance having failed as paganism, and the Reformation having failed as a universal phenomenon), the shipwreck of all that had been dreamed, the paltriness of all that had been achieved, the sadness of living a life too miserable to be shared by others, and other people’s lives too miserable for us to want to share – all of this fell over souls and poisoned them. Minds were filled with a horror of all action, which could be contemptible only in a contemptible society. The soul’s higher activities languished; only its baser, more organic functions flourished. The former having stagnated, the latter began to govern the world.

  Thus was born a literature and art made of the lower elements of thought – Romanticism. And with it, a social life made of the lower elements of action – modern democracy.

  Souls born to rule had no recourse but to abstain. Souls born to create, in a society where creative forces were flagging, had no world to mould to their will besides the social world of their dreams, the introspective sterility of their own soul.

  We apply the name ‘Romantics’ both to the great men who failed and to the little men who showed themselves for what they were. But the only similarity between the two is in their overt sentimentality, which in the former denotes an inability to make active use of the intelligence, while in the latter it denotes the lack of intelligence itself. A Chateaubriand and a Hugo, a Vigny and a Michelet, are products of the same age. But Chateaubriand is a great soul that was diminished, Hugo a little soul that was inflated by the winds of the day. Vigny is a genius that had to flee, Michelet a woman that was forced to be a man of genius. In the father of them all, Jean Jacques Rousseau, the two tendencies coincide. He possessed, in equal measure, the intelligence of a creator and the sensibility of a slave. His social sensibility infected his theories, which his intelligence merely set forth with clarity. His intelligence served only to bemoan the tragedy of coexisting with such a sensibility.

  Rousseau is the modern man, but more complete than any modern man. From the weaknesses that made him fail, he extracted – alas for him and for us! – the forces that made him triumph. The part of him that went forward conquered, but when he entered the city, the word ‘Defeat’ could be read at the bottom of his victory banners. And in the part of him that stayed behind, incapable of fighting to conquer, there were crowns and sceptres, a ruler’s majesty and a conqueror’s glory – his legitimate inner destiny.

  II

  We were born into a world that has suffered from a century and a half of renunciation and violence – the renunciation of superior men and the violence of inferior men, which is their victory.

  No superior trait can assert itself in the modern age, whether in action or in thought, in the political sphere or in the theoretical sphere.

  The downfall of aristocratic influence has created an atmosphere of brutality and indifference towards the arts, such that a refined sensibility has nowhere to take refuge. Contact with life is ever more painful for the soul, and all efforts are ever more arduous, because the outer conditions for making an effort are forever more odious.

  The downfall of classical ideals made all men potential artists, and therefore bad artists. When art depended on solid construction and the careful observance of rules, few could attempt to be artists, and a fair number of these were quite good. But when art, instead of being understood as creation, became merely an expression of feelings, then anyone could be an artist, because everyone has feelings.

  250

  Even if I wanted to create .....

  The only true art is that of construction. But the present-day milieu makes it impossible for constructive qualities to appear in the human spirit.

  That’s why science developed. Machines are the only things today in which there’s construction; mathematical proofs are the only arguments with a chain of logic.

  Creativity needs a prop, the crutch of reality.

  Art is a science…

  It suffers rhythmically.

  I can’t read, for my hypercritical sensibility notices only flaws, imperfections, things that could be improved. I can’t dream, for my dreams are so vivid that I compare them with reality and quickly realize they’re unreal, hence without value. I can’t enjoy innocently gazing at people and things, for my longing to dig deeper is inexorable, and since my interest can’t exist without this longing, it must either die at its hands or wither [on its own]. I can’t be satisfied by metaphysical speculation, for I know all too well (from my own experience) that all systems are defensible and intellectually possible, and to enjoy the intellectual art of constructing systems, I would have to be able to forget that the goal of metaphysical speculation is the search for truth.

  A happy past in whose remembrance I would also be happy, with nothing in the present that would cheer or even interest me, with no dream or possibility of a future that could be any different from this present or have a past other than this past! – here lies my life, a conscious ghost of a paradise I never knew, a stillborn corpse of my unrealized hopes.

  Happy those who suffer as unified selves – whom anxiety alters but doesn’t divide, who believe at least in unbelief, and who can sit in the sun without mental reservations!

  251

  FRAGMENTS OF AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  First I w
as engrossed in metaphysical speculations, then in scientific ideas. Finally I was attracted to sociological [concepts]. But in none of these stages of my search for truth did I find relief or reassurance. I didn’t read much in these various fields, but what I did read was enough to make me weary of so many contradictory theories, all equally based on elaborate rationales, all equally probable and in accord with a selection of the facts that always gave the impression of being all the facts. If I raised my tired eyes from the books, or if I distractedly shifted focus from my thoughts to the outside world, I saw only one thing, which plucked one by one all the petals of the notion of effort, convincing me that all reading and thinking are useless. What I saw was the infinite complexity of things, the vast sum, the utter attainability of even those few facts that would be necessary for the formation of a science.

  ♦

  I gradually discovered the frustration of discovering nothing. I could find no reason or logic for anything except a scepticism that didn’t even seek a self-justifying logic. It never occurred to me to cure myself of this. And indeed, why be cured of it? What would it mean to be ‘healthy’? How could I be sure that this attitude meant I was sick? And if I was sick, who’s to say that sickness wasn’t preferable or more logical or more than health? If health was preferable, then wasn’t I sick due to some natural cause? And if it was natural, why go against Nature, which for some purpose or other – if it has any purpose – must have wanted me to be sick?