The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

  That’s why, in spite of everything, I love them all. My dear vegetables!

  314

  I’d like to develop a code of inertia for superior souls in modern societies.

  Society would govern itself spontaneously if it didn’t contain sensitive and intelligent people. You can be sure that they’re the only thing that hinders it. Primitive societies were happy because they didn’t have such people.

  Unfortunately, superior souls would die if expelled from society, because they don’t know how to work. And without any stupid blanks between them, perhaps they would die of boredom. But my concern here is with overall human happiness.

  Each superior soul who appeared in society would be exiled to the Island of the superiors.* The superiors would be fed, like animals in cages, by normal society.

  Believe me: if there were no intelligent people to point out humanity’s various woes, humanity wouldn’t even notice them. And sensitive people who suffer cause the rest to suffer by association.

  For the time being, since we live in society, our one duty as superiors is to reduce to a minimum our participation in the life of the tribe. We shouldn’t read newspapers, for example, or should read them only to find out what anecdotal and unimportant things are happening. You can’t imagine the delight I get from the provincial news round-up. The very names make doors to the indefinite open up in me.

  The highest honour for a superior man is to not know the name of his country’s chief of state, or whether he lives under a monarchy or a republic.

  He should be careful to position his soul in such a way that passing things and events can’t disturb him. Otherwise he’ll have to take an interest in others, in order to look out for himself.

  315

  There’s an aesthetics to wasting time. For those who cultivate sensations there’s an unwritten handbook on inertia, with recipes for all the forms of lucidity. To develop the right strategy for fighting against the notion of social mores, against the impulses of our instincts and against the solicitations of sentiment requires a study that not every aesthete is prepared to undertake. A rigorous aetiology of our scruples should be followed by an ironic diagnosis of our concessions to normality. We must also learn how to ward off life’s intrusions; a caution is necessary to make us impervious to outside opinions, and a velvety indifference to insulate our soul against the invisible blows of coexisting with others.

  316

  A life of aesthetic quietism, to prevent the insults and humiliations of life and the living from getting any closer than a loathsome periphery of our sensibility, outside the walls of our conscious soul.

  All of us, in some part or other, are loathsome. We all harbour a crime we’ve committed, or a crime our soul is begging us to commit.

  317

  One of my constant preoccupations is to understand how other people can exist, how there can be souls that aren’t mine, consciousnesses that have nothing to do with my own, which – because it’s a consciousness – seems to me like the only one. I accept that the man standing before me, who speaks with words like mine and gesticulates as I do or could do, is in some sense my fellow creature. But so are the figures from illustrations that fill my imagination, the characters I meet in novels, and the dramatic personae that move on stage through the actors who represent them.

  No one, I suppose, genuinely admits the real existence of another person. We may concede that the person is alive and that he thinks and feels as we do, but there will always be an unnamed element of difference, a materialized inequality. There are figures from the past and living images from books that are more real to us than the incarnate indifferences that talk to us over shop counters, or happen to glance at us in the trams, or brush against us in the dead happenstance of the streets. Most people are no more for us than scenery, generally the invisible scenery of a street we know by heart.

  I feel more kinship and intimacy with certain characters described in books and certain images I’ve seen in prints than I feel with many so-called real people, who are of that metaphysical insignificance known as flesh and blood. And ‘flesh and blood’ in fact describes them rather well: they’re like chunks of meat displayed in the window of a butcher’s, dead things bleeding as if they were alive, shanks and cutlets of Destiny.

  I’m not ashamed of feeling this way, as I’ve discovered that’s how everyone feels. What seems to lie behind people’s mutual contempt and indifference, such that they can kill each other like assassins who don’t really feel they’re killing, or like soldiers who don’t think about what they’re doing, is that no one pays heed to the apparently abstruse fact that other people are also living souls.

  On certain days, in certain moments, brought to me by I don’t know what breeze and opened to me by the opening of I don’t know what door, I suddenly feel that the corner grocer is a thinking entity, that his assistant, who at this moment is bent over a sack of potatoes next to the entrance, is truly a soul capable of suffering.

  When I was told yesterday that the employee of the tobacco shop had committed suicide, it seemed like a lie. Poor man, he also existed! We had forgotten this, all of us, all who knew him in the same way as all those who never met him. Tomorrow we’ll forget him even better. But he evidently had a soul, for he killed himself. Passion? Anxiety? No doubt… But for me, as for all humanity, there’s only the memory of a dumb smile and a shabby sports coat that hung unevenly from the shoulders. That’s all that remains to me of this man who felt so much that he killed himself for feeling, since what else does one kill himself for? Once, as I was buying cigarettes from him, it occurred to me that he would go bald early. As it turns out, he didn’t have time enough to go bald. That’s one of the memories I have of him. What other one can I have, if even this one is not of him but of one of my thoughts?

  I suddenly see his corpse, the coffin where they placed him, the so alien grave where they must have lowered him, and it dawns on me that the cashier of the tobacco shop, with crooked coat and all, was in a certain way the whole of humanity.

  It was only a flash. What’s clear to me now, today, as the human being I am, is that he died. That’s all.

  No, others don’t exist… It’s for me that this heavy-winged sunset lingers, its colours hard and hazy. It’s for me that the great river shimmers below the sunset, even if I can’t see it flow. It’s for me that this square was built overlooking the river, whose waters are now rising. Was the cashier of the tobacco shop buried today in the common grave? Then the sun isn’t setting for him today. But because I think this, and against my will, it has also stopped setting for me.

  318

  … ships passing in the night that neither signal nor recognize each other.

  319

  I realize now that I’ve failed, and it only surprises me that I didn’t foresee that I was going to fail. What was there in me to suggest I might triumph? I had neither the conqueror’s blind force nor the madman’s sure vision. I was lucid and sad, like a cold day.

  Clear things console me, and sunlit things console me. To see life passing by under a blue sky makes up for a lot. I forget myself indefinitely, forgetting more than I could ever remember. The sufficiency of things fills my weightless, translucent heart, and just to look is a sweet satisfaction. I’ve never been more than a bodiless gaze, whose only soul was a slight breeze that passed by and saw.

  I have something of the spirit of a bohemian, of those who let life slip away, like something that slips through one’s fingers because the gesture to seize it falls asleep at the mere idea. But I never had the outward compensation of the bohemian spirit – the carefree acceptance of come-and-go emotions. I was never more than an isolated bohemian, which is an absurdity; or a mystic bohemian, which is an impossibility.

  I’ve lived certain moments of respite in the presence of Nature, moments sculpted out of tender isolation, that will always be like medals for me. In these moments I forgot all of my life’s goals, all of the paths I wanted to follow. An immense s
piritual tranquillity fell into the blue lap of my aspirations and allowed me to enjoy being nothing. But I’ve probably never enjoyed an incorruptible moment, free of any underlying spirit of failure and gloom. In all my moments of spiritual liberation there was a dormant sorrow, vaguely blooming in gardens beyond the walls of my consciousness, and the scent and the very colour of those sad flowers intuitively passed through the stone walls, whose far side (where the roses bloomed) never ceased being a hazy near side in the obscure mystery of who I am, in the drowsiness of my daily existence.

  It was in an inner sea that the river of my life ended. All around my dreamed mansion the trees were yellow with autumn. This circular landscape is my soul’s crown of thorns. The happiest moments of my life were dreams, and dreams of sorrow, and I saw myself in their ponds like a blind Narcissus who enjoyed the coolness as he bent over the water, aware of his reflection there through an inner, nocturnal vision that was confided to his abstract emotions and maternally adored in the recesses of his imagination.

  Your necklaces of imitation pearls loved with me my finest hours. Carnations were our preferred flower, perhaps because they didn’t suggest pomp. Your lips solemnly celebrated the irony of your own smile. Did you really understand your destiny? It was because you knew it without understanding it that the mystery written in the sadness of your eyes had cast a pall on your resigned lips. Our Homeland was too far away for roses. In the cascades of our gardens the water was pellucid with silences. In the tiny hollows of the rocks over which the water flowed, there were secrets from our childhood and dreams the same size as our toy soldiers of old, which we could station on the cascades’ stones, in the static execution of a huge military operation, with nothing lacking in our dreams, and nothing lagging in our imagination.

  I know I’ve failed. I enjoy the vague voluptuosity of failure like one who, in his exhaustion, appreciates the fever that laid him up.

  I had a certain talent for friendship, but I never had any friends, either because they simply didn’t turn up, or because the friendship I had imagined was an error of my dreams. I’ve always lived alone, and ever more alone as I’ve become more self-aware.

  320

  Towards the end of summer, when the dull sun’s heat had lost its harshness, autumn began before it was autumn, with a mild and endlessly indefinite sadness, as if the sky didn’t feel like smiling. Its blue was sometimes lighter, sometimes greener, from the lofty colour’s own lack of substance. There was a kind of forgetfulness in the subdued purple tones of the clouds. It was no longer a torpor but a tedium that filled the lonely expanses where the clouds go by.

  The real beginning of autumn was announced by a coldness in the air’s non-coldness, by a subduing of the still unsubdued colours, by something of shadow and distance in the tint of the landscapes and the fuzzy countenance of things. Nothing was going to die yet, but everything – as in a still unformed smile – looked longingly back at life.

  Finally the full autumn came. The air turned cold and windy; leaves rustled with a dry sound, even if they weren’t dry; the ground took on the colour and impalpable shape of a shifting swamp. What had been a final smile faded as eyelids drooped and gestures flagged. And so everything that feels, or that we imagine feels, pressed its own farewell tight against its breast. A sound of whirling wind in a courtyard wafted through our consciousness of something else. Convalescence appealed as a way of at least truly feeling life.

  But the first rains of winter, falling already in the now harsh autumn, washed away these halftones without respect. High winds howled against whatever was fixed, stirred up whatever was tied, swept along whatever was movable, and pronounced – between the rain’s loud outbursts – absent words of anonymous protest, sad and almost angry sounds of glum despair.

  And at last autumn coldly and greyly ceased. What came now was an autumn of winter, with the dust of everything becoming the mud of everything, but there was also a foretaste of the winter cold’s good side: the harsh summer behind us, spring on its way, and autumn finally taking shape as winter. And in the lofty sky, whose dull tones no longer recalled heat or sadness, everything was propitious to night and indefinite meditations.

  That’s how it was for me before I thought about it. If I write it down today, it’s because I remember it. The autumn I have is the one I lost.

  321

  Opportunity is like money, which, come to think of it, is nothing but an opportunity. For those who act, opportunity concerns the will, and the will doesn’t interest me. For those like me who don’t act, opportunity is the song of no sirens existing; it should be voluptuously spurned, stowed high away for no use at all.

  ‘To have occasion to…’ In this space the statue of renunciation will be raised.

  O sprawling fields in the sun, the spectator for whom you alone exist is gazing at you from the shade.

  O alcohol of grand words and long phrases that swell, like waves, with the breathing of their rhythms and then crash, smiling, with the irony of twisting snakes of foam and the sad magnificence of glimmering shadows…

  322

  Every gesture, however simple, violates an inner secret. Every gesture is a revolutionary act; an exile, perhaps, from the true of our intentions.

  Action is a disease of thought, a cancer of the imagination. Action is self-exile. Every action is incomplete and flawed. The poem I dream has no flaws until I try to realize it. We find this recorded in the myth of Jesus. God, becoming man, cannot help but end in martyrdom. The supreme dreamer has the supreme martyr for a son.

  The leaves’ tattered shadows, the birds’ tremulous song, the river’s long arms shimmering coolly in the sun, the plants, the poppies, and the simplicity of sensations – even while feeling all this, I’m nostalgic for it, as if in feeling it I didn’t feel it.

  Time, like a wagon at the close of day, creakingly returns through the shadows of my thoughts. If I lift up my eyes from my thinking, they smart at the sight of the world.

  To realize a dream, one must forget it, tearing away his attention from it. To realize is thus to not realize. Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns.

  I’d like to write the encomium of a new incoherence that could serve as the negative charter for the new anarchy of souls. I’ve always felt that a digest of my dreams might be useful to humanity, which is why I’ve never tried to compile one. The idea that something I did might be helpful galled me and made me feel sapped.

  I have country homes on the outskirts of life. I escape from the city of my actions to the trees and flowers of my reverie. Not a single echo from the life of my acts reaches my green retreat. I’m lulled by my memory as by an endless procession. From the goblets of my meditation I drink only the smile of the golden wine; I drink it only with my eyes, closing them, and Life passes by like a sail in the distance.

  Sunny days smack of what I don’t have. The blue sky and white clouds, the trees, the flute that’s missing – eclogues left unfinished by the branches’ rustling… All this is the silent harp, grazed by the lightness of my fingers.

  The vegetable academy of silences… your name that sounded like poppies… the ponds… my going home… the crazy priest who went out of his mind during Mass… These memories are from my dreams… I keep my eyes open but see nothing… The things I do see aren’t here… Waters*…

  The lush green of the trees, through a jumble of entanglements, is part of my blood. Life throbs in my distant heart… I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.

  The agony of fate! I could die tomorrow! Even today something terrible could befall my soul! When I think of these things, I’m sometimes appalled at the supreme tyranny that obliges us to take steps without knowing where our uncertain paths will lead.

  323

  The rain kept sadly falling, but now with less force, as if seized by a cosmic weariness. There was no lightning, and only very occasionally would a distant, short roll of thunder harshly rumble, haltingly at times, as if it too were weary.
Suddenly the rain let up even more. One of the employees opened the windows facing on to the Rua dos Douradores. A cool air, with dead remnants of warmth, drifted into the large office. The voice of Senhor Vasques talked loudly on the phone in his private office: ‘You mean the line’s still busy?’ And then there was a dryly spoken aside – presumably an obscene remark to the receptionist on the other end.

  324

  To be able to have dreams, it’s crucial that you know how to have no illusions.

  In this way you’ll reach the summit of dreamy abstention, where senses blend, feelings overflow, and ideas intermingle. There colours and souls taste like each other, hatreds taste like loves, and concrete things like abstract things, abstract things like concrete. The ties that joined everything but also separated everything – because they isolated each element – are broken. Everything melds and merges.

  325

  Fictions of the interlude,* colourfully covering the torpor and sloth of our underlying disbelief.

  326

  And I don’t dream, I don’t live; I dream real life. All ships are dreamed ships if we have the power to dream them. What kills the dreamer is to not live while he dreams; what hurts the man of action is to not dream while he lives. I fused the beauty of dreaming and the reality of life into a single, blissful colour. However much a dream may be ours, we can never possess it like the handkerchief in our pocket or, if you will, like our own flesh. However much one lives a life of full, boundless and triumphant action, he will never be free from the of contact with others, from stumbling over obstacles, even if small, and from feeling the passage of time.