The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

  To kill our dream life would be to kill ourselves, to mutilate our soul. Dreaming is the one thing we have that’s really ours, invulnerably and inalterably ours.

  Life and the Universe – be they reality or illusion – belong to everyone. Everyone can see what I see and have what I have, or can at least imagine himself seeing it and having it, and this is .....

  But no one besides me can see or have the things I dream. And if I see the outer world differently from how others see it, it’s because I inadvertently incorporate, into what I see, the things from my dreams that have stuck to my eyes and ears.

  327

  On this clear bright day even the softness of the sounds is golden. There’s gentleness everywhere. If I were told that a war had broken out, I would say there was no war. A day like today cannot admit anything that would disturb this gentleness that is everything.

  328

  Join your hands, and put them in mine, and listen, my love.

  I want to tell you, with the soft and soothing voice of a confessor giving counsel, how much our yearning to attain falls short of what we do attain.

  With my voice and your attention, I want us to pray together the litany of despair.

  There is no artist’s work that could not have been more perfect. When read line by line, the greatest of poems has few verses that couldn’t be improved, few scenes that couldn’t have been told more vividly, and the overall result is never so good that it couldn’t have been vastly better.

  Woe to the artist who notices this, who one day happens to think about it! Never again will he work with joy or sleep in peace. He’ll be a young man without youth, and grow old dissatisfied.

  And why should anyone express himself? What little he may say would be better left unsaid.

  If I could really convince myself that renunciation is beautiful, how dolefully happy I would always be!

  For you do not love the things I say with the same ears I use to hear myself say them. Even my ears, should I speak out loud, do not hear the words I speak in the same way as my inner ear hears the words I think. If even I, when I hear myself, get confused and am not always sure what I meant, then how much more other people are bound to misunderstand me!

  What elaborate misconceptions form other people’s understanding of us!

  The joy of being understood by others cannot be had by those who want to be understood, for they are too complex to be understood; and simple people, who can be understood by others, never have the desire to be understood.

  329

  Have you ever considered, beloved Other, how invisible we all are to each other? Have you ever thought about how little we know each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside ourself.

  The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe in our meanings of other people’s words. We hear death in words they speak to express sensual bliss. We read sensuality and life in words they drop from their lips without the slightest intention of being profound.

  The voice of brooks that you interpret, pure explicator… The voice of trees whose rustling means what we say it means… Ah, my unknown love, this is all just us and our fantasies, all ash, trickling down the bars of our cell!

  330

  Since perhaps not everything is false, may nothing cure us, my love, of the almost ecstatic pleasure of lying.

  Ultimate subtlety! Supreme perversion! The absurd lie has all the charm of the perverse with the even greater, ultimate charm of being innocent. The deliberately innocent perversion – who can go beyond this supreme subtlety? The perversion that doesn’t even aspire to give us pleasure and that lacks the fury to cause us pain, falling to the ground between pleasure and pain, useless and absurd like a shoddy toy with which an adult tries to amuse himself!

  Don’t you know, Exquisite One, the pleasure of buying things you don’t need? Don’t you know the delight of roads which, when we’re distracted, we take by mistake? What human act has a colour as lovely as a spurious one ..... which lies to its own nature and contradicts its own intention?

  How sublime to waste a life that could have been useful, never to execute a work of art that was certain to be beautiful, to abandon midway a sure road to victory!

  Ah, my love, the glory of works which have been lost for ever, of treatises which today are mere titles, of libraries which burned down, of statues which were demolished!

  How blessed with Absurdity are the artists who set fire to a beautiful work! Or the artists who could have made a beautiful work but deliberately made it ordinary! Or the great poets of Silence who, knowing they were capable of writing an absolutely perfect work, preferred to crown it with the decision never to write it. (For an imperfect work, it makes no difference.)

  How much more beautiful the Mona Lisa would be if we couldn’t see it! And if someone were to rob it just to burn it, what an artist he would be, even greater than the one who painted it!

  Why is art beautiful? Because it’s useless. Why is life ugly? Because it’s all aims, objectives and intentions. All of its roads are for going from one point to another. If only we could have a road connecting a place no one ever leaves from to a place where no one goes! If only someone would devote his life to building a road from the middle of one field to the middle of another – a road that would be useful if extended at each end, but that would sublimely remain as only the middle stretch of a road!

  The beauty of ruins? That they’re no longer good for anything.

  The sweetness of the past? Our memory of it, since to remember it is to make it present, and it isn’t present nor ever can be – absurdity, my love, absurdity.

  And I who am saying all this – why am I writing this book? Because I realize it’s imperfect. Dreamed, it would be perfection; written, it becomes imperfect; that’s why I’m writing it. And above all else, because I advocate uselessness, absurdity, – I write this book to lie to myself, to be unfaithful to my own theory.

  And the supreme glory of all this, my love, is to think that perhaps none of it is true and that I don’t even believe it’s true.

  And when lying begins to bring us pleasure, let’s give it the lie by telling the truth. And when lying causes us anxiety, let’s stop so that the suffering can’t become even perversely pleasurable.

  331

  I’m suffering from a headache and the universe. Physical aches, more blatantly painful than moral ones, reflect in the spirit and set off tragedies not contained in them. They make the sufferer cross with everything, and everything naturally includes every star.

  I do not share, have never shared, and can’t imagine ever sharing that degenerate concept that regards us, as living souls, to be consequences of a material thing called the brain, which originates and resides in another material thing known as the cranium. I cannot be a materialist, which I believe is what one calls an adherent to this concept, for I cannot establish a clear relationship – I mean a visual relationship – between a tangible mass of grey or otherwise coloured matter and this thing known as the I that behind my gaze sees the skies and thinks about them, and imagines skies that don’t exist. But even if I cannot fall into the pit of supposing that one thing is another just because they’re in the same place, like a wall and my shadow on it, or that my soul’s dependence on my brain is any greater than my dependence, when travelling, on the vehicle that carries me, I do believe there is a social relationship between what in us is pure spirit and what in us is the body’s spirit, such that quarrels can occur between them. And what usually occurs is that the more ordinary of the two persons gets on the other’s nerves.

  My head aches today, and perhaps my stomach is the source of its aching. But the ache, once it is suggested by my stomach to my head, interrupts the meditation that goes on behind my thinking brain. Covering my eyes won’t blind me, but it will keep me from seeing. And so now, because my head aches, I find nothing at all admirable or worthwhile in t
he show going on outside me which, in this absurd and monotonous moment, I don’t even wish to see as the world. My head aches, which means I’m aware that matter has offended me, and, as happens when one is offended, I’m resentful and apt to be irritable with everyone, including whoever hasn’t offended me but happens to be near by.

  What I feel like doing is dying, at least temporarily, but this, as I’ve indicated, is only because my head aches. And it suddenly occurs to me how much more eloquently a great prose stylist would say this. Sentence by sentence he would elaborate on the anonymous grief of the world; the imagining eyes behind his paragraphs would scan the earth’s various human dramas; and through the feverish throbbing of his temples an entire metaphysics of woe and misery would take shape on paper. But I don’t have an eloquent style. My head aches because my head aches. The universe hurts me because my head hurts. But the universe that actually hurts me is not the true one, which exists because it doesn’t know I exist, but that other universe which belongs only to me and which, should I pass my hands through my hair, makes me feel that each strand suffers for no other reason than to make me suffer.

  332

  I’m astonished by my capacity for anxiety. Though not generally inclined to metaphysical speculation, for some days now I’ve been filled with intense, even physical anxiety as I grope for answers to the metaphysical and religious problems… I quickly realized that for me the solution to the religious problem meant solving an emotional problem in rational terms.

  333

  No problem has a solution. None of us can untie the Gordian knot; either we give up or we cut it. We brusquely resolve intellectual problems with our feelings, either because we’re tired of thinking, or because we’re afraid to draw conclusions, or because of an inexplicable need to latch on to something, or because of a gregarious impulse to return to other people and to life.

  Since we can never know all the factors that a problem entails, we can never solve it.

  To arrive at the truth we would need more data, along with the intellectual resources for exhaustively interpreting the data.

  334

  It’s been months since I last wrote. I’ve lived in a state of mental slumber, leading the life of someone else. I’ve felt, very often, a vicarious happiness. I haven’t existed. I’ve been someone else. I’ve lived without thinking.

  Today I suddenly returned to whom I am or dream I am. It was during a moment of great fatigue, after finishing a tedious assignment. I propped my elbows on the high slanted desk, rested my head against my hands, closed my eyes, and rediscovered myself.

  In a far-away pseudo-slumber I remembered everything I had ever been, and as vividly as if it stood before my eyes I suddenly saw, before or after everything, the side of the old farm that opened on to the fields, and in the middle of the scene appeared the threshing-floor, empty.

  I immediately felt how futile life is. As if prompted by a dull pain in my elbows, everything I was seeing, feeling, remembering and forgetting merged with the faint din from the street and the slight sounds of work as usual in the quiet office.

  When I laid my hands on the desk and looked at what was there with a gaze that must have been heavy with dead worlds, the first thing I saw, with my physical eyes, was a blowfly (that soft buzzing that didn’t belong to the office!) poised on top of the inkstand. I looked at it from the depths of the abyss, anonymous and attentive. It was coloured by green shades of black-blue, and its shiny repulsiveness wasn’t ugly. A life!

  Who knows for what supreme forces – gods or demons of Truth in whose shadow we roam – I may be nothing but a shiny fly that alights in front of them for a moment or two? A facile hypothesis? Trite observation? Philosophy with no real thought? Maybe. But I didn’t think: I felt. It was carnally, directly, with profound and dark horror that I made this ludicrous comparison. I was a fly when I compared myself to one. I really felt like a fly when I imagined I felt like one. And I felt I had a flyish soul, slept flyishly and was flyishly withdrawn. And what’s more horrifying is that I felt, at the same time, like myself. I automatically raised my eyes towards the ceiling, lest a lofty wooden ruler should swoop down to swat me, as I might swat that fly. When I lowered my eyes, the fly had fortunately disappeared without a sound, at least not any I could hear. The involuntary office was again without philosophy.

  335

  ‘To feel is a pain in the neck.’ This offhand remark, spoken by a stranger I met in a restaurant, has been glowing ever since on the floor of my memory. The very earthiness of the language gives the sentence spice.

  336

  I wonder how many have contemplated, with the attention it merits, a deserted street with people in it. This sentence, by its phrasing, seems to want to say something else, and indeed it does. A deserted street is not a street no one walks on, but a street on which people walk as if it were deserted. This isn’t hard to understand, provided one has seen it: a zebra can’t be grasped by a man who doesn’t know more than a donkey.

  Our sensations change according to how we understand them and to what extent. There are ways of understanding that have special ways of being understood.

  There are days when a tedium, a bitterness, an anxiety about life seems to rise to my head from the ground underneath me, and I would say it’s intolerable if I didn’t in fact tolerate it. It’s a strangling of the life inside me, a longing to be another in all of my pores, a brief glimpse of the end.

  337

  What I most of all feel is weariness, and the disquiet that is its twin when the weariness has no reason to exist but to exist. I dread the gestures I have to make and am intellectually shy about the words I have to speak. Everything strikes me in advance as futile.

  The unbearable tedium of all these faces, silly with intelligence or without it, nauseatingly grotesque in their happiness or unhappiness, hideous because they exist, an alien tide of living things that don’t concern me…

  338

  I’ve always worried, in those occasional moments of detachment when we become conscious of ourselves as individuals who are seen as ‘others’ by other people, about the physical and even moral impression I must make on those who observe me and talk to me, whether on a daily basis or in a chance meeting.

  We’re all used to thinking of ourselves as primarily mental realities, and of other people as immediately physical realities. We vaguely see ourselves as physical people, in so far as we consider how we look to others. And we vaguely see others as mental realities, though only when we’re in love or in conflict does it really dawn on us that they, like we, are predominantly soul.

  And so sometimes I lose myself in futile speculations about the sort of person I am in the eyes of others: how my voice sounds, what kind of impression I leave in their involuntary memory, how my gestures, my words and my visible life are inscribed on the retinas of their interpretation. I’ve never succeeded in seeing myself from the outside. No mirror can show us ourself from outside, because no mirror can take us out of ourself. We would need a different soul, a different way of looking and thinking. If I were an actor projected on a screen, or if I recorded my voice on records, I’m certain that I still wouldn’t know what I am on the outside, because like it or not, and no matter what I might record of myself, I’m always here inside, enclosed by high walls, on the private estate of my consciousness of me.

  I don’t know if others are like me, or if the science of life consists essentially in being so alienated from oneself that this alienation becomes second nature, such that one can participate in life as an exile from his own consciousness. Or perhaps other people, even more self-absorbed than I, are completely given over to the brutishness of being only themselves, living outwardly by the same miracle that enables bees to form societies more highly organized than any nation and allows ants to communicate with a language of tiny antennae whose results surpass our complex system of mutual understanding.

  The geography of our consciousness of reality is an endless complexity of irregular co
asts, low and high mountains, and myriad lakes. And if I ponder too much, I see it all as a kind of map, like that of the Pays du Tendre* or of Gulliver’s Travels, a fantasy of exactitude inscribed in an ironic or fanciful book for the amusement of superior beings, who know where countries are really countries.

  Everything is complex for those who think, and no doubt thought itself takes delight in making things yet more complex. But those who think need to justify their abdication with a vast programme of understanding, which they set forth – like liars their explanations – with heaps of exaggerated detail that eventually reveal, once the earth is swept away, the lying root.

  Everything is complex, or I’m the one who’s complex. But at any rate it doesn’t matter, because at any rate nothing matters. All of this, all these considerations that have strayed off the broad highway, vegetate in the gardens of excluded gods like climbing plants detached from their walls. And on this night as I conclude these inconclusive considerations, I smile at the vital irony which makes them appear in a human soul that was already, even before there were stars, an orphan of Fate’s grand purposes.

  339

  The golden tint that still glows on waters abandoned by the setting sun is hovering on the surface of my weariness. I see myself as I see the lake I’ve imagined, and what I see in that lake is myself. I don’t know how to explain this image, or this symbol, or this I that I envision. But I know I see, as if in reality I were seeing, a sun behind the hills that casts its doomed rays on to this lake that dark-goldenly shimmers.