The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

  The trees that lined the avenues were independent of all this.

  The morning hour came to an end in the city, like the slope on the other side of the river when the boat touches the wharf. As long as it didn’t dock, it bore the scenic view of the far shore on its hull; the scenery fell away at the sound of the hull scraping against the rocks. A man whose trousers were rolled up past his knees placed a clamp on the rope; his gesture was definitive, perfectly natural, and it metaphysically concluded with my soul no longer being able to enjoy a doubtful anxiety. The boys on the wharf looked at me as at a normal man, one who would never feel such undue emotion for the practical aspects of docking a boat.

  354

  Heat, like an invisible piece of clothing, makes one feel like taking it off.

  355

  I was already feeling uneasy. Without warning the silence had stopped breathing.

  Suddenly, the light of all hells* cracked like steel. I crouched like an animal against the top of the desk, my hands lying flat like useless paws. A soulless light had swept through all nooks and souls, and the sound of a nearby mountain tumbled down from on high, rending the hard veil of the abyss* with a boom. My heart stopped. My throat gulped. My consciousness saw only a blot of ink on a sheet of paper.

  356

  After the heat had lulled and the light beginning of rain increased until it could be heard, there was a tranquillity that the air didn’t have when it was hot, a new peace in which the water blew its own breeze. So clear was the joy of this soft rain, with no darkness or threat of storm, that even those without raincoats or umbrellas (which was almost everyone) laughingly talked as they stepped quickly down the glistening street.

  During an idle moment I walked over to the open office window – the heat had caused it to be opened, but the rain hadn’t caused it to be shut – and looked with intense and indifferent concentration, as is my custom, at what I just finished accurately describing before I saw it. Yes, there went the joy of two banal souls, smiling as they talked in the fine rain, walking more briskly than hurriedly in the veiled yet luminous, limpid day.

  But suddenly, popping into my view from behind a corner, there appeared an old, mean-looking, poor and unhumble man who impatiently made his way in the rain that was letting up. He surely had no special aim, but at least he had impatience. I looked at him with concentration, no longer the careless kind applied to things, but the kind that discerns symbols. He was the symbol of nobody, which is why he was in a hurry. He was the symbol of those who were never anything; that is why he suffered. He belonged not to those who smile as they feel the rain’s joyful discomfort, but to the rain itself – a man so unconscious that he felt reality.

  That’s not what I wanted to say, however. Something stepped in between my observation of the passer-by (whom I had at any rate lost from view, because I’d stopped looking at him) and the thread of my reflections; some mystery from the unobserved, some urgency of the soul, stepped in and prevented me from continuing. And in the depths of my distraction I hear, without hearing, the voices of the packers at the far end of the office, where the warehouse begins, and without seeing I see the twine used for parcels, doubly knotted and doubly strung around the volumes wrapped in heavy brown paper, on the table next to the back window, among jokes and scissors.

  To see is to have seen.

  357

  It’s a rule of life that we can, and should, learn from everyone. There are solemn and serious things we can learn from quacks and crooks, there are philosophies taught us by fools, there are lessons in faithfulness and justice brought to us by chance and by those we chance to meet. Everything is in everything.

  In certain particularly lucid moments of contemplation, like those of early afternoon when I observantly wander through the streets, each person brings me a novelty, each building teaches me something new, each placard has a message for me.

  My silent stroll is a continual conversation, and all of us – men, buildings, stones, placards and sky – are a huge friendly crowd, elbowing each other with words in the great procession of Destiny.

  358

  Yesterday I saw and heard a great man. I don’t mean a man reputed to be great, but a man who really is great. He is a man of worth, if there’s worth in this world, and people see it, and he knows they see it. Thus he meets all the conditions necessary for me to call him a great man. And that’s what I call him.

  His physical appearance is that of a tired businessman. His face shows signs of fatigue, which could be from thinking too much, or simply from not leading a healthy life. His gestures are unremarkable. His gaze has a certain sparkle – the privilege of not being near-sighted. His voice is a bit garbled, as if the beginnings of a general paralysis had affected this particular expression of his soul. And his soul, thus expressed, goes on about party politics, about the devaluation of the escudo, and about what’s wrong with his colleagues in greatness.

  If I didn’t know who he is, I wouldn’t be able to tell by his appearance. I realize that great men need not conform to that heroic ideal of simple souls, whereby a great poet is always an Apollo in body and a Napoleon in expression, or at the very least a man of distinction with an expressive face. I realize that such notions are as absurd as they are human. But if we can’t expect everything, or almost everything, we can still expect something. And passing from the figure we see to the soul that speaks, although we can’t expect vivacity or verve, we should at least be able to count on intelligence and a hint of grandeur.

  All this – these human disillusions – forces us to question what truth there is, if any, in our common notion of inspiration. It seems that this body of a businessman and this soul of a polite, educated fellow must, when all by themselves, be mysteriously endowed with some inner thing that’s extraneous to them. It seems that they don’t speak but that some voice speaks through them, uttering what would be falsehood if they said it.

  These are casual and useless speculations. I sometimes regret indulging in them. They don’t diminish the worth of the man, nor increase his body’s expressiveness. But then, there isn’t anything that changes anything, and what we say or do merely brushes the tops of the hills, in whose valleys everything sleeps.

  359

  No one understands anyone else. We are, as the poet* said, islands in the sea of life; between us flows the sea that defines and separates us. However much one soul strives to know another, he can know only what is told him by a word – a shapeless shadow on the ground of his understanding.

  I love expressions, because I know nothing of what they express. I’m like the master of St Martha:* I’m satisfied with what I’ve been given. I see, and that’s quite enough. Who can understand anything?

  Perhaps it’s this scepticism vis-à-vis our understanding that makes me look at a tree and a face, a poster and a smile, in exactly the same way. (Everything is natural, everything artificial, everything equal.) Everything I see is for me the merely visible, whether it be the lofty blue sky tinted with the whitish green of a pre-dawn morning, or the false frown on the face of someone suffering the death of a loved one before witnesses.

  Sketches, illustrations, pages we look at and then turn… My heart isn’t in them, and my gaze merely passes over them on the outside, like a fly over a sheet of paper.

  Do I even know if I feel, if I think, if I exist? I know only that there’s an objective scheme of colours, shapes and expressions of which I’m the useless shifting mirror for sale.

  360

  Compared with real, ordinary men who walk down the streets of life with a natural, fortuitous goal in mind, those who sit around in cafés cut a figure that can be described only by comparing them to certain elves from dreams – creatures that aren’t exactly nightmarish or anguishing but whose remembrance, when we wake up, leaves a foul taste in our mouth that we don’t quite understand, a feeling of deep disgust that’s not for them, directly, but for something they embody.

  I see the world’s true geniuses and conq
uerors – both great and small – sailing in the night of things, oblivious to what their haughty prows are cutting through, in that gulfweed sea of packing straw and crumbled cork.

  Everything is summed up in those cafés, just like in the inner court behind the office building, which through the grating of the warehouse window looks like a jail cell for confining rubbish.

  361

  The search for truth – be it the subjective truth of belief, the objective truth of reality, or the social truth of money or power – always confers, on the searcher who merits a prize, the ultimate knowledge of its non-existence. The grand prize of life goes only to those who bought tickets by chance.

  The value of art is that it takes us away from here.

  362

  It’s legitimate to break ordinary moral laws in obedience to a higher moral law. Hunger is no excuse for stealing a loaf of bread, but an artist can be excused for stealing ten thousand escudos to guarantee his sustenance and tranquillity for two years, provided his work seeks to advance human civilization; if it’s merely an aesthetic work, then the argument doesn’t hold.

  363

  We cannot love, son. Love is the most carnal of illusions. Listen: to love is to possess. And what does a lover possess? The body? To possess it we would have to incorporate it, to eat it, to make its substance our own. And this impossibility, were it possible, wouldn’t last, because our own body passes on and transforms, because we don’t even possess our body (just our sensation of it), and because once the beloved body were possessed it would become ours and stop being other, and so love, with the disappearance of the other, would likewise disappear.

  Do we possess the soul? Listen carefully: no, we don’t. Not even our own soul is ours. And how could a soul ever be possessed? Between one and another soul lies the impassable chasm of the fact that they’re two souls.

  What do we possess? What do we possess? What makes us love? Beauty? And do we possess it when we love? If we vehemently, totally possess a body, what do we really possess? Not the body, not the soul, and not even beauty. When we grasp an attractive body, it’s not beauty but fatty and cellular flesh that we embrace; our kiss doesn’t touch the mouth’s beauty but the wet flesh of decaying, membranous lips; and even sexual intercourse, though admittedly a close and ardent contact, is not a true penetration, not even of one body into another. What do we possess? What do we really possess?

  Our own sensations, at least? Isn’t love at least a means of possessing ourselves through our sensations? Isn’t it at least a way of dreaming vividly, and therefore more gloriously, the dream that we exist? And once the sensation has vanished, doesn’t the memory at least stay with us always, so that we really possess…

  Let’s cast off even this delusion. We don’t even possess our own sensations. Don’t speak. Memory is no more than our sensation of the past. And every sensation is an illusion…

  Listen to me, keep listening. Listen and don’t look out the window at the river’s far shore, so flat and smooth, nor at the twilight , nor towards the train whistle cutting the empty distance..... Listen to me carefully:

  We do not possess our sensations, and through them we cannot possess ourselves.

  (The tilted urn of twilight pours out on us an oil in which the hours, like rose petals, separately float.)

  364

  How can I possess with my body, when I don’t even possess my body? How can I possess with my soul, when I don’t possess my soul? How can I understand with my mind, when I don’t understand my mind?

  There is no body or truth we possess, nor even any illusion. We are phantoms made of lies, shadows of illusions, and our life is hollow on both the outside and the inside.

  Does anyone know the borders of his soul, that he can say ‘I am I’?

  But I know that I’m the one who feels what I feel.

  When someone else possesses this body, does he possess the same thing in it as I? No. He possesses another sensation.

  Is there anything that we possess? If we don’t know who we are, how can we know what we possess?

  If, referring to what you eat, you were to say, ‘I possess this’, then I would understand you. Because you obviously incorporate what you eat into yourself, you transform it into your substance, you feel it enter into you and belong to you. But it’s not with regard to what you eat that you speak of possession. What do you call possessing?

  365

  The madness known as affirmation, the sickness called belief, the infamy of being happy – all of this reeks of the world, it smacks of this sad thing that’s the earth.

  Be indifferent. Love the sunset and the dawn because it does no good, not even for you, to love them. Dress yourself in the gold of the dying afternoon, like a king deposed on a morning of roses in full bloom, with May in the white clouds and the smile of virgins in secluded villas. Let your yearning perish among myrtles, your tedium cease among tamarinds, and may the sound of water accompany all of this as if it were twilight on the banks of a river whose only meaning is to flow – eternal – towards distant seas. The rest is but the life that leaves us, the sparkle in our eyes that fades, the purple robes worn thin even before we don them, the moon that shines down on our exile, the stars that spread their silence over our hour of disillusionment. Assiduous is the sterile and friendly grief that clasps us against its breast with love.

  Decadence is my destiny.

  My domain of old was in deep valleys. The water that trickled in my dreams was never tainted by blood. The trees’ foliage that forgets life was always green in my forgetting. The moon was fluid like water between stones. Love never reached that valley, which is why life was happy there. Neither love, nor dreams, nor gods in temples – and we walked in the breeze and the indivisible hour without any nostalgia for drunken, useless beliefs.

  366

  Useless landscapes like those that wind around Chinese teacups, starting out from the handle and abruptly ending at the handle. The cups are always so small… Where would the landscape lead to, and with what of porcelain, if it could continue past the teacup handle?

  Certain souls are capable of feeling heartfelt grief because the painted landscape on a Chinese fan isn’t three-dimensional.

  367

  …and the chrysanthemums languish their sickly life in gardens made gloomy by their presence.

  …the Japanese luxuriance of having only two apparent dimensions.

  …the colourful existence of Japanese figures circling the teacups’ dull translucence.

  A table set for a discreet tea – a mere pretext for perfectly sterile conversations – has always struck me as a kind of living thing, an individuality with soul. It forms, like an organism, a synthetic whole, which is not the mere sum of its component parts.

  368

  And the dialogues in those fantastical gardens that indefinitely circle certain teacups? What sublime words the two figures seated on the other side of that teapot must be exchanging! And I without ears to hear them, a dead member of polychromatic humanity!

  Exquisite psychology of truly static things, a psychology woven by eternity! And the expression of a painted figure, from the summit of its visible eternity, disdains our transitory fever, which never lingers at the windows of an attitude* nor pauses at the gates of a gesture.

  Just imagine the folklore of the colourful people who inhabit paintings! The loves of embroidered figures – loves marked by a two-dimensional, geometric chastity – should be [probed] for the entertainment of venturesome psychologists.

  We don’t love, we only pretend to. True love, immortal and useless, belongs to those figures whose feelings never change, since by nature they are static. Ever since I’ve known the Japanese man who sits on the convex [surface] of my teapot, he has yet to make a move. He has never savoured the hand of the woman who is forever out of reach. Enervated colours, like those of an emptied, poured-out sun, eternally unrealize the slopes of that hill. And the whole scene observes a moment of sorrow – a sorrow more fait
hful than the one that right now fills, without filling, the hollowness of my weary hours.

  369

  In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analyse and to captivate can prevent our personality from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all the rest.

  Whatever is real in our sensations is precisely what they have that isn’t ours. The sensations common to us all are what constitute reality. Our sensations’ individuality, therefore, lies in whatever they have that’s erroneous. What joy it would give me to see a scarlet-coloured sun! How totally and exclusively mine it would be!

  370

  I never let my feelings know what I’m going to make them feel. I play with my sensations like a bored princess with her large, viciously agile cats.

  I slam doors within me where certain sensations were about to pass in order to be realized. I quickly clear their path of mental objects that might cause them to make gestures.

  Little nonsense phrases inserted into the conversations we pretend to be having, meaningless affirmations made from the ashes of other, equally meaningless affirmations…

  – Your gaze reminds me of music played on a boat in the middle of a mysterious river with woods on the facing shore…

  = Don’t say that it’s a chilly moonlit night. I abhor moonlit nights… There are people who actually play music on moonlit nights…

  – That’s also a possibility… An unfortunate one, of course… But your gaze evidently wants to be nostalgic about something… It lacks the feeling it expresses… In the falseness of your expression I can see many of the illusions that I’ve had…