The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

  Great melancholies and sorrows full of tedium can exist only in an atmosphere of comfort and solemn luxury. That’s why Poe’s Egaeus,* pathologically absorbed in thought for hours on end, lives in an ancient, ancestral castle where, beyond the doors of the lifeless drawing room, invisible butlers administer the house and prepare the meals.

  Great dreams require special social circumstances. One day, when the doleful cadence of a certain passage I’d written made me excitedly think of Chateaubriand, it didn’t take me long to remember that I’m not a viscount, nor even a Breton. On another occasion, when I’d written something whose content seemed to recall Rousseau, it likewise didn’t take long for me to realize that, besides not being the noble lord of a castle, I also lack the privilege of being a wanderer from Switzerland.

  But there is also the universe of the Rua dos Douradores. Here God also grants that the enigma of life knows no bounds. My dreams may be poor, like the landscape of carts and crates from among whose wheels and boards I conceive them, but they’re what I have and am able to have.

  The sunsets, to be sure, are somewhere else. But even from this fourth-floor room that looks out over the city, it’s possible to contemplate infinity. An infinity with warehouses down below, it’s true, but with stars up above… This is what occurs to me as I look out my high window at the close of day, with the dissatisfaction of the bourgeois that I’m not, and with the sadness of the poet that I can never be.

  465

  The advent of summer makes me sad. It seems that summer’s luminosity, though harsh, should comfort those who don’t know who they are, but it doesn’t comfort me. There’s too sharp a contrast between the teeming life outside me and the forever unburied corpse of my sensations – what I feel and think, without knowing how to feel or think. In this borderless country known as the universe, I feel like I’m living under a political tyranny that doesn’t oppress me directly but that still offends some secret principle of my soul. And then I’m slowly, softly seized by an absurd nostalgia for some future, impossible exile.

  What I mostly feel is slumber. Not a slumber that latently brings – like all other slumbers, even those caused by sickness – the privilege of physical rest. Not a slumber that, because it’s going to forget life and perhaps bring dreams, bears the soothing gifts of a grand renunciation on the platter with which it approaches our soul. No: this is a slumber that’s unable to sleep, that weighs on the eyelids without closing them, that purses the corners of one’s disbelieving lips into what feels like a stupid and repulsive expression. It’s the kind of sleepiness that uselessly overwhelms the body when one’s soul is suffering from acute insomnia.

  Only when night comes do I feel, not happiness, but a kind of repose which, since other reposes are pleasant, seems pleasant by way of analogy. Then my sleepiness goes away, and the confusing mental dusk brought on by the sleepiness begins to fade and to clear until it almost glows. For a moment there’s the hope of other things. But the hope is short-lived. What comes next is a hopeless, sleepless tedium, the unpleasant waking up of one who never fell asleep. And from the window of my room I gaze with my wretched soul and exhausted body at the countless stars – countless stars, nothing, nothingness, but countless stars…

  466

  Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.

  Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.

  The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

  467

  He listened to me read my verses – which I read well that day, for I was relaxed – and said to me with the simplicity of a natural law: ‘If you could always be like that but with a different face, you’d be a charmer.’ The word ‘face’ – more than what it referred to – yanked me out of myself by the collar of my self-ignorance. I looked at the mirror in my room and saw the poor, pathetic face of an unpoor beggar; and then the mirror turned away, and the spectre of the Rua dos Douradores opened up before me like a postman’s nirvana.

  The acuity of my sensations is like a disease that’s foreign to me. It afflicts someone else, of whom I’m just the sick part, for I’m convinced that I must depend on some greater capacity for feeling. I’m like a special tissue, or a mere cell, that bears the brunt of responsibility for an entire organism.

  When I think, it’s because I’m drifting; when I dream, it’s because I’m awake. Everything I am is tangled up in myself, such that no part of me knows how to be.

  468

  When we constantly live in the abstract, be it the abstraction of thought itself or of thought sensations, then quite against our own sentiment or will the things of the real world soon become phantoms – even those things which, given our particular personality, we should feel most keenly.

  However much and however sincerely I may be someone’s friend, the news that he is sick or that he died produces in me only a vague, indefinite, dull impression, which it embarrasses me to feel. Only direct contact, the actual scene, would kindle my emotion. When we live by the imagination, we exhaust our capacity for imagining, and especially for imagining what’s real. Mentally living off what doesn’t and can never exist, we lose our ability to ponder what can exist.

  I found out today that an old friend, one I haven’t seen for a long time but whom I always sincerely remember with what I suppose is nostalgia, has just entered the hospital for an operation. The only clear and definite sensation that this news aroused in me was weariness at the thought of my having to visit him, with the ironic alternative of forgoing the visit and feeling guilty about it.

  That’s all… From dealing so much with shadows, I myself have become a shadow – in what I think and feel and am. My being’s substance consists of nostalgia for the normal person I never was. That, and only that, is what I feel. I don’t really feel sorry for my friend who’s going to be operated on. I don’t really feel sorry for anyone who’s going to be operated on or who suffers and grieves in this world. I only feel sorry for not being a person who can feel sorrow.

  And all at once I’m helplessly thinking of something else, impelled by I don’t know what force. And as if I were hallucinating, everything I was never able to feel or be gets mixed up with a rustling of trees, a trickling of water into pools, a non-existent farm… I try to feel, but I no longer know how. I’ve become my own shadow, as if I’d surrendered my being to it. Contrary to Peter Schlemihl* of the German story, I sold not my shadow but my substance to the Devil. I suffer from not suffering, from not knowing how to suffer. Am I alive or do I just pretend to be? Am I asleep or awake? A slight breeze that coolly emerges from the daytime heat makes me forget everything. My eyelids are pleasantly heavy… It occurs to me that this same sun is shining on fields where I neither am nor wish to be… From the midst of the city’s din a vast silence emerges… How soft it is! But how much softer, perhaps, if I could feel!…

  469

  Even writing has lost its appeal. To express emotions in words and to produce well-wrought sentences has become so banal it’s like eating or drinking, something I do with greater or lesser interest but always with a certain detachment, and without real enthusiasm or brilliance.

  470

  To speak is to show too much consideration for others. It’s when they open their mouths that fish, and Oscar Wilde, are fatally hooked.

  471

  Once we’re able to see this world as an illusion and a phantasm, then we can see everything that happens to us as a dream, as something that pretended to exist while we were sleeping. And we will become subtly and profoundly indifferent towards all of life’s setbacks and calamities. Those who die turned a corner, which is why we’ve stopped seeing them; those who suffer pass before us like a nightmare, if we feel, or like an unpleasant daydream, if we think.
And even our own suffering won’t be more than this nothingness. In this world we sleep on our left side, hearing even in our dreams the heart’s oppressed existence.

  Nothing else… A little sunlight, a slight breeze, a few trees framing the distance, the desire to be happy, regret over time’s passing, our always doubtful science, and the always undiscovered truth… That’s all, nothing else… No, nothing else…

  472

  To attain the satisfactions of the mystic state without having to endure its rigours; to be the ecstatic follower of no god, the mystic or epopt* with no initiation; to pass the days meditating on a paradise you don’t believe in – all of this tastes good to the soul that knows it knows nothing.

  The silent clouds drift high above me, a body inside a shadow; the hidden truths drift high above me, a soul imprisoned in a body… Everything drifts high above… And everything high above passes on, just like everything down below, with no cloud leaving behind more than rain, no truth leaving behind more than sorrow… Yes, everything that’s lofty passes high above, and passes on; everything that’s desirable is in the distance and distantly passes on… Yes, everything attracts, everything remains foreign, and everything passes on.

  What’s the point of knowing that in the sun or in the rain, as a body or a soul, I will also pass on? No point – just the hope that everything is nothing and nothing, therefore, everything.

  473

  Every sound mind believes in God. No sound mind believes in a definite God. There is some being, both real and impossible, who reigns over all things and whose person (if he has one) cannot be defined, and whose purposes (if he has any) cannot be fathomed. By calling this being God we say everything, since the word God – having no precise meaning – affirms him without saying anything. The attributes of infinite, eternal, omnipotent, all-just or all-loving that we sometimes attach to him fall off by themselves, like all unnecessary adjectives when the noun suffices. And He who, being indefinite, cannot have attributes, is for that very reason the absolute noun.

  The same certainty and the same obscurity exist with respect to the soul’s survival. We all know that we die; we all feel that we won’t die. It’s not just a desire or hope that brings us this shadowy intuition that death is a misunderstanding; it’s a visceral logic that rejects .....

  474

  A DAY

  Instead of eating lunch – a necessity I have to talk myself into every day – I walked down to the Tagus, and I wandered back along the streets without even pretending that it did me good to see it. Even so…

  Living isn’t worth our while. Only seeing is. To be able to see without living would bring happiness, but this is impossible, like virtually everything we dream. How great would be the ecstasy that didn’t include life!

  To create at least a new pessimism, a new negativity, so that we can have the illusion that something of us – albeit something bad – will remain!

  475

  ‘What are you laughing about?’ the voice of Moreira harmlessly wondered beyond the two bookshelves that mark the boundary of my pinnacle.

  ‘I mixed up some names,’ I answered, and my lungs calmed.

  ‘Oh,’ he said quickly, and dusty silence fell once more over the office and over me.

  The Viscount of Chateaubriand doing the books! Professor Amiel* sitting here on a high royal stool! Count Alfred de Vigny debiting Grandela Department Store! Senancour on the Rua dos Douradores!

  Not even poor miserable Bourget, whose books are as tiresome as a building without an elevator… I turn and lean out the window to look once more at my Boulevard Saint Germain, and precisely at that moment the ranch owner’s partner is spitting from the next window over.

  And between thinking about this and smoking, and not connecting one thing to the other, my mental laughter finds the smoke, gets tangled in my throat, and expands into a mild attack of audible laughter.

  476

  It will seem to many that my diary, written just for me, is too artificial. But it’s only natural for me to be artificial. How else can I amuse myself except by carefully recording these mental notes? Though I’m not very careful about how I record them. In fact I jot them down in no particular order and with no special care. The refined language of my prose is the language in which I naturally think.

  For me the outer world is an inner reality. I feel this not in some metaphysical way but with the senses normally used to grasp reality.

  Yesterday’s frivolity is a nostalgia that gnaws at my life today.

  There are cloisters in this moment. Night has fallen on all our evasions. A final despair in the blue eyes of the pools reflects the dying sun. We were so many things in the parks of old! We were so voluptuously embodied in the presence of the statues and in the English layout of the paths. The costumes, the foils, the wigs, the graceful motions and the processions were so much a part of the substance of our spirit! But who does ‘our’ refer to? Just the fountain’s winged water in the deserted garden, shooting less high than it used to in its sad attempt to fly.

  477

  … and lilies on the banks of remote rivers, cold and solemn, on a never-ending close of day in the heart of real continents.

  With nothing else, and yet utterly real.

  478

  (lunar scene)

  The entire landscape is in no place at all.

  479

  Far below, sloping down in a tumult of shadows from the heights where I gaze, the icy city sleeps in the moonlight.

  An anxiety for being me, forever trapped in myself, floods my whole being without finding a way out, shaping me into tenderness, fear, sorrow and desolation.

  An inexplicable surfeit of absurd grief, a sorrow so lonely, so bereft, so metaphysically mine .....

  480

  The silent, hazy city spreads out before my wistful eyes.

  The buildings, all different, form a confused, self-contained mass, whose dead projections are arrested in the pearly, uncertain moonlight. There are rooftops and shadows, windows and middle ages, but nothing around which to have outskirts. There’s a glimmer of the far away in everything I see. Above where I’m standing there are black branches of trees, and all of the city’s sleepiness fills my disenchanted heart. Lisbon by moonlight and my weariness because of tomorrow!

  What a night! It pleased whoever fashioned the world’s details that for me there should be no better melody or occasion than these solitary moonlit moments when I no longer know the self I’ve always known.

  No breeze, no person interrupts what I’m not thinking. I’m sleepy in the same way that I’m alive. But there is feeling in my eyelids, as if something were making them heavy. I hear my breathing. Am I asleep or awake?

  To drag my feet homeward weighs like lead on my senses. The caress of extinction, the flower proffered by futility, my name never pronounced, my disquiet like a river contained between its banks, the privilege of abandoned duties, and – around the last bend in the ancestral park – that other century, like a rose garden…

  481

  I went into the barbershop as usual, with the pleasant sensation of entering a familiar place, easily and naturally. New things are distressing to my sensibility; I’m at ease only in places where I’ve already been.

  After I’d sat down in the chair, I happened to ask the young barber, occupied in fastening a clean, cool cloth around my neck, about his older colleague from the chair to the right, a spry fellow who had been sick. I didn’t ask this because I felt obliged to ask something; it was the place and my memory that sparked the question. ‘He passed away yesterday,’ flatly answered the barber’s voice behind me and the linen cloth as his fingers withdrew from the final tuck of the cloth in between my shirt collar and my neck. The whole of my irrational good mood abruptly died, like the eternally missing barber from the adjacent chair. A chill swept over all my thoughts. I said nothing.

  Nostalgia! I even feel it for people and things that were nothing to me, because time’s fleeing is for me an ang
uish, and life’s mystery is a torture. Faces I habitually see on my habitual streets – if I stop seeing them I become sad. And they were nothing to me, except perhaps the symbol of all of life.

  The nondescript old man with dirty gaiters who often crossed my path at nine-thirty in the morning… The crippled seller of lottery tickets who would pester me in vain… The round and ruddy old man smoking a cigar at the door of the tobacco shop… The pale tobacco shop owner… What has happened to them all, who because I regularly saw them were a part of my life? Tomorrow I too will vanish from the Rua da Prata, the Rua dos Douradores, the Rua dos Fanqueiros. Tomorrow I too – I this soul that feels and thinks, this universe I am for myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be the one who no longer walks these streets, whom others will vaguely evoke with a ‘What’s become of him?’. And everything I’ve done, everything I’ve felt and everything I’ve lived will amount merely to one less passer-by on the everyday streets of some city or other.

  A Disquiet Anthology

  Pessoa, in a note on how to organize The Book of Disquiet (in Appendix III), considered publishing some of the passages with titles in a separate volume. The titled texts included in this section all date from the 1910s and have been ordered alphabetically. Roman numerals have been used to distinguish among the separate fragments that Pessoa left for certain texts, such as ‘Advice to Unhappily Married Women’.