The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

  The best way to start dreaming is through books. Novels are especially helpful for the beginner. The first step is to learn to give in completely to your reading, to live totally with the characters of a novel. You’ll know you’re making progress when your own family and its troubles seem insipid and loathsome by comparison. It’s best to avoid reading literary novels, which tend to divert our attention to the formal structure.

  I’m not ashamed to admit that this is how I started. Strangely enough, detective novels, are what I instinctively read. I was never able to read romantic novels in any sustained way, but this is for personal reasons, I being romantically disinclined even in my dreams. Let each man cultivate his particular inclination. Let us never forget that to dream is to explore ourselves. Sensual souls, for their reading matter, should choose the opposite of what I read.

  When the dreamer experiences physical sensation – when a novel about combat, flights and battles leaves his body really exhausted and his legs worn out – then he has passed beyond the first stage of dreaming. In the case of the sensual soul, he should be able – without any masturbation except in his mind – to experience an ejaculation at the appropriate moment during the novel.

  Next, the dreamer should try to transfer all of this to the mental plane. The dreamed ejaculation (which I choose as the most violent and striking example) should be felt without actually happening. The fatigue will be greater, but the pleasure will be incomparably more intense.

  In the third stage all sensation becomes mental. This increases the feeling of pleasure and also of fatigue, but the body no longer feels anything; instead of weary limbs, it’s our mind, will and emotions that become slack and sluggish… Having arrived this far, it’s time to advance to the supreme stage of dreaming.

  The second stage is to construct novels for your own enjoyment. This should be attempted only once dreaming has become perfectly mentalized, as described above. Otherwise, the effort to set a novel in motion will hinder the smooth mentalization of pleasure.

  Third stage: Once our imagination has been trained, it will fashion dreams all by itself whenever we want.

  At this point there’s hardly even any mental fatigue. The dissolution of personality is total. We are mere ashes endowed with a soul but no form – not even that of water, which adopts the shape of the vessel that holds it.

  With this thoroughly established, complete and autonomous plays can unfold in us line by line. We may no longer have the energy to write them, but that won’t be necessary. We’ll be able to create secondhand; we can imagine one poet writing in us in one way, while another poet will write in a different way. I, having refined this skill to a considerable degree, can write in countlessly different ways, all of them original.

  The highest stage of dreaming is when, having created a picture with various figures whose lives we live all at the same time, we are jointly and interactively all of those souls. This leads to an incredible degree of depersonalization and the reduction of our spirit to ashes, and it is hard, I admit, not to feel a general weariness throughout one’s entire being. But what triumph!

  This is the only final asceticism. It’s an asceticism without faith, and without any God.

  God am I.

  CASCADE

  Children know that the doll isn’t real, but they treat it as if it were, to the point of crying with grief when it breaks. The art of children is in non-realization. How blessed is that deluded age, when life is negated* by the absence of sex, and reality is negated by the act of playing, unreal things standing in for real ones!

  If I could only go back to being a child and remain one for ever, oblivious to the values that men attach to things and the relations they establish between them! When I was little, I often stood my toy soldiers on their heads. And what convincing argument of logic can prove to me that real soldiers shouldn’t march head downward?

  Gold is worth no more than glass to a child. And is gold’s value truly any greater? The child obscurely senses the absurdity of the wraths, passions and fears he sees sculpted in adult gestures. And aren’t all our fears, hatreds and loves truly vain and absurd?

  O divinely absurd intuition of children! True vision of things, which we always dress with conventions, however nakedly we see them, and always blur with our ideas, however directly we look at them!

  Might not God be an enormous child? Doesn’t the whole universe seem like a game, like the prank of a mischievous child? So unreal, so.....

  I laughingly threw out this idea for consideration, and only now, seeing it from a distance, do I realize how ghastly it is. (Who’s to say it isn’t true?) And it falls to the ground at my feet, shattering into shards of mystery and pulverized horror…

  I wake up to make sure I exist…

  An immense, indefinite tedium gurgles with a deceptively fresh sound in the cascades past the beehives, at the stupid far end of the yard.

  CENOTAPH

  No surviving widow or son placed the obol in his mouth to pay Charon. We’ll never know with what eyes he crossed the Styx and saw his face – forever veiled to us – reflected nine times in the waters of the underworld. The name of his shadow, which now wanders on the banks of the gloomy rivers, is for us but another shadow.

  He died for his Country, without knowing how or why. His sacrifice had the glory of going unrecognized. He gave his life with his whole heart and soul: out of instinct, not duty; because he loved his Country, not because he was conscious of it. He defended it as a man defends his mother, whose son he is by birth rather than by logic. Faithful to the primeval secret, he didn’t think about or wish for his death but instinctively lived it, as he had lived his life. The shadow he now inhabits is brother to the shadows that fell at Thermopylae, faithful in their flesh to the pledge made at their birth.

  He died for his Country the way the sun daily rises. He was already, by nature, what Death would make of him.

  He did not fall on behalf of some zealous faith, nor was he killed in the vile struggle for some great ideal. Unsullied by faith or humanitarianism, he did not die in defence of a political idea, the future of humanity, or a new religion. Having no faith in another world, with which the credulous of Mohammed and the followers of Christ deceive themselves, he saw death arrive without hoping for life in it; he saw life leave him without hoping for a better one.

  He passed on naturally, like the wind and the day, taking with him the soul that had made him different. He plunged into the shadows the way a man, arriving at a door, walks through it. He died for his Country, the only thing above us that we can know and grasp. Neither the paradise of Moslems and Christians nor the transcendental oblivion of Buddhists was reflected in his eyes when in their depths the flame of his earthly life went out.

  If we don’t know who he is, neither did he know who he was. He did his duty without knowing what he’d done. He was guided by what makes the roses bloom and the death of leaves beautiful. Life has no better purpose, nor death a better reward.

  Now, according as the gods allow, he visits the lightless regions, passing by the laments of Cocytus and the fire of Phlegethon, and hearing in the night the slow flowing of the livid, Lethean current.

  He is anonymous like the instinct that killed him. He didn’t think he would die for his Country; he died for it. He didn’t decide to do his duty; he just did it. Since his soul bore no name, it is only right that we not ask what name defined his body. He was Portuguese, but not this or that Portuguese, and so he stands as the universal Portuguese.

  His place is not next to the creators of Portugal, who have a different stature and a different consciousness. He doesn’t belong in the company of our demigods, whose daring extended the routes of the sea and brought within our reach more land than could be had.

  Let no statue or stone commemorate this soul who was all of us. Since he was the entire people, for a tomb he should have this entire land. We should bury him in his own memory, with only his example for a stone.

  DECLARATION OF
DIFFERENCE

  The things of city and state have no power over us. It doesn’t matter that the ministers and their courtiers shamelessly mishandle the nation’s affairs. All of this occurs outside, like mud on a rainy day. We have nothing to do with it, however much it may have to do with us.

  We are likewise indifferent to great convulsions such as war and crises around the world. As long as they don’t come to our house, we don’t care on whose door they knock. This attitude would appear to be founded on a profound contempt for others, but its real basis is merely a sceptical view of ourselves.

  We’re not kind or charitable. Not because we’re the opposite, but because we’re neither one way nor the other. Kindness is the form of delicacy that belongs to crude souls. It interests us as a phenomenon that takes place in other people, who have other ways of thinking. We observe without approving or disapproving. Our vocation is to be nothing.

  We would be anarchists if we had been born in the classes which call themselves underprivileged, or in any of the others from which one can move up or down. But we are for the most part individuals born in the cracks between classes and social divisions – nearly always in that decadent space between the aristocracy and the upper-middle class, the social niche of geniuses and lunatics with whom it’s possible to get along.

  Action disconcerts us, partly because of our physical incompetence, but mainly because it offends our moral sensibility. We consider it immoral to act. It seems to us that every thought is debased when expressed in words, which transform the thought into the property of others, making it understandable to anyone who can understand it.

  We’re sympathetic towards the occult and the secret arts. We are not occultists, however. We weren’t born with the kind of will it takes, let alone the patience to educate and develop such a will into the perfect instrument of a wizard or hypnotist. But we sympathize with occultism, especially since it tends to express itself in ways that many who read and even think they understand it don’t understand a thing. Its arcane attitude is arrogantly superior. It is, in addition, a rich source of mysterious and terrifying sensations: astral larvae, the strange beings with strange bodies evoked in its temples by ritual magic, and the immaterial presences that hover all around our unperceiving senses, in the physical silence of inner sound – all of this comforts us in darkness and distress with the caress of its sticky, horrid hand.

  But we don’t sympathize with occultists when they act as apostles and champions of humanity; this strips them of their mystery. The only valid reason for an occultist to operate in the astral realm is for the sake of a higher aesthetic, not for the insidious purpose of doing good to others.

  Almost unawares we harbour an ancestral sympathy for black magic, for the forbidden forms of transcendental science, and for the Lords of Power who sold themselves to Condemnation and a degenerate Reincarnation. The eyes of our weak, vacillating souls lose themselves – like a bitch in heat – in the theory of inverse degrees, in corrupted rites, and in the sinister curve of the descendent, infernal hierarchy.

  Like it or not, Satan exerts an attraction on us like a male on a female. The serpent of Material Intelligence has wound around our heart, as around the symbolic caduceus of the God who communicates: Mercury, lord of Understanding.

  Those of us who aren’t homosexuals wish we had the courage to be. Our distaste for action can’t help but feminize us. We missed our true calling as housewives and idle chatelaines because of a sexual mix-up in our current incarnation. Although we don’t believe this one bit, to act as though we do smacks of irony’s very blood.

  None of this is out of meanness, just weakness. In private we adore the Bad, not because it’s bad, but because it’s stronger and more intense than the Good, and all that is strong and intense is attractive to nerves that should have belonged to a woman. Pecca fortiter can’t apply to us, for we have no force, not even the force of intelligence, which is the only one we could ever claim. To think of sinning forcefully – that’s the most we can do with this severe dictum. But even this is not always possible, for our inner life has its own reality which we sometimes find painful just because it is a reality. The existence of laws governing the association of ideas (along with all other mental operations) is insulting to our inherent lack of discipline.

  DIVINE ENVY

  Whenever I experience an agreeable sensation in the company of others, I begrudge the part they had in the sensation. It strikes me as an indecency that they should feel the same thing I do, that they should penetrate my soul through their own concordantly feeling soul.

  How can I take pride in the landscapes I contemplate, when the painful truth is that someone else has no doubt contemplated them for the same reasons I do? At other times and on other days, to be sure, but to call attention to such differences would be a pedantic consolation that’s beneath me. I know all too well that these differences are petty and that other people, with the same spirit of contemplation, have seen the landscape in a way not identical, but similar, to my own.

  That’s why I constantly strive to alter what I see, thereby making it indisputably mine – to alter the mountains’ profile while making it every bit as beautiful, and beautiful in the exact same way; to replace certain trees and flowers with others that are vastly and very differently the same; to see other colours that produce an identical effect in the sunset. In this way I create, thanks to my experience and my habit of spontaneously seeing when I look, an inner version of the outer world.

  And this is but the lowest level of replacing the visible. In my best and most intense moments of dreaming, I alter and create much more.

  I cause the landscape to affect me like music and to evoke visual images for my viewing pleasure – a peculiar and difficult ecstasy to achieve, since the evocative agent is of the same order as the sensations it evokes. My greatest triumph of this sort occurred when, during a moment of hazy light and atmosphere, I looked at the square at Cais do Sodré* and clearly saw it as a Chinese pagoda with odd bells hanging like absurd hats from the tips of its roof-tiles – a strange Chinese pagoda painted in space, painted I don’t know how on this satin-like space that endures in the abominable third dimension. And the moment smelled to me just like a cloth dragging somewhere far away, highly envious of reality…

  FUNERAL MARCH

  What does anyone do that can disturb or change the world? Isn’t there always, for every man of worth, another man just as worthy? One ordinary man is worth another; a man of action is worth the force he interprets; the man of thought is worth what he creates.

  Whatever you’ve created for humanity is at the mercy of the Earth’s cooling down. Whatever you’ve left for posterity is so characteristic of you that no one else will understand it, or it belongs only to your age and won’t be understood by future ages, or it speaks to all ages but won’t be understood by the final abyss into which all ages will fall.

  We are but windows, making gestures in the shadows, while behind us Mystery.....

  We are all mortal, with a given duration – never longer or shorter. Some die as soon as they die, while others live on for a time in the memory of those who knew and loved them; others survive in the memory of the nation that bore them; still others enter into the memory of the civilization they were part of; and some very few are able to span the contrary tendencies of differing civilizations. But all of us are surrounded by the abyss of time, in which we will ultimately vanish; the hunger of the abyss will swallow us all.....

  Durability is just a wish, and eternity an illusion.

  Death is what we are and what we live. We are born dead, we deadly exist, and we are already dead when we enter Death.

  Whatever lives, lives because it changes; it changes because it passes; and, because it passes, it dies. Whatever lives is constantly transforming into something else – it continually denies itself, it perpetually evades life.

  Life is thus an interval, a link, a relation, but a relation between what has passed and what will pass,
a dead interval between Death and Death.

  …intelligence, an errant fiction of the surface.

  Material life is either pure dream or a mere ensemble of atoms, oblivious to our rational conclusions and our emotional motivations. And so the essence of life is an illusion, an appearance, which is either pure being or non-being, and the illusion or appearance that it’s nothing must belong to non-being – life is death.

  How vain is all our striving to create, under the spell of the illusion of not dying! ‘Eternal poem,’ we say, or ‘Words that will never die.’ But the material cooling down of earth will carry off not only the living who cover it, but also.....

  A Homer or a Milton can do no more than a comet that strikes the earth.

  FUNERAL MARCH FOR LUDWIG II, KING OF BAVARIA *

  Today Death, tarrying longer than ever, came to sell at my doorstep. Slower than ever, she unfolded before me the rugs, silks and linens of her oblivion and her consolation. She smiled with satisfaction at the things she showed, without caring that I saw her smile. But as soon as I felt tempted to buy them, she said they weren’t for sale. She hadn’t come to make me want the things she showed but, through those things, to make me want her. The rugs, she said, were the kind that graced her far-away palace; the silks were the same ones worn in her castle of darkness; and even better linens than what she had showed me draped the altarpieces of her abode in the nether world.