The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

  She gently unravelled the ties that held me to my native, unadorned home. ‘Your fireplace,’ she said, ‘has no fire, so why do you want a fireplace?’ ‘Your table,’ she said, ‘has no bread, so what is your table for?’ ‘Your life,’ she said, ‘has no friend or companion, so why does your life charm you?’

  She said, ‘I am the fire of cold fireplaces, the bread of bare tables, the faithful companion of the lonely and the misunderstood. The glory that’s missing in this world is the pride of my black domain. In my kingdom love doesn’t weary, for it doesn’t long to possess; nor does it suffer from the frustration of never having possessed. My hand lightly rests on the hair of those who think, and they forget; those who have waited in vain lean against my breast, and finally come to trust.

  ‘The love that souls have for me is free of the passion that consumes, of the jealousy that deranges, of the forgetfulness that tarnishes. To love me is as calm as a summer night, when beggars sleep in the open air and look like rocks on the side of the road. My lips utter no song like the sirens’ nor any melody like that of the trees and fountains, but my silence welcomes like a faint music, and my stillness soothes like the torpor of a breeze.

  ‘What do you have,’ she said, ‘that binds you to life? Love doesn’t follow you, glory doesn’t seek you, and power doesn’t find you. The house that you inherited was in ruins. The lands you received had already lost their first fruits to frost, and the sun had withered their promises. You have never found water in your farm’s well. And before you ever saw them, the leaves had all rotted in your pools; weeds covered the paths and walkways where your feet had never trod.

  ‘But in my domain, where only the night reigns, you will be consoled, for your hopes will have ceased; you’ll be able to forget, for your desire will have died; you will finally rest, for you’ll have no life.’

  And she showed me the futility of hoping for better days when one isn’t born with a soul that can know better days. She showed me how dreaming never consoles, for life hurts all the more when we wake up. She showed me how sleep gives no rest, for it is haunted by phantoms, shadows of things, ghosts of gestures, stillborn desires, the flotsam from the shipwreck of living.

  And as she spoke, she slowly folded up – more slowly than ever – her rugs which tempted my eyes, her silks which my soul coveted, and the linens of her altarpieces, where my tears were already falling.

  ‘Why try to be like others if you’re condemned to being yourself? Why laugh if, when you laugh, even your genuine happiness is false, since it is born of forgetting who you are? Why cry if you feel it’s of no use, and if you cry not because tears console you but because it grieves you that they don’t?

  ‘If you’re happy when you laugh, then when you laugh I’ve triumphed; if you’re happy, because you don’t remember who you are, then think how much happier you’ll be with me, where you won’t remember anything! If you rest perfectly on those rare occasions when you sleep without dreaming, then think how you’ll rest in my bed, where sleep never has dreams! If you sometimes feel exalted because, seeing Beauty, you forget yourself and Life, then how much more you’ll feel exalted in my palace, whose nocturnal beauty is always harmonious and never ages or decays; in my halls, where no wind ruffles the curtains, no dust covers the chairs, no light slowly fades the velvets and the silks, and no time yellows the vacant whiteness of the walls!

  ‘Come to my affection, which never changes, and to my love, which has no end! Drink from my inexhaustible chalice the supreme nectar which doesn’t jade or taste bitter, which doesn’t nauseate or inebriate! Look out the window of my castle and contemplate not the moonlight and the sea, which are beautiful and thus imperfect things, but the vast, maternal night, the undivided splendour of the bottomless abyss!

  ‘In my arms you will forget even the painful road that brought you to them. Against my breast you won’t even feel the love that prompted you to come and seek it. Sit next to me on my throne and you will for ever be the undethronable emperor of the Mystery and the Grail, you will coexist with the gods and with all destinies, and like them you’ll be nothing, you’ll have no here or hereafter, and you won’t need what you abound in, nor what you lack, nor even what suffices you.

  ‘I will be your maternal wife, the twin sister you’ve at long last recovered. And with all your anxieties married to me, with all that you vainly sought in yourself now entrusted to me, you yourself will become lost in my mystic substance, in my forsworn existence, in my breast where things smother, in my breast where souls drown, in my breast where the gods vanish.’

  ♦

  Sovereign King of Detachment and Renunciation, Emperor of Death and Shipwreck, living dream that grandly wanders among the world’s ruins and wastes!

  Sovereign King of Despair amid splendours, grieving lord of palaces that don’t satisfy, master of processions and pageants that never succeed in blotting out life!

  Sovereign King risen up from the tombs, who came in the night by the light of the moon to tell your life to the living, royal page of lilies that have lost their petals, imperial herald of the coldness of ivory!

  Sovereign King Shepherd of the Watches, knight errant of Anxieties travelling on moonlit roads without glory and without even a lady to serve, lord in the forests and on the slopes, a silent silhouette with visor drawn shut, passing through valleys, misunderstood in villages, ridiculed in towns, scorned in cities!

  Sovereign King consecrated by Death to be her own, pale and absurd, forgotten and unrecognized, reigning amid worn-out velvets and tarnished marble on his throne at the limits of the Possible, surrounded by the shadows of his unreal court and guarded by the fantasy of his mysterious, soldierless army.

  Bring the goblets, platters and garlands, all you pages and damsels and servants! Bring them for the feast which Death will host! Bring them and come dressed in black, with your heads crowned by myrtle.

  Bring mandrake in the goblets, on your platters, and make your garlands from violets, from all the flowers that evoke sadness.

  The King is going to dine with Death in her ancient palace next to the lake, up in the mountains and far from life, cut off from the world.

  Let the orchestras rehearsing for the feast be made up of strange instruments, whose mere sound prompts tears. Let the servants be clad in sober liveries of unknown colours; let them be lavish yet simple, like the catafalques of heroes.*

  And before the feast begins, let the long medieval cortège of dead purple robes promenade in a grandly silent ritual on the tree-lined paths of vast parks, like beauty passing through a nightmare.

  Death is Life’s triumph!

  It is by death that we live, because we exist today only for having died to yesterday. It is by death that we hope, for we can believe in tomorrow only because we’re sure today will die. It is by death that we live when we dream, since to dream is to deny life. It is by death that we die when we live, since to live is to deny eternity! Death guides us, death seeks us, death accompanies us. All that we have is death, all that we want is death, and death is all that we care to want.

  A breeze of attention sweeps through the wings.

  Here he comes, escorted by Death, whom no one sees, and by , who never arrives.

  Heralds, sound your horns! Attention!

  Your love for things dreamed was your contempt for things lived.

  Virgin King who disdained love,

  Shadow King who despised light,

  Dream King who denied life!

  Amid the muffled racket of cymbals and drums, Darkness acclaims you Emperor!

  IMPERIAL LEGEND

  My Imagination is a city in the Orient. The entire substance of its spatial reality has the surface sensuality of a plush and luxurious rug. The tents and stalls that brightly colour the streets stand out against a strange background that doesn’t match, like red or yellow embroidery on light-blue satin. The entire history of this city circles around the light bulb of my dream like a scarcely audible moth in the penumbra of
my room. My fantasy once lived amid splendours and received time-tarnished jewels from the hands of queens. Intimate velvets carpeted the beaches of my non-existence, and seaweeds like shadowy puffs floated in plain view on my rivers. And so I was porticos from lost civilizations, feverish arabesques in dead friezes, the blackening of eternity in the twists of broken columns, lonely masts of remote shipwrecks, the stone steps of toppled thrones, veils veiling nothing but seeming to veil shadows, phantoms risen up from the ground like smoke from dashed censers. My reign was gloomy, and constant wars in the border regions tainted the imperial peace of my palace. Always the vague sound of parties in the distance, always a procession that was supposed to pass beneath my windows, but no golden red fish in my pools, and no apples in the green stillness of my orchard; and not even the smoke from beyond the trees, rising from the chimneys of poor huts with happy people, ever lulled to sleep with their ballads of simplicity the restless mystery* of my self-awareness.*

  IN THE FOREST OF ESTRANGEMENT

  I know I have woken up and still sleep. My ancient body, exhausted from living, tells me it is still very early… I feel distantly feverish. I weigh on myself, without knowing why…

  Half awake and half asleep, I stagnate in a lucid, heavily immaterial torpor, in a dream that is a shadow of dreaming. My attention floats between two worlds, blindly seeing the depths of an ocean and the depths of a sky; and these depths blend, they interpenetrate, and I don’t know where I am or what I’m dreaming.

  A gust of shadows blows ashes of dead intentions over the part of me that’s awake. A warm dew of tedium falls from an unknown firmament. An enormous, inert anxiety sifts through my soul and unwittingly changes me, as the breeze changes the line formed by the tops of the trees.

  In my warm, languid alcove, the imminent dawn is just a shadowy glow. I’m overwhelmed by a quiet confusion… Why must a new day break?… It weighs on me to know it will break, as if I had to do something to make it happen.

  Slowly, as if in a daze, I grow calm, then numb. I hover in the air, neither awake nor asleep, and find myself engulfed by another sort of reality, appearing from I don’t know where…

  This new reality – that of a strange forest – makes its appearance without effacing the reality of my warm alcove. The two realities coexist in my captivated attention, like two mingled vapours.

  And that tremulous, transparent landscape clearly belongs to them both!…

  And who is this woman who joins me in clothing, with her gaze, that forest of otherness? Why do I stop to ask myself?… I don’t even know how to want to know…

  The hazy alcove is a dark glass through which I consciously view that landscape… And I’ve known that landscape for a long time, and for a long time I’ve walked with this woman I don’t know, wandering as a different reality through her unreality. I can feel, deep down, all the centuries through which I’ve known those trees, those flowers and those straying paths, as well as the me that wanders there, ancient and visible to my gaze – a gaze that’s shadowed by my awareness of being in this alcove.

  Sometimes in that forest, where from afar I see and feel myself, a light breeze spreads a mist, and that mist is the dark, clear vision of the alcove where I exist in reality, among these hazy pieces of furniture and drapes and nocturnal torpor. Then the breeze subsides and the landscape of that other world returns to being completely and exclusively itself…

  At other times this small room is but an ashen whiff of fog on the horizon of that so different land… And there are times when this tangible alcove is the ground we tread in that other land…

  I dream and lose myself, doubly so, in me and the woman… I’m consumed by the black fire of an overwhelming fatigue… I’m constricted by the false life of an enormous, passive yearning…

  O tarnished happiness!… Eternal hesitation at the crossroads!… I dream, and behind my consciousness someone is dreaming with me… And perhaps I’m no more than a dream of that Someone who doesn’t exist…

  The dawn outside is so far away! and the forest so near to those other eyes of mine!

  When I’m far from the forest, I almost forget it, but when I have it I feel nostalgia for it, and roaming through it makes me weep and yearn for it…

  The trees! the flowers! the paths hidden among the brush!…

  We sometimes strolled arm in arm under the cedars and redbuds, and neither of us thought about living. Our flesh was a wispy fragrance and our life the echo of a trickling fountain. We held hands and our gazes wondered what it would be like to be sensual and to try to live out the illusion of love in the flesh…

  Our garden had flowers endowed with every kind of beauty: roses with ruffled edges, yellowish-white lilies, poppies that would remain hidden if their deep red didn’t betray them, violets towards the verdant borders of the flower beds, delicate forget-me-nots, camellias with no scent… And above the tall grasses, the startled eyes of solitary sunflowers stared at us intently.

  Our souls, which were pure vision, stroked the visible coolness of the mosses, and passing by the palm trees we vaguely intuited other lands… And tears welled up at the thought, for not even here were we happy when happy…

  Oak trees full of knotty centuries made our feet trip over the dead tentacles of their roots… The plane trees stood perfectly still… And through the nearby trees we could see, in the distance, blackish clusters of grapes hanging in the silence of trellised vines…

  Our dream of living went ahead of us, on wings, and we both smiled at it with the same detached smile, agreed upon in our souls without looking at each other, unaware of each other except for the felt presence of one person’s arm supporting the other’s.

  Our life had no inner dimension. We were outer and other. We no longer knew ourselves. It was as if we had arrived back at our souls after a journey through dreams…

  We had forgotten time, and the immensity of space had become tiny in our eyes. Besides the nearby trees and the distant grape vines and the last hills on the horizon, was there anything real, anything worthy of the rapt attention paid to things that exist?…

  In the clepsydra of our imperfection, steady drops of dreaming marked the unreal hours… Nothing is worth our while, O my faraway love, except to know how sweet it is to know that nothing is worth our while…

  The static motion of the trees; the troubled quiet of the fountains; the indefinable breathing of the saps’ deep pulsing; the slow arrival of dusk, which seems not to fall over things but to come from inside them and to reach its spiritually kindred hand up to that distant sorrow (so close to our soul) of the heavens’ lofty silence; the steady and futile falling of leaves, drops of estrangement in which the landscape comes to exist only in our hearing, and it becomes sad in us like a remembered homeland – all of this girded us uncertainly, like a belt coming undone.

  There we lived in a time that couldn’t possibly flow, in a space one could never even dream of measuring. A flowing that occurred outside of Time, an expanse that didn’t respect the norms of spatial reality… All those hours we spent there, O useless soulmate of my tedium! All those hours of joyful disquiet that pretended to be ours!… All those hours of spiritual ashes, days of spatial nostalgia, inner centuries of outer landscape… And we didn’t ask what it was all for, because we revelled in knowing that it was for nothing.

  There we knew, by an intuition that was surely not ours, that this sorrowful world in which we were two was situated – if it existed – beyond the farthest line where the mountains were only hazy shapes, and we knew that beyond that line there was nothing. And it was this contradiction that made the time we spent there dark like a cave in a superstitious country, and our awareness of the contradiction was eerie, like the silhouette of a Moorish city against an autumn sky at twilight…

  On the horizon of our hearing, unknown seas lapped beaches we would never be able to see, and it was a joy to hear – and to see in ourselves – that sea on which caravels no doubt sailed, and for other ends besides the us
eful ones that reign on Earth.

  We suddenly realized, as when someone realizes he’s alive, that the air was full of birdsong and that we were imbued by the loud rustle of leaves – like satin by an ancient perfume – even more than by our consciousness of hearing it.

  And so the warbling of the birds, the whispering of the trees and the monotonous, forgotten depths of the eternal sea circled our abandoned life with a halo of no longer knowing that life. There we slept away waking days, glad of being nothing, of having no desires or hopes, of having forgotten the colour of loves and the taste of hatreds. We thought we were immortal…

  There we lived hours that we felt in a new way, hours of an empty imperfection that were therefore perfect, perfectly diagonal to life’s rectangular certainty… Deposed imperial hours, hours clad in fraying purple robes, hours fallen into this world from another world, one that boasts of having more dismantled anxieties…

  And to enjoy all of that was painful, truly painful… For in spite of the peaceful exile it afforded us, the landscape smacked of our belonging to this world, it was steeped in the pomp of a vague tedium, sad and vast and perverse like the decadence of some unknown empire…

  In the curtains of our alcove the morning is a shadow of light. My lips, which I know are pale, taste to each other like they don’t wish to live.

  The air of our neutral room is as heavy as a drape across a doorway. Our drowsy attention to the mystery of all this is limp like the train of a robe dragged across the ground during a ceremony at twilight.

  None of our yearnings has any reason to exist. Our attentive gaze is an absurdity allowed by our winged inertia.

  I don’t know what penumbral oils anoint the idea we have of our body. The fatigue we feel is the shadow of a fatigue. It comes from far away, like the idea that our life exists…

  Neither of us has a plausible existence or name. If we could be noisy to the point of imagining ourselves laughing, we would doubtless laugh at our belief that we live. The warmed-up coolness of the bed sheet caresses (surely for you as well as for me) our two feet that nakedly touch each other.