The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

  …pacts between torpor and anguish – dull green-black and looking terribly weary between their sentries of tedium…

  …nacre of useless consequences, alabaster of many macerations – the welcome distraction of violet gold sunsets with fringes, but no boats leading to better shores, nor bridges to better twilights…

  …nor even to the edge of the idea of pools, lots of pools, in the distance amid poplar trees or perhaps cypresses, depending on the syllables employed by the wistful moment to utter their name…

  …hence windows opening on to wharfs, a continual pounding of waves against docks, a mad and enraptured retinue like a confusion of opals in which amaranths and terebinths write with lucid insomnias on the dark stone walls of being able to hear…

  …strands of fine silver, ties made from the thread of unravelled robes, futile feelings beneath linden trees, ancient couples on quiet paths lined by hedges, sudden fans, vague gestures, and no doubt better gardens awaiting the placid weariness of nothing but paths and promenades…

  …bowers, trees in quincunxes, artificial grottoes, sculpted flower beds, fountains, all the art that survives from the dead masters whose dissatisfaction duelled with the visible, and they authored whole processions of things made for dreams along the narrow streets of the ancient villages of sensations…

  …melodies that resound against the marble of distant palaces, reminiscences that place their hands on ours, sunsets in fateful skies like fortuitous glances of uncertainty, giving way to starlit nights over silently decaying empires…

  _____

  To reduce sensation to a science, to make psychological analysis into a microscopically precise method – that’s the goal that occupies, like a steady thirst, the hub of my life’s will.

  It’s between my sensations and my consciousness of them that all of my life’s great tragedies occur. It’s there in that murky, indefinite region of nothing but woods and every kind of water sound, where not even the commotion of our wars is felt, that my true being – which I try in vain to see clearly – takes place.

  I lay down my life. (My sensations are a long-drawn-out epitaph* on top of my dead life.) I subsist in death and dusk. The most I can sculpt is my tomb of inner beauty.

  The gates of my seclusion open on to parks of infinity, but no one passes through them, not even in my dreams – and yet they are open eternally on to the useless, they are eternally of iron opening on to the unreal…

  I pluck the petals of private glories in the gardens of my inner splendours, and between dreamed hedges my feet loudly tread the paths that lead to the Confused.

  I’ve pitched my Empires in the Confused, at the edge of silences, in the tawny war that will do away with the Exact.

  _____

  The man of science realizes that the only reality for him is his own self, and that the only real world is the world as his sensations give it to him. That’s why, instead of following the fallacious path of adapting his sensations to other people’s, he uses objective science to try to achieve a perfect knowledge of his world and his personality. There’s nothing more objective than his dreams, and nothing more infallibly his than his self-awareness. Around these two realities he refines his science. It’s very different from the one practised by the old scientists, who, rather than studying the laws of their own personality and the organization of their dreams, sought the laws of the ‘outside’ and the organization of what they called ‘Nature’.

  ♦

  What’s primordial in me are my habit of dreaming and my knack for dreaming. The circumstances of my life, solitary and quiet since my childhood, and perhaps forces that go further back, moulding me to their sinister specifications through the obscure action of heredity, have made my mind an endless stream of daydreams. Everything I am comes down to this, and even what seems farthest in me from the dreamer belongs unequivocally to the soul of one who only dreams, with his soul as elevated as it can be.

  For the sake of my own pleasure in self-analysis, I would like to express in words, as far as I’m able, the mental processes which in me are really just one process – that of a life devoted to dreaming, of a soul that knows only how to dream.

  Seeing myself from the outside (as I almost always do), I’m unfit for action, flustered when I have to take a step or make a move, tongue-tied when I have to talk to someone, lacking the inner lucidity needed to enjoy things that require mental effort, and without the physical stamina to entertain myself through some merely mechanical labour.

  It’s only natural that I’m this way. A dreamer is expected to be this way. All reality disconcerts me. Other people’s speech throws me into a state of great anguish. The reality of other souls always astounds me. The vast network of unconscious behaviours responsible for all the action I see strikes me as an absurd illusion, without any plausible coherence, nothing.

  But should someone imagine that I’m ignorant of the workings of other people’s psychology, that I’m not clearly aware of their motives and private thoughts, then he’ll be quite mistaken about what I am.

  For I’m not just a dreamer, I’m exclusively a dreamer. My sole habit – to dream – has endowed me with an extraordinarily keen inner eyesight. I not only see the figures and stage sets of my dreams with astounding and startling clarity, I see just as clearly my abstract ideas, my human feelings (what’s left of them), my secret urges and my psychological attitudes towards myself. I even see, inside myself, my own abstract ideas; I see them in an internal space, with my veritable inner eyesight. And thus their meanders are visible to me in every detail.

  I therefore know myself completely and, knowing myself completely, I know all of humanity completely. There is no base impulse or noble intention that hasn’t been a flash in my soul, and I know the tell-tale gestures of each one. Beneath the masks of goodness or indifference that wicked thoughts wear, even within us, I recognize them for what they are by their gestures. I know what strives, inside us, to delude us. And thus I know most people better than they know themselves. I often probe them at some length, for in that way I make them mine. I conquer every psyche I fathom, because for me to dream is to possess. And so it’s only natural that I, dreamer that I am, should be the analyst I profess to be.

  That’s why plays count among the few things I occasionally enjoy reading. Plays are performed in me every day, and I know exactly how souls are laid out flat, in a Mercator projection. But this doesn’t really amuse me much, because playwrights are always making the same trite and glaring errors. No play ever satisfied me. Knowing human psychology with a lightning precision that probes every cranny with a single glance, I find the crude analysis and construction of playwrights offensive, and the little that I read in this genre annoys me like a blot of ink on a handwritten page.

  Things are the raw material of my dreams; that’s why I apply a distractedly hyperattentive attention to certain details of the Outside.

  To give contours and relief to my dreams, I have to understand how life’s characters and reality’s landscapes appear to us with contours and relief. Because the dreamer’s eyesight is not like the eyesight we use to see actual things. In dreams we do not, as in reality, focus equally on the important and unimportant aspects of an object. The dreamer sees only what’s important. An object’s true reality is only a portion of what it is; the rest is the heavy tribute it pays to physical matter for the right to exist in space. In like manner, certain phenomena that are palpably real in dreams have no reality in space. A real sunset is imponderable and transitory. A dreamed sunset is fixed and eternal. Those who can write are those who know how to see their dreams with sharp clarity (and do so) and to see life as they see dreams, to see life immaterially, taking pictures of it with reverie’s camera, which is insensible to the rays of what’s heavy, useful and circumscribed, such things yielding nothing but a black blur on the photographic plate of the soul.

  This attitude, engrafted into me from so much dreaming, makes me always see the dream side of reality. My eyes
ight suppresses those aspects of an object that my dreams can’t use. And so I always live in dreams, even when I live in life. To look at a sunset inside me or at a sunset on the Outside is all the same to me, for I see them in the same way, my eyesight registering the same thing in both cases.

  It will therefore seem to many that I have a distorted view of myself. In a certain way it is distorted. But I dream myself and choose those parts of me that are dreamable, constructing and reconstructing myself in every way possible until what I am and what I am not conform to my ideal. Sometimes the best way to see an object is to delete it, because it subsists in a way I can’t quite explain, consisting of the substance of its negation and deletion; this is what I do with vast areas of my real-life being, which, after they’re deleted from my picture of myself, transfigure my true being, the one that’s real for me.

  How do I keep from deceiving myself in these processes of illusion applied to my own person? Well, the process that thrusts a certain aspect of the world or the figure of a dream into a more-than-real reality also thrusts emotions and thoughts into the more-than-real sphere, stripping them of all the false trappings (and only rarely are they not false) of nobility and purity. It should be noted that my objectivity couldn’t be more absolute, for I create each object absolute, with absolute qualities in its concrete form. I haven’t really fled from life, in the sense of seeking a softer bed for my soul; I’ve merely changed lives, finding in my dreams the same objectivity that I found in life. My dreams – I discuss this in another passage – take shape independently of my will, and they frequently shock and offend me. The things I discover in myself very often make me feel dismayed, ashamed (perhaps due to some vestige of humanity in me – what is shame?), and alarmed.

  In me ceaseless daydreaming has replaced attention. Over everything I see, including things seen in dreams, I’ve taken to superimposing other dreams I have inside me. I’m already sufficiently inattentive to be adept at what I’ve dubbed ‘the dream view’ of things. Even so, since this inattentiveness was motivated by a perpetual daydreaming and by a preoccupation (likewise not overly attentive) with the course of my dreams, I superimpose what I dream on the dreams I see in the real world around me, intersecting reality already stripped of its physical matter with an absolute immateriality.

  This explains the ability I’ve acquired to focus on various ideas at the same time, to observe certain things while at the same time dreaming other, very different things, to dream simultaneously of a real sunset over the real Tagus River and a dreamed morning on an inner Pacific Ocean; and the two dreamed things crisscross without blending, without anything getting mixed up besides the different emotional states induced by each. It’s as if I saw a number of people walking down a street and felt all their souls inside me (which could occur only in a unity of feeling) at the same time that I saw their various bodies (these I could see only separately) crossing paths on the street full of legs in motion.

  MILLIMETRES

  (the sensation of slight things)

  The present is ancient, because everything from the past was in the present when it existed, and so I have an antique dealer’s fondness for things precisely because they belong to the present, and I have the wrath of an outrivalled collector for anyone who tries to replace my mistaken notions about things with plausible and even provable, scientifically based arguments.

  The various points that a butterfly successively occupies in space are various things which, to my astonished eyes, remain visible in space. My recollections are so intense that.....

  But it is only the subtlest sensations of the slightest things that I live intensely. Perhaps this is due to my love of futility. Or maybe it’s because of my concern for detail. But I’m inclined to believe – I can’t say I know, for these are things I never bother to analyse – that it’s because slight things, having absolutely no social or practical importance, are for that very reason absolutely free of sordid associations with reality. Slight things smack to me of unreality. The useless is beautiful because it’s less real than the useful, which continues and extends, whereas the marvellously futile and the gloriously minuscule stay where and as they are, living freely and independently. The useless and the futile open up humbly aesthetic interludes in our real lives. What dreams and fond delights are stirred in my soul by the puny existence of a pin in a ribbon! What a pity for those who don’t realize how important this is!

  Among the sensations that inwardly torture us to the point of becoming pleasurable, the disquiet provoked by the world’s mystery is one of the most common and complex. And that mystery is never more evident than when we contemplate tiny things, which don’t move and are therefore perfectly translucent, allowing their mystery to show through. It’s harder to feel mystery when contemplating a battle (and yet to meditate on the absurdity of there being people and societies and conflicts between them is what can most unfurl in our minds the flag of triumph over mystery) than when contemplating a small stone on the road which, since it brings to mind no idea beyond that of its existence, will naturally and necessarily lead us – if we keep thinking about it – to consider the mystery of its existence.

  Blessed be instants and millimetres and the shadows of tiny things, which are even more humble than the things themselves! Instants..... Millimetres – how astonished I am by their audacity to exist side by side and so close together on a tape measure. Sometimes these things make me suffer or rejoice, and then I feel a kind of gut pride.

  I’m an ultrasensitive photographic plate. All details are engraved in me out of all proportion to any possible whole. The plate fills up with nothing but me. The outer world that I see is pure sensation. I never forget that I feel.

  OUR LADY OF SILENCE

  Sometimes, when I feel discouraged and depressed, even my ability to dream loses its leaves and shrivels, and the only kind of dreaming I can have is to muse on my dreams, and so I leaf through them, like a book one leafs through over and over, finding nothing but inevitable words. And then I ask myself who you are, you this figure who traverses all my languid visions of unknown landscapes and ancient interiors and splendid pageants of silence. In all of my dreams you appear, in dream form, or you accompany me as a false reality. With you I visit regions that are perhaps dreams of yours, lands that are perhaps your bodies of absence and inhumanity, your essential body dissolved into the shape of a tranquil plain and a stark hill on the grounds of some secret place. Perhaps I have no dream but you. Perhaps it is in your eyes, when my face leans into yours, that I read these impossible landscapes, these unreal tediums, these feelings that inhabit the shadows of my weariness and the caves of my disquiet. Perhaps the landscapes of my dreams are my way of not dreaming about you. I don’t know who you are, but do I know for certain who I am? Do I really know what it means to dream, such that I can know what it means to call you my dream? How do I know that you’re not a part of me, perhaps the real and essential part? And how do I know it’s not I who am the dream and you the reality, I who am your dream instead of you being mine?

  What sort of life do you have? By what manner of seeing do I see you? Your profile? It’s never the same, yet it never changes. And I say this because I know it, without knowing that I know it. Your body? It’s the same whether naked or dressed, and in the same position whether seated or standing or lying down. What is the meaning of this that means nothing?

  ♦

  My life is so sad, and I don’t even think of weeping over it; my days are so false, and I don’t even dream of trying to change them.

  How can I possibly not dream of you? Lady of the Passing Hours, Madonna of stagnant waters and rotting seaweed, Tutelary Goddess of the sprawling deserts and the black landscapes of barren cliffs – deliver me from my youth.

  Consoler of the disconsolate, Tears of those who never weep, Hour that never strikes – deliver me from joy and happiness.

  Opium of all silences, unplucked Lyre, Stained-Glass Window of distance and exile – make me hated by men
and scorned by women.

  Cymbal of Extreme Unction, Caress that doesn’t touch, Dove lying dead in the shade, Oil of hours spent dreaming – deliver me from religion, for it is sweet, and from unbelief, for it is strong.

  Lily drooping in the afternoon, Keepsake Box of wilted roses. Silence between prayers – fill me with loathing for being alive, with resentment for being healthy, and with contempt for my youth.

  Make me useless and sterile, O Shelter of all hazy dreams; make me pure for no reason, and indifferently false, O Running Water of Sad Experience; let my mouth be a frozen landscape, my eyes two dead ponds, and my gestures the slow withering of decrepit trees, O Litany of Disquiet, O Royal Mass of Weariness, O Corolla, O Holy Fluid, O Ascension!

  What a pity I must pray to you as to a woman and cannot love you as one loves a man, nor feast my dream’s eyes on you as the Dawn-in-Reverse of the unreal sex of those angels who never entered heaven!

  ♦

  In my prayer to you I offer my love, because my love is itself a prayer, but I don’t think of you as my beloved nor hold you up before me as a saint.

  May your acts be the statue of renunciation, your gestures the pedestal of indifference, and your words the stained-glass windows of denial.

  ♦

  Splendour of nothing, name from the abyss, peace from the Beyond…

  Eternal virgin, who existed before the gods, before the gods’ fathers, and before the fathers of the gods’ fathers, barren Virgin of all the worlds, sterile Virgin of all souls…

  To you we lift up all days and all beings; the stars are votive offerings in your temple; and the weariness of the gods returns to your breast like the bird to the nest it built without knowing how.

  From the height of anguish may we see the day come into view! And if we see no day come, then let that be the day that comes into view!