The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

  Shine, absence of sun! Glow, fading moon!…

  Only you, unshining sun, light up the caves, for the caves are your daughters. Only you, unreal moon, give to the caverns, for the caverns.....

  ♦

  Your sex is that of dreamed forms, the sterile sex of figures. Now a vague profile, now a mere stance, and sometimes just a languid gesture – you are moments and stances which, spiritualized, become mine.

  My dreaming of you implies no fascination with your sex, with what lies beneath your ethereal robe, O Madonna of inner silences. Your breasts are not the kind one would imagine kissing. Your body is all soulish flesh, and yet it is body, not soul. The substance of your flesh isn’t spiritual, it’s spirituality. You are the woman before the Fall, still a sculpture made from that clay that paradise.

  My horror of real women endowed with sex is the road that brought me to you. How can one love the women of earth, who must endure the shifting weight of a man to be ? How can one’s love not wither in the foreglimpse of the pleasure that serves […] sex? Who can honour the Wife without being assaulted by the thought that she’s a woman who copulates? Who can help but despise having a mother by whom he was so vulvally, loathsomely born?* How can we not despise ourselves when we think of the carnal origin of our soul, of that restless, bodily that brings our flesh into the world? And however lovely that flesh may be, it’s ugly by virtue of its origin, loathsome because it was born.

  False, real-life idealists dedicate poems to the Wife and kneel to the idea of the Mother… Their idealism is a cloak that disguises, not a dream that creates.

  You alone are pure, Lady of Dreams, whom I can conceive as a lover without conceiving any stain, for you are unreal. I can conceive of you as a mother and adore you, for you were never defiled by the horror of being fertilized or the horror of giving birth.

  How not adore you when you alone are adorable? How not love you when you alone are worthy of love?

  Perhaps by dreaming you I create you, real in some other reality; perhaps it is there that you are mine, in a different, pure world where we love each other without tangible bodies, with another kind of embrace and other, ideal forms of possessing. Perhaps I didn’t create you; perhaps you already existed and I merely saw you with a different kind of vision – pure and inner – in another, perfect world. Perhaps my dreaming of you was simply my finding you, and my loving you merely my thinking of you. Perhaps my contempt for the flesh and my loathing of love were the obscure desire with which, unaware of your existence, I waited for you; perhaps they were my uncertain hope by which, without knowing you, I already loved you.

  It could even be that I already loved you in some vague wherever, and that my nostalgia for that love makes everything in my present life a tedium. Perhaps you are just my nostalgia for something, an embodiment of some absence, the presence of some Distance, female for reasons that don’t have to do with being a female.

  I can think of you as both a virgin and a mother, for you are not of this world. The child you hold in your arms was never any younger that you could have defiled him by carrying him in your womb. You were never other than who you are, so how could you not be a virgin? I can both love and adore you, for my love doesn’t possess you and my adoration doesn’t put you at a distance.

  Be the Eternal Day and let my sunsets be made of your sun’s rays, inseparable from you.

  Be the Invisible Twilight, with my disquiet and my yearnings as the shades of your indecision, the colours of your uncertainty.

  Be the Absolute Night, the Sole Night, in which I totally lose and forget myself, with my dreams glowing as stars on your body of distance and negation…

  Let me be the folds of your robe, the jewels of your tiara, and the strange gold in the rings on your fingers.

  Let me be ashes from your fireplace, because so what if I’m dust? Or a window in your room, because so what if I’m mere space? Or an hour in your clepsydra, because so what if I pass on but remain yours, if I die but live on as yours, if I lose you but by losing you find you?

  Mistress of absurdities, Votary of nonsense phrases,* may your silence cradle me and your lull me. May your pure being caress and soothe and comfort me, O heraldic Lady from the Beyond, O Empress of Absence, Virgin Mother of all silences, Hearthstone of cold souls, Guardian Angel of the forlorn, O unreal and human Landscape of sad, eternal Perfection.

  ♦

  You aren’t a woman. Not even within me do you evoke anything that feels feminine to me. It’s only when I speak of you that the words call you female and the phrases outline a woman’s profile. For I can’t help but speak of you with tenderness and dreamy affection, and words find a voice for this only by addressing you as a woman.

  But you, in your vague substance, are nothing. You have no reality, not even a reality that belongs only to you. Strictly speaking, I don’t see you or even feel you. You’re like a feeling whose object is its own self, contained entirely in the heart of its being. You’re always the landscape that I was just about to lay eyes on, the hem of the robe that I just missed seeing, lost in an eternal Now beyond the bend in the road. Your profile is your nothingness, and the contour of your unreal body tears apart, into separate pearls, the necklace of the very idea of contour. You’ve already passed, you’ve already gone, and I’ve already loved you – this is what I feel when I feel your presence.

  You occupy the blanks in my thoughts and the gaps in my sensations, which is why I neither think of you nor feel you. But my thoughts are vaulted with the feeling of you, and my feelings are gothic with your lofty evocation.

  Moon of lost memories over the black, vividly empty landscape of my imperfection’s self-awareness. My being feels you vaguely, as if it were one of your belts that feels you. I lean over your white face that flutters in the nocturnal waters of my disquiet, knowing that you are the moon in my sky that causes it, or a strange underwater moon that somehow feigns it.

  If only someone could create New Eyes through which to see you, New Thoughts and Feelings by which to think and feel you!

  When I go to touch your robe, my expressions grow weary from the effort to stretch out their hands, and a stiff, painful fatigue freezes in my words. And so the flight of a bird circles around what I wished to say about you, seeming to come nearer but never arriving, for the substance of my phrases cannot imitate the substance of your footsteps’ soft thudding, or of your glance’s slow sweeping, or of the sad, empty colour traced by the gestures you never made.

  ♦

  And should I speak with someone far away, and should you who today are a cloud of the possible fall tomorrow as rain of reality over the earth, don’t ever forget your divine origin as my dream. Let whatever you are in real life serve as the dream of a loner, never as a lover’s refuge. Do your duty as a mere vessel. Fulfil your calling as a useless amphora. Let no one ever say of you what the river’s soul might say of its banks: that they exist to confine it. It were better not to flow in life, better to let the dream dry up.

  May your essence consist in being superfluous, and may your life be the art of gazing at your life, of being gazed at, never identical. Don’t ever be anything more.

  Today you are but a profile, created out of this book, a moment made incarnate and separated from other moments. If I were sure that’s what you are, I would found a religion on the dream of loving you.

  You’re what everything is lacking. You’re what’s missing in each thing that would allow us to love it for ever. Lost key to the doors of the Temple, secret pathway to the Palace, distant Island forever hidden from view by the fog…

  PEDRO’S PASTORAL

  I don’t know where or when I saw you. I don’t know if it was in a picture or in the actual countryside, with real grass and trees growing around your body; but perhaps it was in a picture, so idyllic and legible is my memory of you. And although I don’t know when this happened or if it really did happen (for it may be that I didn’t even see you in a picture), I know with all my mind’s feelin
g that it was the most peaceful moment of my life.

  You calmly came down the wide stretch of road, a graceful herdswoman with a huge, gentle ox. I seem to remember seeing you from afar, and you came towards me and passed on by. You didn’t seem to notice me. You walked slowly and unmindful of the large ox. Your gaze had forgotten all memory, and it revealed a vast clearing in your inner life: your consciousness of self had abandoned you. In that moment you were nothing more than a.....

  Seeing you, I remembered that cities change but the fields are eternal. If we call rocks and mountains ‘biblical’, it’s because they’re surely just like the ones from biblical times.

  It’s in the fleeting image of your anonymous figure that I place all that the country evokes for me, and all the peace that I’ve never known fills my soul when I think of you. You walked with a light swing, a vague swaying, and a bird alighted* on each of your gestures; invisible vines wound around the of your chest. Your silence – the day was sinking down, and jingling flocks bleated their weariness on the greying slopes – your silence was the song of the last shepherd, who was left out of an eclogue that Virgil never wrote and thus remained forever unsung, forever a wandering silhouette in the fields. It’s possible you were smiling – to yourself, to your soul, seeing yourself smile in your mind – but your lips were as still as the outline of the mountains, and the gesture (which I don’t remember) of your rustic hands was garlanded with flowers from the fields.

  Yes, it was in a picture that I saw you. But where did I get this idea that I saw you approach and pass by me while I just kept going, never once turning around, since I could still see you, then and always? Time suddenly stops to let you pass, and I get you all wrong when I try to put you into life, or into its semblance.

  PERISTYLE

  It was in the silence of my disquiet, at the hour of day when the landscape is a halo of Life and dreaming is mere dreaming, my love, that I raised up this strange book like the open doors of an abandoned house.*

  I gathered every flower’s soul to write it, and from the fleeting moments of every song of every bird I wove eternity and stagnation. A steady weaver , I sat at the window of my life and forgot that I lived there and existed, shrouding my tedium in the chaste linens I wove for the altars of my silence.....

  And I offer you this book because I know it is beautiful and useless. It teaches nothing, inspires no faith, and stirs no feeling. A mere stream that flows towards an abyss of ashes scattered by the wind, neither helping nor harming the soil..... I put my whole soul into making it, but without thinking about it as I made it, for I thought only of me, who am sad, and of you, who aren’t anyone.

  And because this book is absurd, I love it; because it is useless, I want to give it away; and because it serves no purpose to want to give it to you, I give it to you…

  Pray for me by reading it, bless me by loving it, and forget it as today’s sun forgets yesterday’s, as I forget the women from my dreams that I was never very good at dreaming…

  Tower of Silence of my yearnings, may this book be the moonlight that transformed you on the night of the Ancient Mystery!

  River of painful Imperfection, may this book be the boat that drifts with your waters until it ends in the dreamed sea.

  Landscape of Estrangement and Exile, may this book be yours like your very Hour, and not be limited by you or by the Hour of false purples.

  ♦

  Eternal rivers flow beneath the window of my silence. I never stop seeing the far shore, and I don’t know why I don’t dream of being there, different and happy. Perhaps because you alone console, you alone lull, and you alone anoint and officiate.

  What white Mass do you interrupt to give me the blessing of showing me you exist? At what whirling moment of the dance do you halt, and Time with you, making your sudden halt into a bridge to my soul, and your smile into the royal purple of my splendour?

  Swan of rhythmic disquiet, lyre of immortal hours, faint harp of mythic sorrows – you are both the Awaited and the Departed, the one who soothes and also wounds, who gilds joys with sadness and crowns griefs with roses.

  What God created you, what God who must be hated by the God who created the world?

  You don’t know, you don’t know you don’t know, you don’t want to know or not know. You’ve stripped all purpose from your life, you’ve haloed your appearing with unreality, you’ve clothed yourself with perfection and intangibility so that the Hours won’t kiss you, nor the Days smile at you, nor the Nights come and place the moon, like a lily, in your hands.

  Shower me, my love, with the petals of better roses, of lovelier lilies, of chrysanthemums scented with the melody of their name.

  And I will die my life in you,* O Virgin for whom no arms are waiting, whom no kisses seek, and whom no thought deflowers.

  Foyer of all hopes, Threshold of all desires, Window to all dreams.....

  Belvedere that looks out on to all landscapes of nocturnal forests with far-off rivers shimmering in the bright moonlight…

  Poems and prose that were never meant to be written, just dreamed…

  ♦

  I know full well that you don’t exist, but do I know for certain that I exist? Do I, who make you exist in me, have more real life than you, than this dead life* that lives you?

  Flame transformed into halo, absent presence, rhythmic and female silence, twilight of wispy flesh, goblet that was left out of the banquet, stained-glass window of some painter-dream from the Middle Ages of another Earth.

  Chastely elegant chalice and host, abandoned altar of a still living saint, corolla of a dreamed lily in a garden no one has ever entered…

  You’re the only form that never brings tedium, for you always change according to our feelings, kissing our joy as well as lulling our pain and our weariness. You’re the opium that soothes, the sleep that refreshes, and the death that crosses and joins our hands.

  Angel , of what substance does your winged matter consist? What life holds you to what earth – you who are the never rising flight, a stagnant ascension, a gesture of rapture and of rest?

  ♦

  My dreaming of you will be my strength, and when my sentences tell your Beauty they will have melodies of form, curves of stanzas, and the sudden splendours of immortal verses.

  Let us create, O Mine Alone, an art like no other, founded on the wonder of you existing and on my seeing you exist.

  May I be able to extract the soul of new verses from the useless amphora that’s your body! And in your slow and quiet, wave-like rhythm, may my trembling fingers find the perfidious lines of a prose still virgin to human ears!

  May your fading, melodious smile be for me a symbol – the visible emblem of the whole world’s choked sob when it realizes it is error and imperfection.

  May your harpist’s hands pull my eyelids shut when I die from having given my life to making you. And you who are nobody will be forever, O Supreme One, the cherished art of the gods who never were, and the sterile, virgin mother of the gods who will never be.

  RANDOM DIARY

  Every day I’m mistreated by Matter. My sensibility is a wind-whipped flame.

  Walking down a street I see, in those who pass by me, not the facial expressions that they really have but the expressions that they would have if they knew what I’m like and the kind of life I lead, if my face and my gestures betrayed the shy and ridiculous abnormality of my soul. In eyes that don’t even look at me I suspect there are smirks (which I consider only natural) directed at the awkward exception I embody in a world of people who know how to act and to enjoy life; and the passing physiognomies, informed by an awareness that I myself have interposed and superimposed, seem to snicker out loud at my life’s timid gesticulations. Reflecting on all this, I try to convince myself that the smirks and mild reproach I feel come from me, and me alone, but once the image of me looking ridiculous has been objectified in others, I can no longer say it’s just mine. I suddenly feel myself suffocating and vacillating in a ho
thouse of mockery and hostility. All point their finger at me from the depths of their souls. All who pass by pelt me with their mirthful and contemptuous taunts. I walk among fiendish phantoms that my sick imagination has invented and placed in real people. Everything slaps me in the face and makes fun of me. And sometimes in the middle of the street – where in fact no one even notices me – I suddenly stop and look around me, as if searching for a new dimension, a door leading to the inside of space, to the other side of space, where I could run away from my awareness of other people, from my overly objectified intuition of the reality that belongs to other living souls.

  Does this habit of placing myself in the souls of others really lead me to see myself as others see me or would see me, if they took notice of me? Yes. And as soon as I realize how they would feel about me if they knew me, it’s as if they really did feel that way, as if right at that moment they were feeling exactly that, and expressing what they feel. To associate with others is sheer torture for me. And the others are in me. I’m forced to associate with them even when they’re nowhere near. All alone, I’m surrounded by multitudes. There’s no escape possible, unless I were to escape from myself.

  O magnificent hills at twilight, O narrowish streets in the moonlight, if only I had your unconsciousness, your spirituality that’s nothing but Matter, with no inner dimension, no sensibility, and no place for feelings, thoughts, or disquiet of the spirit! Trees so completely and only trees, with your greenness so pleasant to look at, so foreign to my troubles and concerns, so soothing to my anxieties precisely because you don’t have eyes with which to see them nor a soul which, seeing through those eyes, might misunderstand and make fun of them! Stones on the road, logs here and there, anonymous dirt of the ground that’s everywhere, my sister because your unawareness of my soul is a cosy and peaceful repose… Sunlit or moonlit things of Earth, my mother, so tenderly my mother, who can’t even criticize me like my own human mother, for you lack the soul that would instinctively analyse me, nor do you have swift glances which would betray thoughts about me that you’d never even confess to yourself… Vast ocean, my roaring childhood companion that soothes and lulls me, because your voice isn’t human and thus can never whisper my weaknesses and shortcomings into human ears… Broad and blue sky so close to the mystery of the angels....., you do not look at me with deceitful green eyes, and if you hold the Sun against your chest you don’t do it to seduce me, nor when you [cover yourself] with stars are you trying to show me that you’re superior… Universal peace of Nature, maternal because you don’t know me; aloof tranquillity of atoms and systems, so brotherly in your complete ignorance of me… I’d like to pray to your vastness and your calm, as a sign of my gratitude for having you and being able to love you without any doubts or qualms; I’d like to give ears to your inability to hear despite your always hearing us, to give eyes to your sublime blindness with which you always see us, and to be the object of your attentions via these imaginary ears and eyes, to feel the comfort of being noticed by your Nothingness, as if it were a definitive death, far far away, beyond any hope for another life, beyond any God and the possibility of other beings, voluptuously nil, with the spiritual colour of all matter…