The Book of Disquiet in On Paths Unknown

Apr 16, 2011 David Katzman rated it really liked it

The Book of Disquiet should be read slowly and thoughtfully, savored and sipped like fine wine. It’s a groundbreaking work of Modernist experimentation that consists of a collection of writings found on disorganized scraps of paper in a chest found in the author’s home after his death. These scraps were assembled into a book for the first time in the 1960s. Pessoa, who was Portuguese, wrote the segments over the course of the last twenty years of his life, which ended in 1935.

Pessoa invented mul The Book of Disquiet should be read slowly and thoughtfully, savored and sipped like fine wine. It’s a groundbreaking work of Modernist experimentation that consists of a collection of writings found on disorganized scraps of paper in a chest found in the author’s home after his death. These scraps were assembled into a book for the first time in the 1960s. Pessoa, who was Portuguese, wrote the segments over the course of the last twenty years of his life, which ended in 1935.

Pessoa invented multiple personas for himself that he called heteronyms, and each of his novels or collections of poetry was written from the perspective of an alter ego. He essentially invented multiple authors and wrote from their perspective. It’s a distinct approach from having a character narrate a novel, especially when it comes to writing a collection of poetry, but even in this “novel” because there is no plot to speak of, only an internal landscape. Pessoa makes no effort to distinguish his own critique of the “author’s opinions,” he merely embodies them. In other words, there is no authorial distance, no “unreliable narrator” theme, there is only the narrator. It is as if Pessoa had a multiple personality disorder in artistic form. The collection of writings in this book are measures of the interior life of one Bernardo Soares, which Pessoa described as being a “mutilated version” of himself, but perhaps the closest to his own beliefs of all his heteronyms. He describes Soares as rather like “himself minus the affection.”

Indeed, Soares comes across as so purely intellectual (although he does have the occasional overwhelming emotional response to small occurrences) that he is rather distant and cold—completely self-absorbed and narcissistic, in fact. Soares lives a life that is almost entirely metaphysical. In one of the 276 segments in the book, he refers to this collection as a “book of disconnected impressions.” Some might say that this isn’t a novel! But in the case of what is important to Soares (or to Pessoa), intellectual thought is apparently the only process that sustains his life. It is the story of his life, which was very little but intellectual.

We get glimpses of this persona at work, as an accountant poring over ledgers (which is what Pessoa did as well), and walking the streets of Lisbon, but for the most part, nothing ever happens. Soares lives a life only in his mind and in his daydreams. He is scared and reluctant to say hello or even shake hands with others. It is too shocking, too much for him. Much like Proust who wrote an entire series of book triggered by the taste of a single Madeleine cookie, Soares believes that an artist must be able to wring the greatest emotional effect out of the smallest incidents. So why write of large incidents when small ones suffice?

What subjects does Soares ponder as we make our way through this book? What is the book about? Walking and weather. Fame and ambition, rain and dreams. Banality, the banality of existence. Change or the lack there of. Dreams, especially dreams. Work. God. Writing and art. Identity and being.

At times he can seem quite humble, or more precisely, assured of his own inadequacy and contemptuous of himself, believing that everything he writes is worthless and a failure, railing at his own—and by proxy, every writers’—inability to truly represent ideas or thoughts in words (this being quite reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s view that language mediates our understanding of reality). Yet other times he can seem utterly arrogant in his narcissism. Other people are merely props for his internal dreams and thinking, and in fact he boldly declares at one point, “… of what importance is to me what life is to other people?” Because, he would say, we can only live life from our own perspective and to attempt “empathy” is a delusion. Other people aren’t even real to any of us—except as dreams.* Sometimes this seems almost Buddhist—we are dreaming life and because all is change, nothing is real and all there is is nothing. “The self is nothing more than all it is thinking in the moment.” Other times, it comes across as clearly Nietzschean, which would seem close to Pessoa's own ideology because he was a royalist of sorts. Soares believes that humans want to be enslaved not free. He has certain fascist tendencies that peek through his primarily apolitical musings. For example, he declares himself both anti-revolutionary and anti-reformist. Much like Nietzsche who sought to create amoral übermen, he is anti-social and believes that pursuing matters of social justice are not only a waste of time, but also a false presumption of pride and ambition in the self, to shape society. Furthermore, such actions support the premise that other people are “real” when in fact they are only dreams.** And then on the flipside of this, humans are unimportant and vulgar animals anyway: "Life disgusts me."

When he talks about work, he seems to say that work (not artist work, but paid commercial work) is an opportunity to become nothing—a mere tool, a non-thing—and to Soares, this is good, this is the enslavement that people want. The more the self can vanish as meaningless, the better. He criticizes ambition to “do something better” as pure vanity.

How can I give this book four stars when there are such disagreeable elements? Well, firstly, one doesn’t have to agree with everything in a book philosophically to find it a great book. Sometimes, finding a point of view that one can disagree with is just as valuable. And secondarily, he spends most of the book pondering apolitical questions on the nature of perception, emotion, and identity revealing brilliant bon mots that remind me of Montaigne such as, “There is nothing that shows poverty of mind more quickly than not knowing how to be witty except at the expense of others.” Admittedly, I did feel at times as though I were slogging through an ambiguous fog that didn’t quite make sense, but then I would come to a burst of insight like a spotlight that illuminates the way. In the end, these insights (whether they be about life in general, or whether they gave me insights into certain types of people with tendencies like the narrator), were often profound enough to elevate this book to quite a high status.

All in all, this book will only appeal to those readers comfortable with deep thoughts lacking a plot, and willing to persevere, but the rewards can be great.

*I counter this by noting that if everything is a dream and everyone is a dream then all that matters is dreams and empathy for dreams is just as valid as non-empathy for dreams.

**It’s important to recognize that someone is always shaping society—those who are already in power. Therefore, in fact, passively supporting the status quo is just as much a political action as resisting the status quo. It’s merely the path of least resistance…that is, until your freedom or means of survival are at stake. ...more

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Jun 12, 2013 Tej rated it it was amazing

Shelves: all-time-favorites

I begin because I don’t have the strength to think; I finish because I don’t have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice. .
........
It sometimes occurs to me, with sad delight, that if one day (in a future to which I won’t belong) the sentences I write are read and admired, then at last I’ll have my own kin, people who ‘understand’ me, my true family in which to be born and loved. But far from being born into it, I’ll have already died long ago. I’ll be understood only in effigy, I begin because I don’t have the strength to think; I finish because I don’t have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice. .
........
It sometimes occurs to me, with sad delight, that if one day (in a future to which I won’t belong) the sentences I write are read and admired, then at last I’ll have my own kin, people who ‘understand’ me, my true family in which to be born and loved. But far from being born into it, I’ll have already died long ago. I’ll be understood only in effigy, when affection can no longer compensate for the indifference that was the dead man’s lot in life.

My mind says, say something. You ought to. Heart asks what? He has said it all…. his voice is vituperatively, brazenly, lyrically honest, his courage unassailable and his meekness unfathomable. You will muddle and mix it up ‘to suit the tastes’, he has not cared for the aesthetics… his picture is ‘THE TRUTH’. And then, he is a poet, even his prose is poetic. He writes in a reverie, writes about nothingness, on nothingness and even if all he says is the truth, his goals are ‘nothing’ and he exactly achieves that, nothing. All the more, this is about nothing else but life which is nothing but an absurd and meaningful nothingness. Absurdity breeds disquiet, absurdity cannot be accepted always, without at least voicing the disquiet. Fear of one’s own reflection is strictly antagonistic to this holy grail of disquiet.

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.
...........
I weep over my imperfect pages, but if future generations read them, they will be more touched by my weeping than by any perfection I might have achieved, since perfection would have kept me from weeping and, therefore, from writing. Perfection never materializes. The saint weeps, and is human. God is silent. That is why we can love the saint but cannot love God.

Lumps innumerable! Why lumps? The fortitude and bravado at the battle fronts of life suddenly striking the moldy impenetrable wall of an abyss. But how can an abyss have a wall? A wall periodically entrenched by our very blood, the symbol of life. The abyss must be kept from interfering in our ‘living’. ‘Lump’ then is a euphoric signal, not of pusillanimity but of there still being ‘real life’ beating in us.

Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I’d languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.
...........
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.
...........
We never know self-realization. We are two abysses – a well staring at the sky.

To live is to be dead. Feel less, hypnotize the self into a make believe world of thoughtfully ‘planned’ happiness. The death of feelings should be disquieting at least but in a world where will leads to power, the disquiets are muted. In the world governed by the statistical p-value significance, the individual outliers matter the least, muted insignificant beings. Poking into the pustules of emotional conundrums, of famine of the soul is a hush-hush affair. Disquieted world breeds disquiets all ends yet very few voice it aloud. Life is an absurdly unfathomable behemoth of immense contradictions where us, inhabitants, all individual grapplers of ‘realities’, initially learn from it and then it becomes us, constructing compartments, claustrophobic nooks where we rest ourselves, the depth of us loses itself into an immense inertial inertness and what projects itself among the living is the altered, masked, affectively ‘dead’ me, us. Our petrification is complete when it comes to dislocating anything that rests in these grottos of darkness for the fear that the hard earned semblance of make believe tranquility that supposedly ‘runs’ our lives and the world, a whole of several such worlds, may not get dislodged to stall it all. We are nothing but scared chickened out living dead.

…… in spite of everything, I love them all. My dear vegetables!
.........
For me, to write is self-deprecating, and yet I can’t quit doing it. Writing is like the drug I abhor and keep taking, the addiction I despise and depend on. There are necessary poisons, and some are extremely subtle, composed of ingredients from the soul, herbs collected from among the ruins of dreams, black poppies found next to the graves of our intentions, the long leaves of obscene trees whose branches sway on the echoing banks of the soul’s infernal rivers.
..........
In writing I rock myself, like a crazed mother her dead child.

Solitude’s darkest hours and inevitability of disquiet, diving into one’s entrails, fishing out the darkest ponderings, meanderings of a troubled soul is probably the toughest road to traverse. The yearning of a few is the albatross of the masses. These are surreptitious affairs carried out in the private company of own selves. In an ironical world, the pain and suffering of disquieted souls often becomes a source of solace to the beings far removed from overt venturesome acknowledgment of disquiet.

Taking nothing seriously and recognizing our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge there, exploring them like large unknown countries.
...............
Why is art beautiful? Because it’s useless. Why is life ugly? Because it’s all aims, objectives and intentions. All of its roads are for going from one point to another. If only we could have a road connecting a place no one ever leaves from to a place where no one goes!

Moreover, Life may be a beacon of light, of luminously glowing brightness, its glow, nevertheless is a cipher and not everyone out there is blessed with the key to break the code. Even the privileged few who possess the key, find it utterly unusable at times, sometimes as good as useless. Disquiet is universal, mostly hidden in the ‘travesty’ of life, masked by the penumbra of its superficiality. Peace, tranquility, repose, balance, equilibrium, all heavy words, and to provide them weight are many an unshed tear and wails, snubbed and curtailed disquiets. Ours is a world of tedium.

Tedium… To think without thinking, but with the weariness of thinking; to feel without feeling, but with the anxiety of feeling; to shun without shunning, but with the disgust that makes one shun – all of this is in tedium but is not tedium itself, being at best a paraphrase or translation of it. In terms of our immediate sensation, it’s as if the drawbridge had been raised over the moat of the soul’s castle, such that we can only gaze at the lands around the castle, without ever being able to set foot on them. There’s something in us that isolates us from ourselves, and the separating element is as stagnant as we are, a ditch of filthy water around our self-alienation.
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Tedium… To suffer without suffering, to want without desire, to think without reason… It’s like being possessed by a negative demon, like being bewitched by nothing at all.

But some of us fail at the double-game, play the ‘fool’ in this picture perfect world of sanity, spill our disquiet. In all the ruckus created by the shenanigans of gregarious tom-foolery in the name of wailing off the ‘joy’ that life is, disquiet still finds few of its flag-bearers, voices that refuse to get lost in the face of being out-casted, declared pariahs or dispatched with disdain, even. The disquieted denizens of a world replete with disquiets, kings of solitude, ambition-less, will-less and illusion-less dreamers (of reality).

We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it’s towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses.
............
And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self-expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes.

Of-course, all is not well with us, neither do we claim so. We are not phlegmatic saints, pictures of equanimity and unequivocal balance, lined up at the altars of wisdom. We are not idealistic idols to be framed and heralded in the echelons of peace. Chaos! Chaos is our talisman and we represent anarchy. Peaceful, subtle anarchy! Absolutely, contradiction! You are dead to the ‘feel’ to be alive to the world, we are alive because we feel and dead to the world. Opposites, well not entirely maybe but we exist because you exist, in the lack of universality, our disquiet is our very existence. We exist because we feel, only because we feel. Our real world is conjured up in dreams, dreams sans illusions. Our needs are many, elaborate and vivid, we are the eponymous ‘feelers’. We are like children when it comes to living. We want this, we also want that, can’t have both, we need both or nothing at all…. DISQUIET.

Children, who want at all costs to have their way, are closest to God, for they want to exist.

We are the flag-bearers of ‘the Human Condition’. Running after tomes and tomes of packaged elixirs of knowledge and understanding to know thyself, what foolery you embody and frame. Live embodiment of all that you can ever hope to find in your encyclopedic repertoire of information, are we.

To be able to have dreams, it’s crucial that you know how to have no illusions.
............
What would be ideal is to have no more action than the false action of a fountain – to go up so as to fall down in the same place, pointlessly shimmering in the sun and making sound in the silence of the night so that whoever dreams would think of rivers in his dream and smile forgetfully.
............
Perhaps the novel is a more perfect life and reality, which God creates through us. Perhaps we live only to create it. It seems that civilizations exist only to produce art and literature; words are what speak for them and remain. How do we know that these extra-human figures aren’t truly real? It tortures my mind to think this might be the case…

TO LIVE IS TO BE IN-EBRIATED. Drunk with life or the lack of it. The lack of life per se can’t be life? But our ‘life’ beats in different frequency from your existence supported by innumerable contraptions. We are drunk with nothingness? We ‘feel’ alive to the point of death in our world of nothingness. Only here, empty is not empty but full! Come to us, disquieted denizens, savor our world!

Revolution? Change? What I really want, with all my heart, is for the atonic clouds to stop greyly lathering the sky. What I want is to see the blue emerge, a truth that is clear and sure because it is nothing and wants nothing.
..............
Sleep! To fall asleep! To have peace! To be an abstract consciousness that’s conscious only of breathing peacefully, without a world, without heavens, without a soul – a dead sea of emotion reflecting an absence of stars!
...more

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Feb 21, 2013 Jonathan rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, worshiped-and-adored

I found this last night, which I scribbled down about 8 years ago when I first read this. I will let it stand as is:

*******************

I am reading a new translation of 'The Book of Disquiet' by Fernando Pessoa. These fragments shoved in a trunk speak in a voice so close to my own, secret, internal wanderings that I feel like a shadow slowly recognising the body it follows. This is not to suggest I am anything near his genius but simply that he writes what I remember feeling, or I remember feel I found this last night, which I scribbled down about 8 years ago when I first read this. I will let it stand as is:

*******************

I am reading a new translation of 'The Book of Disquiet' by Fernando Pessoa. These fragments shoved in a trunk speak in a voice so close to my own, secret, internal wanderings that I feel like a shadow slowly recognising the body it follows. This is not to suggest I am anything near his genius but simply that he writes what I remember feeling, or I remember feeling their rough, uncertain edges at my few precious moments of precision...

"We generally give to our ideas about the unknown the color of our notions about what we do know: If we call death a sleep it's because it has the appearance of sleep; if we call death a new life, it's because it seems different from life. We build our beliefs and hopes out of these small misunderstandings with reality and live off husks of bread we call cakes, the way poor children play at being happy.
But that's how all life is; at least that's how the particular way of life generally known as civilization is. Civilization consists in giving an inappropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so. We manufacture realities. We use the raw materials we always used but the form lent it by art effectively prevents it from remaining the same. A table made out of pinewood is a pinetree but it is also a table. We sit down at the table not at the pinetree. ..."

This reminds me of Heidegger's comment that when we sit at our table to eat we are not sitting at 'A' table, but 'The' (or 'This') table - it is burdened with memories and language (although some would say they are the same thing) and that the Being of my table is something only I can give it. I used to think a lot about how 'The' Universe existed only for, and in, me...There is, of course, something that is 'The Universe' and will run me over if I cross the road without looking, but the only one I can 'Know' or 'Experience' is the one created within me by my brain. Which means my universe, and my table, are unique and that my death will be their death too...I am truly a destroyer (and a creator) of worlds..

*********************

I find it funny I was having the same rambling Heidegger thoughts then as I just had on my review of McElroy's Ancient History. Apparently my brain is just going round and round in circles...

I also now take something a little different from the quote - much more about the way language and naming operate to prevent "open" interactions with Things. ...more

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Oct 31, 2010 David Katzman rated it really liked it · review of another edition

The Book of Disquiet should be read slowly and thoughtfully, savored and sipped like fine wine. It’s a groundbreaking work of Modernist experimentation that consists of a collection of writings found on disorganized scraps of paper in a chest found in the author’s home after his death. These scraps were assembled into a book for the first time in the 1960s. Pessoa, who was Portuguese, wrote the segments over the course of the last twenty years of his life, which ended in 1935.

Pessoa invented mul The Book of Disquiet should be read slowly and thoughtfully, savored and sipped like fine wine. It’s a groundbreaking work of Modernist experimentation that consists of a collection of writings found on disorganized scraps of paper in a chest found in the author’s home after his death. These scraps were assembled into a book for the first time in the 1960s. Pessoa, who was Portuguese, wrote the segments over the course of the last twenty years of his life, which ended in 1935.

Pessoa invented multiple personas for himself that he called heteronyms, and each of his novels or collections of poetry was written from the perspective of an alter ego. He essentially invented multiple authors and wrote from their perspective. It’s a distinct approach from having a character narrate a novel, especially when it comes to writing a collection of poetry, but even in this “novel” because there is no plot to speak of, only an internal landscape. Pessoa makes no effort to distinguish his own critique of the “author’s opinions,” he merely embodies them. In other words, there is no authorial distance, no “unreliable narrator” theme, there is only the narrator. It is as if Pessoa had a multiple personality disorder in artistic form. The collection of writings in this book are measures of the interior life of one Bernardo Soares, which Pessoa described as being a “mutilated version” of himself, but perhaps the closest to his own beliefs of all his heteronyms. He describes Soares as rather like “himself minus the affection.”

Indeed, Soares comes across as so purely intellectual (although he does have the occasional overwhelming emotional response to small occurrences) that he is rather distant and cold—completely self-absorbed and narcissistic, in fact. Soares lives a life that is almost entirely metaphysical. In one of the 276 segments in the book, he refers to this collection as a “book of disconnected impressions.” Some might say that this isn’t a novel! But in the case of what is important to Soares (or to Pessoa), intellectual thought is apparently the only process that sustains his life. It is the story of his life, which was very little but intellectual.

We get glimpses of this persona at work, as an accountant poring over ledgers (which is what Pessoa did as well), and walking the streets of Lisbon, but for the most part, nothing ever happens. Soares lives a life only in his mind and in his daydreams. He is scared and reluctant to say hello or even shake hands with others. It is too shocking, too much for him. Much like Proust who wrote an entire series of book triggered by the taste of a single Madeleine cookie, Soares believes that an artist must be able to wring the greatest emotional effect out of the smallest incidents. So why write of large incidents when small ones suffice?

What subjects does Soares ponder as we make our way through this book? What is the book about? Walking and weather. Fame and ambition, rain and dreams. Banality, the banality of existence. Change or the lack there of. Dreams, especially dreams. Work. God. Writing and art. Identity and being.

At times he can seem quite humble, or more precisely, assured of his own inadequacy and contemptuous of himself, believing that everything he writes is worthless and a failure, railing at his own—and by proxy, every writers’—inability to truly represent ideas or thoughts in words (this being quite reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s view that language mediates our understanding of reality). Yet other times he can seem utterly arrogant in his narcissism. Other people are merely props for his internal dreams and thinking, and in fact he boldly declares at one point, “… of what importance is to me what life is to other people?” Because, he would say, we can only live life from our own perspective and to attempt “empathy” is a delusion. Other people aren’t even real to any of us—except as dreams.* Sometimes this seems almost Buddhist—we are dreaming life and because all is change, nothing is real and all there is is nothing. “The self is nothing more than all it is thinking in the moment.” Other times, it comes across as clearly Nietzschean, which would seem close to Pessoa's own ideology because he was a royalist of sorts. Soares believes that humans want to be enslaved not free. He has certain fascist tendencies that peek through his primarily apolitical musings. For example, he declares himself both anti-revolutionary and anti-reformist. Much like Nietzsche who sought to create amoral übermen, he is anti-social and believes that pursuing matters of social justice are not only a waste of time, but also a false presumption of pride and ambition in the self, to shape society. Furthermore, such actions support the premise that other people are “real” when in fact they are only dreams.** And then on the flipside of this, humans are unimportant and vulgar animals anyway: "Life disgusts me."

When he talks about work, he seems to say that work (not artist work, but paid commercial work) is an opportunity to become nothing—a mere tool, a non-thing—and to Soares, this is good, this is the enslavement that people want. The more the self can vanish as meaningless, the better. He criticizes ambition to “do something better” as pure vanity.

How can I give this book four stars when there are such disagreeable elements? Well, firstly, one doesn’t have to agree with everything in a book philosophically to find it a great book. Sometimes, finding a point of view that one can disagree with is just as valuable. And secondarily, he spends most of the book pondering apolitical questions of the nature of perception, emotion, and identity revealing brilliant bon mots that remind me of Montaigne such as, “There is nothing that shows poverty of mind more quickly than not knowing how to be witty except at the expense of others.” Admittedly, I did feel at times as though I were slogging through an ambiguous fog that didn’t quite make sense, but then I would come to a burst of insight like a spotlight that illuminates the way. In the end, these insights (whether they be about life in general, or whether they gave me insights into certain types of people with tendencies like the narrator), were often profound enough to elevate this book to quite a high status.

All in all, this book will only appeal to those readers comfortable with deep thoughts lacking a plot, and willing to persevere, but the rewards can be great.

*I counter this by noting that if everything is a dream and everyone is a dream then all that matters is dreams and empathy for dreams is just as valid as non-empathy for dreams.

**It’s important to recognize that someone is always shaping society—those who are already in power. Therefore, in fact, passively supporting the status quo is just as much a political action as resisting the status quo. It’s merely the path of least resistance…that is, until your freedom or means of self-survival are stake. ...more

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Apr 17, 2011 Magdelanye rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: ethics, creative-process, social-commentary, existential-crises, language-thought-reality, alternate-reality, auto-biography, favorite

'Sometimes I think with ambivilent pleasure of the possibility of creating in the future a geography of our consciousness of ourselves....All this depends on a great refinement of our inner feelings, which,taken to its limit, will no doubt reveal or create in us a genuine space like the space in which physical things exist but which,in fact, does not itself exist as a thing." p171

"The truth is that we possess nothing but our own senses; it is on them,then,and not on what we perceive,that we must ...more

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