The Book of Disquiet in On Paths Unknown

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. .
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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. .
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Jun 25, 2013 Xandra rated it did not like it

Shelves: 1001-books, big-books, z-m, memoir-biography, 1900-1949, european, philosophy, portuguese-spanish

Okay, so the plan was to fall in love with Fernando Pessoa and correct my ignorance regarding his work. He appears to be one of Portugal’s most remarkable writers and I wanted to start with The Book of Disquiet, follow with Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis and finish with Antonio Tabucchi’s tribute to Pessoa, Requiem: A Hallucination.

The thing is, I didn’t like The Book of Disquiet. Sure, I felt a pang of nostalgia every time he mentioned the name of a street in Lisbon or a day ...more

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Mar 19, 2013 Poet Gentleness rated it it was amazing

Shelves: classics

I know this is going to be more of a confession than a review, but here we go.

I was gifted this book by a dear Goodreads friend, DC, who unfriended me, but I haven't unfriended her. (Why? Ask Pessoa, he will explain it better than I would ever.).

In fact, she sent it to me directly from Lisbon, Portugal, in Portuguese (It was not this edition). I felt as if the most wonderful of the gifts had landed on my lap because it was a shame that a prolific reader like me and a Portuguese (albeit Brazilia I know this is going to be more of a confession than a review, but here we go.

I was gifted this book by a dear Goodreads friend, DC, who unfriended me, but I haven't unfriended her. (Why? Ask Pessoa, he will explain it better than I would ever.).

In fact, she sent it to me directly from Lisbon, Portugal, in Portuguese (It was not this edition). I felt as if the most wonderful of the gifts had landed on my lap because it was a shame that a prolific reader like me and a Portuguese (albeit Brazilian) reader, had not read The Book of Disquiet.
To wrap the gift with a golden ribbon, I am finishing writing a trilogy (at that time), full of lonely and troubled characters, that are looking for some peace for their souls.
And as I read The Book of Disquiet, I felt my characters speaking many of his words to my readers. To explain themselves, their feelings, and their acts - weird and eerie, and why not say, scary - I felt myself being explained too.
I felt as if I was one of the hundreds lonely souls of Pessoa and one and each of my characters' souls. It took me a long time to gathered the courage to sit down and write this review.

I read the book in one night. Just like that. It was so easy. Easy because I knew I was reading it superficially that I would revisited it many and many times. It turned out to be one of my bedside table books. And it's so marked and dog eared that it seems an old book. Because its writing is as old as the world, as Pessoa must have been. It's a door to a painful new world of discoveries that were right there on my face. And I felt... dispossessed. Robbed. Of what I don't really know.

People tend to look at those who like solitude as psychiatric troubled. I know from personal experience. I don't quite know if I could live completely alone, but I feel perfectly comfortable with myself and my books, alone, on a sunny Sunday or a gloomy Friday night. Why shouldn't I? I'm not a recluse and I have a family, but specially as I write, and this is a long solitary journey - and if you're true to your writing there is no journey more important than that of the one into oneself, because each and every one of my characters are myself, even though they could have been blueprints of other people, I have experienced these blueprints one way or another.

When writing - or reading a good book - I can spend a full day alone and without saying a word. Sometimes I even forget to eat. I don't need to see the outside world. It is inside me. I don't need others' companies, they are all inside myself. And in a world that requires so much from one while gives out so little, why should I bother?
And then I understood... I understood the dispossessment I felt. Because when I was re-reading my own book, the second instalment of the trilogy, to finish a scene in the third, I could heard the words of Bernardo Soares in my ear...
"That’s why I read, as a stranger,
My being as if it were pages.
Not knowing what will come
And forgetting what has passed,
I note in the margin of my reading
What I thought I felt.
Rereading, I wonder: “Was that me?”
God knows, because he wrote it."

Many times I stopped to ask how I could have written some of the parts of my trilogy or the philosophical essay (written in 1988 - published in 2013) because I could find in myself those deep, touching passages.
I'm a common, normal woman that has a family and many daily problems. And yet... And yet... "I don’t know how many souls I have."

The Book of Disquiet turned out to be the perfect lonely soul's bible.
This is not a 5 star rating. This is a 5 million star rating and a million thank you to my still dear friend, for her sensitivity and huge soul.

If there are guardian angels in this planet, I think I just found one of mine in The Book of Disquiet. ...more

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