The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

Sometimes he wished he were a simple unreflecting animal, untroubled by self-consciousness, but he saw in our uniquely human ability to reflect on and analyse ourselves the source of all our pleasures in life (he described sunsets as ‘an intellectual experience’) – and its pain.

Not even the suffering apparent in his pale, unremarkable features added any interest to them nor was it easy to pinpoint the origin of that suffering.

It could have been any number of things: hardship, grief or simply the suffering born of the indifference that comes from having suffered too much.

one who hopes for nothing because all hope is vain.

during one of those periods of daydreaming which, though devoid of either purpose or dignity, still constitute the greater part of the spiritual substance of my life, I imagined myself free forever

Freedom would mean rest, artistic achievement, the intellectual fulfilment of my being.

in times of difficulty, he’s easier to deal with than any abstraction the world has to offer.

but since it’s the fate of everyone in this life to be exploited, my question would be: is it any worse being exploited by Senhor Vasques and his textile company than by vanity, glory, resentment, envy or the impossible? Some, the prophets and saints who walk this vacuous world, are exploited by God himself.

I feel love for all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love or perhaps too, because even though nothing truly merits the love of any soul, if, out of sentiment, we must give it, I might just as well lavish it on the smallness of an inkwell as on the grand indifference of the stars.

Or else I’U be interned in a poorhouse, content with my utter failure, mingling with the riffraff who believed they were geniuses when in fact they were just beggars with dreams, mixing with the anonymous mass of people who had neither the strength to triumph nor the power to turn their defeats into victories.

and for me the monotony of my daily life will be like the memory of loves that never came my way and of triumphs that were never to be mine.

And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other.

I have never had a very high opinion of my physical appearance but never before have I felt such a nonentity as I did then, comparing myself with the other faces, so familiar to me, in that line-up of my daily companions.

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tambours I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.

I was robbed of any possibility of having existed before the world. If I was ever reincarnated, I must have done so without myself, without a self to reincarnate.

I’m a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I’ve even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me.

I’m always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I’m falling through a trapdoor, through infinite, infinitous* space, in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool.

Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul.

That monotony, however, is just the monotony of being me.

I’d like to run away, to flee from what I know, from what is mine, from what I love.

I want a rest from, to be other than, my habitual pretending. I want to feel the approach of sleep as if it were a promise of life, not rest.

since the monotony exists in me alone, I would never be free of it ? Suffocating where I am and because I am where I am, would I breathe any better there when it is my lungs that are diseased and not the air about me?

Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us, it seeps into us with every experience of the flesh and of life and, like the web of the great Spider, binds us subtly to what is near, ensnares us in a fragile cradle of slow death, where we lie rocking in the wind.

For banality is a form of intelligence, and reality, especially if it is brutish and rough, forms a natural complement to the soul.

The gods continue their conversations above the sweeping, indifferent to these incidents in the world below.

Discarded once I have served my purpose, I am thus relegated to the rubbish bin, along with the crumbs of what remains of Christ’s body, unable even to imagine what will come after, under what stars; but I know there will be an ‘after’.

In my case the two realities I attend to have equal weight. In that lies my originality. In that, perhaps, lie both my tragedy and the comedy of my tragedy.

Whether we like it or not, we are slaves to the hour in all its forms and colours, we are the subjects of heaven and earth.

As with all tragedies, the real tragedy of my life is just an irony of Fate. I reject life because it is a prison sentence, I reject dreams as being a vulgar form of escape. Yet I live the most sordid and ordinary of real lives and the most intense and constant of dream lives. I’m like a slave who gets drunk during his rest hour - two miseries inhabiting one body.

the laborious futility of each identical day, the same characters constantly rehearsing their roles, like a drama consisting only of scenery and in which even that scenery is facing the wrong way …

And so I drag myself along, doing things I don’t want to do and dreaming of what I cannot have […] as pointless as a public clock that’s stopped…

We are all of us the slaves of external circumstance:

that I will go to the bed of life not in the least tired, but companionless and troubled, caught in the ebb and flow of my confused consciousness, twin tides flowing in the black night, at the outer limits of nostalgia and desolation.

Fraternity is a very subtle thing. Some govern the world, others are the world.

One must monotonize existence in order to rid it of monotony.

if I had all that, none of it would be mine.

If I possessed the impossible landscapes, what would remain of the impossible?

Because I am nothing, I can imagine myself to be anything.

all I have to hope for is that today, like every other day, will come to an end.

The eyes of reason also look at the dawn and I see that the hope I placed in it, if it ever existed, was not mine.

deep-seated will to die, to finish, no more to see light falling on a city, not to think or feel, to leave behind me, like discarded wrapping paper, the course of the sun and all its days, and to peel off the involuntary effort of being as one would discard one’s heavy clothing at the foot of the great bed.

The life I drag around with me until night falls is not dissimilar to that of the streets themselves. By day they are full of meaningless bustle and by night full of an equally meaningless lack of bustle. By day I am nothing, by night I am myself. There is no difference between me and the streets around the Alfândega, except that they are streets and I am a human soul, and this, when weighed against the essence of all things, might also count for little. Men and objects share a common abstract destiny: to be of equally insignificant value in the algebra of life’s mystery.

the bitter sense that everything is at once both felt by me and external to me, and that I am powerless to change it.

What could anyone confess that would be worth anything or serve any useful purpose? What has happened to us has either happened to everyone or to us alone; if the former it has no novelty value and if the latter it will be incomprehensible. I write down what I feel in order to lower the fever of feeling. What I confess is of no importance because nothing is of any importance.

At the end of this day there remains what remained yesterday and what will remain tomorrow: the insatiable, unquantifiable longing to be both the same and other.

What’s become of the living?

Today tragedy is made visible by an absence and tangible because it barely deserves to be felt. Ah, but the office boy left today.

What a lot of nonsense just to satisfy myself! What cynical insights into purely hypothetical emotions!

‘My soul is weary of my life!’

Life, after all, is but one great insomnia and there is a lucid half-awakeness about everything we think or do.