The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

Someone, please, close the lid on all this! Let me be done with consciousness and life!

I am more truly myself in this random eternity, symbolic of the half-souled state in which I live deluding myself.

I don’t want to know about the world out there. All I feel is tired, tired, utterly tired!

I do not sleep. I half-exist.

One can see only what one has already seen.

My soul today is sad to the very marrow of its bones. Everything hurts me - memory, eyes, arms. It’s like having rheumatism in every part of my being.

I suffer without feeling or thinking.

Everything is as utterly vain as stirring up cold ashes, as insubstantial as the moment just before dawn.

A cloud passing in front of the sun is enough to make me suffer, how then should I not suffer in the darkness of the endlessly overcast sky of my own life?

My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.

The peace of it all hurts me and weighs on me. A formless tedium suffocates me.

What I enjoyed about these vast fields I enjoyed because I don’t live here. Someone who has never known constraint can have no concept of freedom.

We build our beliefs and hopes out of these small misunderstandings with reality and live off husks of bread that we call cakes, the way poor children play at being happy.

the words I write are utterly will-less. Sadness lurks beneath consciousness. I write, or rather scribble, these lines not in order to say anything in particular but to give my distraction something to do.

The poet was born only after he died, because it was only after his death that his poetry came to be appreciated.

everything, and with it my childhood, will be lost.

What makes my mind ache with the repeated, involuntary recurrence of the piano scales from upstairs, so horribly distant and anonymous, is the abstract flight of time, not the concrete flight of time that affects me directly. It is the whole mysterious fact of nothing lasting which again and again hammers out the notes, notes that are not quite music,

but rather a mixture of nostalgia and longing that lurks in the absur...

the longing I feel is neither truly mine nor truly abstract,

My hurt and anguish come from my imagined feelings and it is only in my imagination and my sense of otherness that I think and feel this nostalgia, which nevertheless leaves my own eyes awash with tears.

There’s intoxication enough for me in just living.

again just like everyone else. I’m just the same. But behind this sameness, I secretly scatter my personal firmament with stars and therein create my own infinity.

I suffer the double tragedy of knowing them to be worthless but at the same time knowing that indeed they were not entirely dreamed and that some trace of them lingers on in the abstract threshold of my thinking them and their existing.

I live always in the present. I know nothing of the future and no longer have a past. The former weighs me down with a thousand possibilities, the latter with the reality of nothingness. I have neither hopes for the future nor longings for what was.

Nothing in my past life fills me with the vain desire to repeat it. I have never been anything more than a mere vestige, a simulacrum of myself.

in this moment you are the whole universe to me, because you entirely fill my every conscious feeling.

Until the day when this outward aspect of my self should cease, may the gods preserve in me this clear, sunny notion of external reality, this sense of my own unimportance, this comforting feeling of being small and capable of imagining being happy.

these evenings are full of such painful indifference it is as if the autumn were beginning in us rather than in the world.

My heart aches as if it were not mine. My brain lulls to sleep everything I feel.

The truth is that we possess nothing but our own senses; it is on them, then, and not on what they perceive, that we must base the reality of our life.

But all this is apropos of nothing.

How little of the real world one needs as a starting point for the best meditations: arriving late for lunch, running out of matches and throwing the empty box out into the street, feeling slightly indisposed after eating lunch too late, it being Sunday with nothing in the air but the promise of a poor sunset, my being no one in this world, and other such metaphysical matters.

With my waking was born a physical nausea for all of life.

I felt afraid I might go mad, not from madness, but just from being there. My whole body was a suppressed scream. My heart beat as if it would speak.

great sense of peace that I do not possess is scattered in the cold, abstract autumn air. Not having it, I let myself suffer the vague pleasure of imagining its existence. But in reality there is neither peace nor a lack of it, there is only sky, a sky made up of every fading colour -

And all of this is just a vision that dies the instant it is conceived, a fleeting interval between nothing and nothing, placed on high, prolix and undefined, painted in the colours of heaven and of grief.

Now, as many times before, I am troubled by my own experience of my feelings, by my anguish simply to be feeling something, my disquiet simply at being here, my nostalgia for something never known, the setting of the sun on all emotions, this fading, in my external consciousness of myself, from yellow into grey sadness.

Who will save me from existence? It isn’t death I want, or life: it’s the other thing that shines at the bottom of all longing like a possible diamond in a cave one cannot reach.

if that sense of freedom is not in me, then it’s nowhere.

‘However high we climb and however low we fall we never escape our own feelings.’ We can never disembark from ourselves.

I think of us as climates constantly threatened by storms that always break somewhere else.

The empty immensity of things, the great forgetting that fills sky and earth …

There is something of my own disquiet in the steady drip and patter by which the day vainly empties out its sadness upon the earth.

A cold hand grips my throat and will not let me breathe in life. Everything is dying in me, even the knowledge that I can dream! I do not feel well, not in any physical sense. My soul finds hard edges to all the soft comforts on which I lean for support. Every gaze I look on has grown dark, defeated by the impoverished light of this day now set to die a painless death.

Nothing was definite, not even the indefinite.

another day, life and its fictitious usefulness and vain activity; my physical personality, visible, social, communicable through words that mean nothing, usable by other people’s thoughts and gestures.

None of these things is of any importance. Like all ordinary things in life, they are a dream of mysteries and castle battlements from which I look out upon the plain of my meditations like a herald newly arrived.

What do I know? What do I want? What do I feel? What would I ask for if I had the chance?

Everything is as useless as I feel. Everything I’ve lived through I’ve forgotten as if it were something I had only vaguely overheard. And of what I will be there is no trace in my memory, as if I had already lived through and forgotten it.

Tedium is not a sickness brought on by the boredom of having nothing to do but the worse sickness of feeling that nothing is worth doing.