The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

How often have I looked up from the book in which I’m writing and felt my head quite empty of the whole world. It would be better for me if I were inert, doing nothing,

I meditate on the eternal insatiability of my vague desires and on the perennial instability of my impossible longings. What afflicts me most is a sickness which is really only my capacity for suffering. I lack something I do not want and suffer because this is not true suffering.

Everything floats blithely by on the surface of life.

I asked for so little from life and life denied me even that.

not to feel the knowledge of my existence weigh too heavily on me, to demand nothing of others and have them demand nothing of me.

Sad, in my quiet room, alone as I have always been and as I always will be, I sit writing.

I observe my useless life devoid of beauty, the cheap cigarette […] on the old blotter. Here I am, in this fourth floor room, demanding answers from life! pronouncing on what other souls feel! writing prose [ …]

however, I am myself, I squeeze a meagre enjoyment out of the meagre pleasure of imagining myself that other person.

for a moment I was someone else: I saw and lived as another that humble, human happiness of existing like a dumb beast in shirtsleeves.

It was a time to be happy, yet something weighed on me, an obscure longing, an undefined but not entirely despicable desire.

I know that I was never anything but error and mistake, that I never lived, that I existed only in the sense that I filled up time with consciousness and thought.

And, after it all, I just feel sleepy because, though I don’t really know why, I suspect that the meaning of it all is simply to sleep.

I am equal in size to whatever I see

‘I am equal in size to whatever I see!’ And the vague moonlight, entirely mine, begins to mar with its vagueness the almost black blueness of the horizon.

I can only comprehend the perennial inertia in which I allow my monotonously uneventful life to lie, like a layer of dust or dirt on the surface of a resolute unchangeability, as a lack of personal cleanliness.

We should bathe our destinies as we do our bodies, change our lives just as we change our clothes - not to keep ourselves alive, which is why we eat and sleep, but out of the disinterested respect for ourselves which can properly be called cleanliness.

in the dust of necessity, I write my daily signature on my contract with death.

Anyone who lives the way I do does not die: he comes to an end, withers, merely ceases to vegetate. The space he occupied continues to exist without him,

I never wanted to be understood by other people. To be understood is akin to prostituting oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously as what I am not and to be, with decency and naturalness, ignored as a person.

I prefer to fail having known the beauty of flowers than to triumph in a wilderness, for triumph is the blindness of the soul left alone with its own worthlessness.

I dream because I dream, but I don’t insult myself by giving to dreams a value they do not have, apart from that of being my personal theatre,

Like me, they all have sad, exalted hearts. I know them well:

But all of them, poor things, are poets and seem to me (as I must to them) to drag with them the same misery of our common incongruousness. Like me, their future is already in the past.

I’m on the side of the others, the poorest, who have only themselves to tell their dreams to and make of them what would be poems were they to write them down; poor devils, with only the literature of their own souls […] who die suffocated by the mere fact of existing

Like eels in a bowl they become so entangled with one another that they can never escape.

They are the happy ones because they are given the dream […] of stupidity. But as for those, like me, who have dreams without illusions

I left my own existence behind and found myself.

One man reads in order to know, all in vain. Another enjoys himself in order to live, again all in vain.

There are times when everything wearies us, even those things that would normally bring us rest.

Behind all anguish and pain lie certain debilities of the soul; the only people who remain unaware of these are, I believe, those who shrink from human anguish and pain and tactfully conceal from themselves their own tedium.

And I want nothing, prefer nothing, there is nothing I can escape into.

there are also moments, like now, when I feel too oppressed and too aware of myself to be conscious of external things and everything then becomes for me a night of rain and mud, alone and lost in an abandoned railway station, where the last third-class train left hours ago and the next has yet to arrive.

I don’t think, therefore I don’t exist. I’ve forgotten who I am; I can’t write because I can’t be.

I fainted away a little from my life.

If I did live, I’ve forgotten how to know that I did.

it’s the tedium of trying to remember what cannot be remembered, despair at what my consciousness mislaid amongst the algae and reeds of some unknown shore.

What does it matter? I have spent myself in chance events, in interstices, and now that the cool of the day and the cooling sun are one, the dark reeds by the shore sleep their cold sleep in the sunset I see but do not possess.

Today I’m in that intermediate state of mind in which I feel no interest in life or in anything else.

I often suffer from tedium but, as far as I can tell, it follows no rules as to when and why it appears.

it is not wanting something but wanting it, and suffering all the nausea involved in not wanting.

We are isolated within ourselves from ourselves, an isolation in which what separates us is as stagnant as us, a pool of dirty water surrounding our inability to understand.

It is suffering without suffering, wanting without will, thinking without reason … It’s like being possessed by a negative demon, bewitched by nothing at all.

my soul overflows with the bile of inertia and I feel weary, not of work or leisure, but of myself.

The universal pain of living crystallized suddenly in the intermediary of my soul? Why thus ennoble someone who doesn’t even know who he is? It’s a feeling of utter vacuity, a hunger with no desire to eat, about as noble as the feelings you experience in your brain or stomach from having smoked or eaten too much.

No one with a god to believe in will ever suffer from tedium.

It is a wish not to think, a desire never to have been anything, a conscious despair in every cell of my soul.

Where can one even think of fleeing, if the prison cell is all there is?

It’s the fact that in all this - sky, earth, world - there is never anything but myself!

Everything seems doomed in advance to insignificance.

And I don’t know what I feel, I don’t know what I want to feel, I don’t know what I think or what I am.