The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

I noticed that a certain hesitant intelligence illuminated his features, but his face was so often clouded by exhaustion, by the inertia of cold fear, that it was usually hard to see beyond this.

I had great ambitions and extravagant dreams, but so did the errand boy and the seamstress, for everyone has dreams; the only difference is whether or not we have the strength to fulfil them or a destiny that will fulfil them through us.

Wherever I am, I will think nostalgically of my boss Senhor Vasques and the office in Rua dos Douradores, 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.

Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.

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

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.

Everything is us and we are everything, but what is the point if everything is nothing?

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.

But I also see that in order to flee from all this I must either master it or repudiate it. I do not master it because I cannot rise above reality and I do not repudiate it because, whatever I may dream, I always remain exactly where I am.

twin tides flowing in the black night, at the outer limits of nostalgia and desolation.

Only one thing surprises me more than the stupidity with which most men live their lives and that is the intelligence inherent in that stupidity.

That is the central error of the literary imagination: the idea that other people are like us and must therefore feel like us. Fortunately for humanity, each man is only himself and only the genius is given the ability to be others as well.

The wise man makes his life monotonous, for then even the tiniest incident becomes imbued with great significance.

Because I am nothing, I can imagine myself to be anything. If I were somebody, I wouldn’t be able to. An assistant book-keeper can imagine himself to be a Roman emperor; the King of England can’t do that, because the King of England has lost the ability in his dreams to be any other king than the one he is. His reality limits what he can feel.

The sun did not rise for me then, it rose for all of life, because I (still an unconscious being) was life. I saw the morning and I was happy; today I see the morning and I am first happy, then sad. The child in me is still there but has fallen silent.

These confessions of my feelings are my game of patience. I don’t interpret them, the way some read cards to know the future. I don’t scrutinize them because in games of patience the cards have no value in themselves.

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.

I advance slowly, a dead man, and my vision, no longer my own, is nothing now: it is merely that of a human animal who unwittingly inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality and all the other illusions that make up the civilization in which I live and feel. What’s become of the living?

The lack of respect between men, the indifference that allows them to kill others without compunction (as murderers do) or without thinking that they are killing (as soldiers do), comes from the fact that no one pays due attention to the apparently abstruse idea that other people have souls too.

Seeing dawn in the countryside does me good, seeing dawn in the city affects me for both good and ill and therefore does me even more good. For the greater hope it brings me contains, as does all hope, the far-off, nostalgic aftertaste of unreality.

Dawn in the countryside just exists; dawn in the city overflows with promise. One makes you live, the other makes you think. And, along with all the other great unfortunates, I’ve always believed it better to think than to live.

The only way I can find the heart to work is by turning myself, through active inertia, into my own slave. The office boy left today.

Oh, night, in which the stars masquerade as light, oh night, equal only to the Universe in magnitude, make me, body and soul, part of your body, and let me lose myself in mere darkness, make me night too, with no dreams to be as stars to me, nor longed-for sun to light the future.

Anyone wanting to make a catalogue of monsters would need only to photograph in words the things that night brings to somnolent souls who cannot sleep.

Like a bow that’s come undone, the soul does not in itself exist. The great landscapes all belong to a tomorrow we have already lived. The interrupted conversation was a failure. Who would have guessed life would be like this?

No one likes us when we’ve slept badly. The sleep we missed carried off with it whatever it was that made us human. There is, it seems, a latent irritation in us, in the empty air that surrounds us. Ultimately it is we who are in dispute with ourselves, it is within ourselves that diplomacy in the secret war breaks down.

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. The limpid brightness of the day, the great pure blue sky, the steady tide of diffuse light, none of this touches my being. I remain unmoved by the light autumnal breeze, that still bears a trace of unforgotten summer and lends colour to the air. Nothing means anything to me. I’m sad, but not with a definite or even an indefinite sadness. My sadness is out there, in the street strewn with boxes.

To wipe everything off the slate from one day to the next, to be new with each new dawn, in a state of perpetually restored virginity of emotion - that and only that is worth being or having, if we are to be or to have what we imperfectly are.

The artificial provides an approach to the natural. What we must never do, however, is mistake the artificial for the natural. In the harmony between the natural and the artificial lies the essence of the superior human soul.

Life sickens me like a dose of bad medicine. And it’s then, with immense clarity of vision, that I see how easy it would be to remove myself from this tedium if I just had the strength truly to want to do so.

To act, that is true intelligence. I will be what I want to be. But I have to want whatever that is. Success means being successful, not just having the potential for success. Any large area of land has the potential to be a palace, but where’s the palace if no one builds there?

For I walk through daily life still holding the hand of my astral mistress, and my footsteps in the street are concordant and consonant with the obscure designs of my sleeping imagination. And yet I walk straight down the street; I don’t stumble; I react as I should; I exist.

If it’s time to go back to work, I go to the office just like everyone else. If not, I go down to the river to stare at the waters, 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.

Phrases I will never write and landscapes I will never be able to describe: with what clarity I dictate them to my inertia and describe them in my meditations when, reclining in a chair, I have only the remotest ties with life.

I was more of a genius in dreams than in life. That is my tragedy. I was the runner who fell just before the finishing line having led. the field all the way until then.

It is still not yet quite autumn and the air is not yet filled with the yellow of fallen leaves or the damp sad weather that will eventually turn to winter. But there is an anticipation of sadness, some intimate grief dressed and ready for the journey, in one’s sense of being aware, however vaguely, of the diffuse colours of things, of a different tone in the wind, of an ancient quiet which, as night falls, slowly invades the unavoidable presence of the universe.

One day, when all knowledge ceases, the door beyond will open and everything that we were - a mere detritus of stars and souls – will be swept from the house in order that whatever remains may begin again.

Yes, it is the beginning of autumn and, in this limpid hour, the beginning of a clear understanding of the anonymous inadequacy of all things. The autumn, yes, the autumn, as it is and always will be: an anticipation of weariness in every gesture, of disillusionment with every dream. What possible hopes can I have?

Whatever the truth, I let it be. And to whatever gods or goddesses may exist, I hand over what I am, resigned to whatever fate may send and whatever chance may offer, faithful to some forgotten promise.

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.

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?

The absence of a true God is become the empty corpse of the vast sky and the closed soul. Infinite prison, because you are infinite no one can escape you!

One retires to bed as wearily from having dreamed as from having done hard physical labour. One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.

I feel not only tired but embittered and yet the cause of that bitterness is also unknown. I feel such anguish I’m on the verge of tears, tears to be suppressed not cried, tears born of a sickness of the soul not of any physical ill.

I have lived so much without ever having lived. I have thought so much without ever having thought. I feel weighed down by worlds of unenacted violence, of stillborn adventures. I am sick of what I never had nor will have, weary of gods always just about to exist. I bear on my body the wounds of all the battles I did not fight. My muscles are weary from efforts I never even considered making.

Life is whatever we make it. The traveller is the journey. What we see is not what we see but who we are.

A sudden memory assails me: he knew exactly which trains one had to catch to go from Paris to Bucharest; which trains one took to cross England; and in his garbled pronunciation of the strange names hung the bright certainty of the greatness of his soul. Now he probably lives like a dead man, but perhaps one day, when he’s old, he’ll remember that to dream of Bordeaux is not only better, but truer, than actually to arrive in Bordeaux.

I think that as children we must have a guardian angel who lends us his own astral intelligence and then, perhaps with sadness, but in accordance with a higher law, abandons us, the way female animals abandon their grown-up offspring, to become the fattened pigs it’s our destiny to be.

Like history, experience of life teaches us nothing. True experience consists in reducing one’s contact with reality whilst at the same time intensifying one’s analysis of that contact.

I’m not interested in nor can I truly see any of the seven zones of the world; I travel the eighth zone, which is my own.