The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

Some people have one great dream in life which they fail to fulfil. Others have no dream at all and fail to fulfil even that.

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.

And what kind of feeling did it create? The impossibility of there being any, a confusion of heart and mind, a perplexity of feelings, a torpor of awakened existence, a sharpening of some sense in the soul equivalent to that of straining to catch a definitive but vain revelation, always just about to be revealed, like the truth, and, like the truth, the twin of concealment.

Each day that I hear the dawn, from the bed on which I lie empty of knowledge, seems to me the day of some great event in my life that I will lack the courage to confront.

The cool air is damp on my hot skin. Yes, it’s raining, but even if everything remains just the same, in the end what does it matter! I want to feel refreshed, I want to live and I bow my neck to life as if to bear the weight of a huge yoke.

Only the unbelieving adult, whose soul still remembers and weeps, only he is but fiction and turmoil, confusion and the cold grave.

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

It’s not in broad fields or large gardens that I first notice the spring arrive. It’s in the few pathetic trees growing in a small city square. There the bright green seems like a gift and is as joyful as a good bout of sadness.

I really need very little to feel content: the rain having stopped, the good sun of the happy South, some yellow bananas, all the yellower for having black spots, the people who chatter as they sell them, the pavements of the Rua da Prata, the blue touched with green and gold, of the Tagus beyond this domestic corner of the Universe.

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. And thus, the more one has to do the worse the tedium.

I know today is going to be tedious for me, as tedious as one’s inability to understand something. I know that everything I do today will be infected not by the weariness brought on by lack of sleep, but by this night’s insomnia. I know that my customary state of somnambulism will be even more marked, even nearer the surface, not just because I didn’t sleep, but because I couldn’t sleep.

Some days are like whole philosophies in themselves that suggest to us new interpretations of life, marginal notes full of the acutest criticism in the book of our universal destiny. I feel that this is one such day. The foolish thought strikes me that my heavy eyes and my empty head are the absurd pencil shaping the letters of that futile and profound statement.

I walked from one side of the room to the other dreaming out loud of unconnected, impossible things - gestures I had forgotten to make, impossible ambitions only randomly realized, long steadfast conversations which, had I had them, would have taken place.

It was only a moment but I saw myself. Now I cannot even say what I was. 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.

Even in lithographs there is something terrible about human eyes: the unavoidable proof of the existence of a consciousness, the clandestine cry that they too have a soul.

‘I am equal in size to whatever I see!’ Each time I think this phrase with every nerve of my being, I’m filled by an even stronger conviction of its ability to reorganize the heavens into new constellations. ‘I am equal in size to whatever I see!’

There are those, like me, pigs by destiny, who do not attempt to escape the daily banality of life, being mesmerized by their own impotence. They are birds fascinated by the absence of the snake; flies who, unaware, hover above the branches until they come within the sticky reach of the chameleon’s tongue.

Nothing would displease me more than to have my colleagues in the office think me different. I want to savour the irony of their not doing so. I want the penance of having them think me the same as them. I want the crucifixion of their not thinking me any different.

The greater the sensibility and the more subtle the capacity to feel, the more absurdly one trembles and quivers at the small things. It requires prodigious intelligence to be reduced to anguish by a day of lowering skies. Humanity, which is not very sensitive, doesn’t get upset by the weather, because the weather is always with us; humanity only feels the rain when it’s actually falling on its head.

I remember myself as a child made happy by all things, as an adolescent with a hundred ambitions, as a man with no joy and no ambition. And all this happened softly, dully like the day that makes me see or remember it.

Which of us turning to look back down the road along which there is no return, could say that we had walked that road as we should have?

Everything is absurd.

Under the influence of some oblique drowsiness I have been someone else. The knowledge that I do not remember myself awakens me.

Tedium … 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.

Yes, that’s what tedium is: the loss by the soul of its capacity to delude itself, the absence in thought of the nonexistent stairway up which the soul steadfastly ascends towards the truth.

There is such a thing as a weariness of the abstract intelligence, which is the most terrible of all wearinesses. It does not weigh on you like physical weariness, nor does it trouble you like a weariness of the emotions. It is the consciousness of the weight of the whole world, an inability in the soul to breathe.

tedium is a boredom with other worlds, whether they exist or not; the malaise of living, even if one were someone else, with a different life, in another world; a weariness not just with yesterday or today but with tomorrow too, with all eternity (if it exists) and with nothingness (if that is what eternity is).

Tedium is the physical sensation of chaos and of the fact that chaos is everything.

What is there in these tiny scraps, barely clouds, whose presence I already doubt, but a little reflected light scattered by a submissive sun? What is there in all this but myself? Ah, but in that and only that lies tedium. It’s the fact that in all this - sky, earth, world - there is never anything but myself!

I’ve reached the point where tedium has become a person, the fiction made flesh of my life with myself.

True wealth is closing one’s eyes and puffing on an expensive cigar.

It is a rule of life that we can and must learn from everyone. There are serious matters in life to be learned from charlatans and bandits, there are philosophies to be gleaned from fools, real lessons of fortitude that come to us by chance and from those who depend on chance. Everything contains everything else.

I’m always astonished whenever I finish anything. Astonished and depressed. My desire for perfection should prevent me from ever finishing anything; it should prevent me even from starting. But I forget that and I do begin.

I’ve never had a talent for the active life. I always bungled the gestures no one else gets wrong; what others were born to do, I always had to struggle not to forget to do. I always want to achieve what others achieved almost casually.

Sometimes, right in the middle of my active life, when I’m evidently as clear about myself as anyone is, a strange feeling of doubt enters my imagination; I do not know if I exist, it seems possible to me that I might be someone else’s dream; the idea occurs to me, with an almost carnal reality, that I might be a character in a novel, moving through the long waves of someone else’s literary style, through the created truth of a great narrative.

And this thought provokes the dream question: is everything in the whole world just a series of interlocking dreams and novels like smaller boxes fitting inside larger ones - each one inside another - stories within a story, like The Thousand and One Nights, unwinding falsely into the eternal dark?

What I read may depress me, but at least I’m not troubled by the thought that I wrote it.

Suicide seems too uncertain and death, even if one assumes it guarantees oblivion, merely insignificant. What this weariness aspires to is not simply to cease to exist - which might or might not be possible - but, far more horrifying, far deeper than that, it wants never to have existed at all, and that, of course, cannot be.

Yet I exorcise it by writing about it. Provided it comes also from the intellect and is not just pure emotion, there is no truly deepseated affliction that will not succumb to the ironic cure of being written about.

However, as an ironic spectator of myself, I have never lost my interest in observing life. And now, knowing beforehand that each tentative hope will be crushed, I suffer the special pleasure of enjoying the disillusion together with the pain, a bittersweetness in which the sweetness predominates. I am a sombre strategist who has lost every battle and now, on the eve of each new engagement, draws up the details of the fatal retreat, savouring the plan as he does so.

I spend my life wondering whether or not I am deep, with only my own eyes to gauge the depth, and all they show me, clearly in the black mirror of the great well, is my own face watching me watching it.

Writing is like paying myself a formal visit. I have special rooms, recalled in the interstices of the imagination by someone else, where I enjoy myself analysing what I do not feel and peer at myself as at a painting hung in the shadows.

I chose the wrong method of flight. I took an awkward short cut that led me right back to where I was, compounding the horror of living there with the exhaustion of the journey.

I never considered suicide a solution, because I only hate life out of love for it. It took me a long time to be convinced of the lamentable error in which I live with myself. Once convinced, I felt displeased, as always happens when I convince myself of something, because it means the loss of another of my illusions.

I never gave much credence to any of my beliefs. I filled my hands with sand and called it gold then let it all slip away through my fingers.

I have a kind of duty always to dream, for, since I am nothing more, nor desirous of being anything more, than a spectator of myself, I must put on the best show I can. So I deck myself in gold and silks and place myself in imaginary rooms on a false stage with ancient scenery, a dream created beneath the play of soft lights, to the sound of invisible music.

To reach the truth we lack both the necessary facts and the intellectual processes that could exhaust all possible interpretations of those facts.

We are all accustomed to think of ourselves as essentially mental realities and of others as merely physical realities; because of the way others respond to us, we do vaguely think of ourselves as physical beings; we vaguely think of other people as mental beings, but only when we find ourselves in love or conflict with another do we really take in the fact that others have a soul just as we do.

When I’m alone I can come up with endless bon mots, acerbic ripostes to remarks no one has made, sociable flashes of wit exchanged with no one; but all this disappears when I’m confronted by another human being.

For the average man, to feel is to live, and to think is to know that one lives. For me, to think is to live, and to feel just provides food for thought.