The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

In this world we’re all travellers on the same ship that has set sail from one unknown port en route to another equally foreign to us; we should treat each other therefore with the friendliness due to fellow travellers.

I believe, moreover, that to help or clarify is, in a way, to commit the evil of intervening in someone else’s life. Kindness is a temperamental caprice and we do not have the right to make others the victims of our caprice however humane or tender-hearted. Favours are things imposed on others; that’s why I so thoroughly detest them.

Confronted by other people’s misfortunes I do not experience pain but a feeling of aesthetic discomfort and a furtive irritation. This has nothing to do with kindness, it is simply because when someone is made to feel ridiculous, they appear ridiculous not only to me but to others too and it is that that irritates me; it hurts me that any animal of the human species should laugh at someone else’s expense when they have no right to do so. I don’t care if others laugh at me, because I’m protected by an efficient armour of scorn.

There’s an aura of cold around me, a halo of ice that repels others. I still haven’t managed not to feel the pain of my solitude. It is so difficult to achieve the distinction of spirit that makes isolation seem a haven of peace free from all anguish.

I always wanted to please. It always hurt me that people should be indifferent towards me. As an orphan of Fortune I have, like all orphans, a need to be the object of someone’s affection. I’ve always been starved of the realization of that need. I’ve grown so accustomed to this vain hunger that, at times, I’m not even sure I still feel the need to eat. With or without it life still hurts me.

I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.

I don’t have the right qualities to be either leader or follower. I don’t even have the merit of being contented which, if all else fails, is all that remains.

It’s unlikely that life will bring me another encounter with natural emotions. I almost wish it would just to see how I would feel the second time around, now that I have thoroughly analysed that first experience. I might feel less; I might feel more. If Fate decrees it should happen, so be it.

Why did they give me a kingdom to rule over if there is no better kingdom than this hour in which I exist between what I was not and what I will not be?

How I die if I allow myself to feel for all things! How much I feel if I let myself drift, incorporeal and human, my heart quiet as a beach, and, in the night in which we live, in my endless nocturnal walk along its shore, the sea of all things beats loud and mocking, then grows calm.

Life is like a ball of wool that someone has tangled up. There would be some sense in it were it unravelled and pulled out to its full length, or else properly rolled up. But, as it is, it’s a problem no one has bothered to roll into a ball, a muddle with nowhere to go.

I, who did not even know whence I came, having only woken up at the crossroads. I realized that I was on a stage and did not know the words that everyone else picked up instantly even though they did not know them either. I saw that though I was dressed as a page they had given me no queen to wait on and blamed me for that. I saw that I had in my hands a message to deliver and when I told them the paper was blank, they laughed at me.

I feel that in describing all my different moods, I always use the same words; I feel that I am more like myself than I would like to think; that, when the final accounts are drawn up, I have tasted neither the joy of winning nor the excitement of losing.

Let them continue, just as they are. When the last domino is played and the game is won or lost, all the pieces are turned over and the game ends in darkness.

When we live constantly in the abstract - whether it be abstractness of thought or of feelings one has thought - it soon comes about that contrary to our own feelings and our own will the things in real life which, according to us, we should feel most deeply turn into phantasms.

languidez, mareo y angustioso afán.*

Perhaps future scientific research will discover that everything, whether physical or spiritual, is just a dimension of the same space. In one dimension we live as body, in the other as soul. And perhaps there are other dimensions in which we experience other equally real aspects of ourselves. Sometimes I enjoy letting myself be carried away by this futile meditation on just how far this research might lead.

The simplest things, the truly simple things that nothing can make anything other than simple, are made complex just by my experiencing them. I feel intimidated sometimes by having to say good morning to someone. My voice dries up, as if to pronounce the words out loud were an act of extraordinary audacity. It’s a kind of embarrassment at my own existence - there are no other words for it.

I wander aimlessly through the quiet streets, I walk until my body is as tired as my soul, until I feel that familiar pain that revels in being felt, a maternal compassion for oneself, set to music, indefinable.

I notice the tiniest facial tics of the person I’m talking to, pick up minimal changes in the intonation of what they say; but when I hear, I do not listen, for I’m thinking about something else, and I come away from any conversation with little idea of what was said, either by me or by the other person.

All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create a raw landscape within us, a sun eternally setting on what we are.

There is a touch of autumn in all one’s emotions and thoughts, or rather one feels like one of those early spring days when the air and sky seem more like autumn than spring, except, of course, that no leaves fall.

When the day is right for such feelings, when, like today, even though it is still summer, the blue sky is striped with clouds and the light wind feels cold simply because it isn’t warm, then that state of mind grows more noticeable in the way we think, feel or experience these impressions. It isn’t that the memories, hopes or desires we had are any clearer, they are simply more present and, however absurd it may seem, the uncertain sum of their parts weighs a little on one’s heart.

The useless and the futile create intervals of humble static in our real lives. The mere insignificant existence of a pin stuck in a piece of ribbon provokes in my soul all manner of dreams and wondrous delights! I pity those who do not recognize the importance of such things!

In seeking anything, we do so out of ambition, but we either fail to achieve that ambition and are the poorer, or we think we have achieved it and are merely rich madmen.

Everything we do, in art and life, is the imperfect copy of what we intended. It betrays both external and internal ideals of perfection; it fails not only our concept of what it should have been, but also of what it could have been. We are hollow inside and out, pariahs of anticipation and promise.

If health were preferable, why did I fall ill in the first place unless it was natural to do so, and if it was natural, why go against Nature which for some reason, assuming Nature has reasons, apparently wanted me to be ill?

To consider our greatest anguish an incident of no importance, not just in terms of the life of the universe, but in terms of our own souls, is the beginning of knowledge. To reflect on this whilst in the midst of that anguish is the whole of knowledge.

To some people who speak and listen to me I must seem an insensitive person. However, I am, I think, more sensitive than the vast majority of men. I am, moreover, a sensitive man who knows himself and therefore knows what sensitivity is.

That all those who read me should learn - little by little, as the subject demands - to feel utter indifference before the critical gaze and opinions of others, such a destiny would be reward enough for the scholastic stagnation of my life.

To know, immediately and instinctively, how to abstract from every object and event only what is suitable dream material and to leave for dead in the External World any reality it contains, that is what the wise man should aim to achieve in himself.

The greatest self-discipline one can achieve is indifference towards oneself, believing one’s self, body and soul, to be merely the house and garden in which Destiny has ordained one should spend one’s life.

The superiority of the dreamer lies in the fact that dreaming is much more practical than living, and in the fact that the dreamer derives a greater and more multifarious pleasure from life than the man of action. To put it more succinctly, it’s the dreamer who is the true man of action.

The truly superior (and the happiest) men are those who, perceiving that everything is a fiction, make up their own novel before someone else does it for them and, like Machiavelli, don courtly robes in order to write in secret.

I’m always afraid people will talk about me. I’ve failed in everything. I’ve never even dared think of making something of myself; I never even dreamed of thinking of desiring something because in my own dreams, even in my visionary state of mere dreamer, I recognized that I was unsuited for life.

My imaginary world has always been the only true world for me. I never knew loves so real, so full of passion and life as I did with the characters I myself created. What a shame! I miss them because, like all loves, they too end

For me humanity is one vast decorative motif, existing through one’s eyes and ears and through psychological emotion. I demand nothing more from life than to be a spectator of it. I demand nothing more from myself than to be a spectator of life.

For any spirit of a scientific bent, seeing more in something than is actually there is actually to see less. What you add in substance, you take away in spirit.

A marked talent for self-deception is the statesman’s foremost quality. Only poets and philosophers have a practical vision of the world since only to them is given the gift of having no illusions. To see clearly is to be unable to act.

It pains my intelligence that someone should think they can alter anything through political agitation. I’ve always considered violence, of any type, a particularly cockeyed example of human stupidity. All revolutionaries are stupid as are all reformers, albeit to a lesser degree, because less discomfiting.

If you cannot live alone, then you were born a slave. Though you may be possessed of every superior quality of spirit and soul, you are still nothing more than a noble slave or an intelligent serf, you are not free.

The true reality of an object lies only in a part of it; the rest is the heavy tribute it pays to the material world in exchange for its existence in space.

The generation to which I belong was born into a world devoid of certainty for anyone possessed of both an intellect and a heart.

In modern life the world belongs to the stupid, the insensitive and the disturbed. The right to live and triumph is today earned with the same qualifications one requires to be interned in a madhouse: amorality, hypomania and an incapacity for thought.

To be a pessimist one has to view life as a tragedy, which is an exaggerated, uncomfortable attitude to take. It’s true that we do not have any concept of value that we can place on the work we produce. It’s true we produce that work in order to pass the time, but we do so not like the prisoner weaving straw to distract himself from his destiny, but like the little girl embroidering pillowcases to entertain herself and nothing more.

Night will fall on all of us and the carriage will arrive. I enjoy the breeze given to me and the soul given to me to enjoy it and I ask no more questions, look no further. If what I leave written in the visitors’ book is one day read by others and entertains them on their journey, that’s fine. If no one reads it or is entertained by it, that’s fine too.

Pride, when it exists alone, without vanity, manifests itself as timidity. A man who believes he is great but is unsure as to whether others will recognize him as such, fears comparing the opinion he holds of himself with the opinion others might have of him.

Vanity, when it exists alone, without pride (something which, though rare, is quite possible) manifests itself as boldness. A man who is sure that others acknowledge his value and courage need fear nothing from them.

Even our ability to imagine the impossible may not be a unique talent, for I’ve seen cats staring at the moon and for all I know they may be wishing for it.

It’s the phrase they use to talk of any material pleasure: ‘You have to grab it while you can.’ Grab it and take it where? what for? why? It would be sad to rouse them from the shadows they inhabit by asking them such questions … For there speaks a materialist, because any man who talks like that is, even if only subconsciously, a materialist.