The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

What right have I to make fun of another man’s pork chops, red wine and girlfriend?

All ideals and ambitions are just the ravings of gossiping men. No empire merits even the smashing of a child’s doll. No ideal merits even the sacrifice of one toy train. What empire is really useful, what ideal really profitable? Everything comes from humanity and humanity is always the same - changeable but incapable of perfection, vacillating but incapable of progress.

History rejects certainty. There are orderly times when everything is wretched, and disorderly times when everything is sublime. Decadent times can be intellectually fertile, and authoritarian times fertile only in feeblemindedness. Everything intermingles and intersects, and the only truth that exists is in one’s imagination. So many noble ideas fallen onto the dungheap, so many authentic desires lost in the mire!

Everything unpleasant that happens to us in life - for example, when we appear ridiculous in the eyes of others, behave badly or lapse from virtue - should be considered merely external events without the power to touch the depths of our soul. We should think of them as the toothache or the corns of life, things that give us some discomfort but which, although ours, are outside us, as things that it is up to our organic existence to deal with, things that only our biology need concern itself with. Once we fully adopt this attitude which is, in a way, that of the mystics, we are defended not only against the world but also against ourselves, because we have conquered what is other, what is external and contrary to us and therefore our enemy.

Men of action are the unwitting slaves of men of the intellect. Things only acquire value once they are interpreted. Some men, then, create things in order that others, by giving them meaning, make them live. To narrate is to create, whilst to live is merely to be lived.

There is no happiness without knowledge. But the knowledge of happiness brings unhappiness, because to know one is happy is to know that one is passing through happiness and is, therefore, soon obliged to leave it behind. In happiness as in everything, knowledge kills. Not to know, however, is not to exist.

In this world we all sleep on our left side and hear in our dreams the oppressive beating of our heart.

Did I say I re-read these pages? I lied. I daren’t re-read them. I can’t. What good would it do me ? It’s some other person there. I no longer understand any of it…

I feel nostalgia for the possibility of one day feeling nostalgia, regardless of how absurd that nostalgia may seem.

To remember is restful because it does not involve action. How often, to obtain a deeper sense of repose, I remember what never was

I carry within me, as if they were souls, the very philosophies I criticize; Omar could reject them all, for they were external to him; I cannot reject them because they are me.

But what is happening to me when I can read what I wrote as if it were written by a stranger? What shore can I be standing on that allows me to look down and see my own self at the bottom of the sea?

Only those who are unable to think what they feel obey grammatical rules. Someone who knows how to express himself can use those rules as he pleases.

I remember, as if it were yesterday, the night on which I picked up an anthology and read for the first time Vieira’s famous passage on King Solomon.

Trees, never anything more than trees, with your green leaves so pleasant to the eyes, you are so indifferent to my cares and griefs, so consoling to my anguish because you lack eyes to see it and a soul to look through those eyes to misunderstand and mock!

The creator of the mirror poisoned the human soul.

The only thing that prevents the everyday greeting of ‘How are you?’ from being an unforgivable insult is the fact that in general it is utterly empty and insincere.

To observe oneself as one observes nature; to gaze on one’s impressions as one would on a field - that is true wisdom.

This child playing before me is an intellectual bundle of cells, but he is also a timepiece made up of sub-atomic movements, a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in microscopic miniature.

We should be content with the incomprehensibility of the universe; the desire to understand makes us less than human, for to be human is to know that one does not understand.

Apart from mathematics which has nothing to do with anything except dead numbers and empty formulae and can therefore be perfectly logical, science is nothing but a game played by children in the twilight, a desire to catch hold of the shadows of birds, to fix the shadows of grasses swaying in the wind.

To consciously unknow oneself, that is the right path to follow. And to consciously unknow oneself is the active task of irony. I know no greater nor more proper task for the truly great man than the patient, expressive analysis of ways of unknowing ourselves, the conscious registering of the unconsciousness of our consciousnesses, the metaphysics of the autonomous shadows, the poetry of the twilight of disillusion.

Like all of humanity, I will always belong to a Rua dos Douradores. In verse or prose, I will always be just another employee at his desk. With or without mysticism, I will always be parochial and submissive, the slave of my feelings and of the moment in which I feel them.

An inability to imagine other people’s personalities, their pains and joys is, therefore, essential if one is to act. He who sympathizes is lost.

The epitome of the practical man is the strategist, because he combines extreme concentration of action with a sense of self-importance. All life is war, and battle is, therefore, the very synthesis of life. The strategist is a man who plays with life the way a chessplayer plays with chesspieces.

Leadership requires insensitivity. Only the happy govern because to be sad it is necessary to feel.

Vasques is the same as all men of action: captains of industry and commerce, politicians, men of war, religious and social idealists, great poets and artists, beautiful women, spoilt children. The person who feels nothing has the whiphand. The winner is the one who thinks only those thoughts that will bring him victory.

The argonauts said that it was the journey that mattered, not life. We, the argonauts of an ailing sensibility, say that it is not living that matters, but feeling.

To realize a dream it is necessary to forget it, to distract one’s attention from it. That’s why to realize something is not to realize it. Life is as full of paradoxes as roses are of thorns.

To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life.

To possess something is to lose it. To feel something without possessing it is to keep it, because in that way one extracts its essence.

We are only able to teach the real rules of life to those already dead.

I feel this because I feel nothing. I think this because this is all nothing. Nothing, nothing, just part of the night and the silence and of whatever emptiness, negativity and inconstancy I share with them, the space that exists between me and me, a thing mislaid by some god