The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

by Fernando Pessoa

Taking dreams for reality, living too much in dreams, has left me with the thorn of this false rose, my dreamed life:

And yet I struggle so hard to remain entirely in the present, killing inside me the past and the future.

Society would govern itself spontaneously if it did not contain people of sensitivity and intelligence. That, believe me, is the only obstacle. Primitive societies existed happily enough on more or less that basis.

The best way of beginning to dream is through books. Novels are very useful for beginners. The first step: learn to surrender totally to your reading and live alongside the characters in a novel.

Art is an act of isolation. Every artist should seek to isolate other people, to fill their souls with the desire to be alone.

art life

Whenever I feel pleasure in the company of others, I envy them their part of that feeling. It seems to me a kind of impudence that they should feel the same as me, that they should invade my soul via their soul by feeling in unison with mine.

The truly wise man is the man who lets external events trouble him as little as possible. To do this, he needs to armor himself by surrounding himself with realities that are closer to him than those events, and through which the events reach him, changed so as to accord with those realities.

The broken shadows of leaves, the tremulous song of birds, the outstretched arms of rivers, their cool light trembling in the sun, the greenness, the poppies, and the simplicity of sensation — when I feel all this, I experience a nostalgia for it as if I were not at that moment really feeling it.

I simply missed my idea of you.

My mania for creating a false world is still with me and will leave me only when I die. I no longer line up in my desk drawers cotton reels and pawns — with the occasional bishop and knight thrown in — but I regret not doing so … and instead, like someone in winter, cozily warming himself by the fire, I line up in my imagination the ranks of constant, living characters who inhabit my inner world. For I have a whole world of friends inside me, each with his or her own real, definite, imperfect life.

The generation to which I belong was born into a world devoid of certainty for anyone possessed of both an intellect and a heart. The destructive work of previous generations meant that the world into which we were born had no security to offer us as regards religion, no anchor as regards morality, no stability as regards politics. We were born into a state of anguish, both metaphysical and moral, and of political disquiet.

I get to know people quickly. It doesn’t take long for them to grow to like me. But I never really gain their affection. I’ve never experienced devotion. To be loved has always seemed to me an impossibility, as unlikely as a complete stranger suddenly addressing me familiarly by my first name.

When Christianity passed over our souls like a storm that raged into the small hours, people could feel the invisible damage it had caused; however, the ruins it left behind could be fully seen only once it had passed completely. Some thought the ruins were caused by its departure, but it was simply that the damage done was only revealed once it was gone.

I have no clear idea of myself, not even an idea that consists of having no idea of myself. I am a nomad of my own consciousness of myself. The flocks of my inner riches all scattered during the first watch.

I created various personalities inside myself. I create them constantly. Every dream I have is immediately, as soon as it is dreamed, made flesh in another person, who then goes on to dream that dream, not me. In order to create, I destroyed myself; I have externalized myself so much inside that, inside, I exist only externally. I am the bare stage on which various actors perform various plays.

I sometimes think with sad pleasure that if, one day in a future to which I will not belong, these sentences I write should meet with praise, I will at last have found people who “understand” me, my own people, a real family to be born into and to be loved by. But far from being born into that family, I will have been long dead by then.

“Postpone everything. Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow. You don’t have to do anything, tomorrow or today.”

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.

When one reads of wars and revolutions — there’s always one or the other going on — one feels not horror but boredom. It isn’t the cruel fate of all those dead and wounded, the sacrifice of those who die as warriors or onlookers, that weighs so heavy on the heart; it’s the stupidity that sacrifices lives and possessions to anything so unutterably vain.

Fraternity is a very subtle thing. Some govern the world, others are the world. Between an American millionaire, a Caesar or Napoleon, or Lenin and the Socialist boss of a village there is no qualitative difference, only quantitative. Below them come us, the amorphous ones, the unruly dramatist William Shakespeare, the schoolteacher John Milton, that vagabond Dante Alighieri, the boy who ran an errand for me yesterday, the barber who always tells me stories, and the waiter who, simply because I drank only half my bottle of wine, proffered the fraternal hope that I would feel better tomorrow.

The other day a friend, who’s a partner in a prosperous company that does business throughout the country and who considers my salary to be distinctly on the low side, said to me: “You’re being exploited, Soares.” This made me realize that indeed I am; but since it’s the fate of everyone in this life to be exploited, my question would be: is it any worse being exploited by Senhor Vasques and his textile company than by vanity, glory, resentment, envy or the impossible? Some, the prophets and saints who walk this vacuous world, are exploited by God himself.

May I at least take with me into the immense possibilities to be found in the abyss of everything the glory of my disillusion as if it were that of a great dream, the splendor of my unbelief like a flag of defeat — a flag held aloft by feeble hands, but dragged through the mud and blood of the weak and held on high as we sink into the shifting sands, whether in protest or defiance or despair no one knows … No one knows because no one knows anything, and the sands swallow up those with flags and those without … And the sands cover everything, my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry with me the knowledge of my defeat as if it were a flag of victory.

A tedium that contains only the prospect of more tedium; the anticipated sadness of feeling sad about having felt sad today — great tangles of feelings that lack utility or truth, great tangles

find it so irritating, the happiness of all those men unaware of their unhappiness. Their human life is full of everything that would constitute a whole series of anxieties for any truly sensitive soul. However, since their real life is purely vegetative, any pain they feel passes by without even touching their soul, and they live a life that can only be compared to that of a rich man who occasionally suffers from toothache, but takes plenty of aspirin — the genuine good fortune of being alive without realizing it, which is the greatest gift the gods can give, because it is the gift of being similar to them, and, like them, superior (albeit in a different way) to those incidents called joy and pain.

That is why, despite everything, I love them all. My beloved vegetables!

Isolation made me in its own image. The presence of another person — one person is all it takes — immediately slows down my thinking and, just as in a normal person contact with others acts as a stimulus to expression and speech, in me that contact acts as a counter-stimulus, if such a word exists. 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. I lose all my intelligence, I lose the power of speech and after a while all I feel like doing is sleeping. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my spectral and imagined friends, only the conversations I have in dreams, have reality and substance, and in them the spirit is present like an image in a mirror.

To sleep, to be far off without even realizing it, to lay oneself down, to forget one’s own body, to enjoy the freedom of unconsciousness, that refuge by a forgotten lake stagnating amongst the leafy trees of vast, remote forests. A nothing that seems to breathe, a little death from which one wakes feeling fresh and revived, a yielding of the fibers of the soul as it is massaged by oblivion.

write down what I feel in order to lower the fever of feeling. What I confess is of no importance because nothing is of any importance. I make landscapes out of what I feel. I make a holiday of sensation.

I pass through time, through silences, as formless worlds pass through me.

Suddenly, as if destiny had turned surgeon and, with dramatic success, operated on an ancient blindness, I raise my eyes from my anonymous life to the clear knowledge of the manner of my existence. And I see that everything I have done, everything I have thought, everything I have been, is a sort of delusion and madness. I marvel that I did not see it before. I am surprised by everything I have been and that I now see I am not.

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

I think what creates in me the deep sense I have of living out of step with others is the fact that most people think with their feelings whereas I feel with my thoughts.

When I wrote that last sentence, which describes exactly what I saw, I thought it might be useful to place at the end of my book, when it’s published, underneath any “Errata,” a few “Non-Errata” and to say: the words “this uncertain movements” on page so-and-so is correct, with the noun in the plural and the demonstrative pronoun in the singular. But what has that to do with what I was thinking? Nothing, which is why I allow myself to think it.

The dreamer is not superior to the active man because dreaming is essentially superior to reality. 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.

Whenever I’ve dreamt a lot, I go out into the street with my eyes open but I’m still wrapped in the safety of those dreams. And I’m amazed how many people fail to recognize my automatism. 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.

We never love anyone. We love only our idea of what someone is like. We love an idea of our own; in short, it is ourselves that we love.

Everything in me is a tendency to be about to become something else; an impatience of the soul with itself, as if with an importunate child; a disquiet that is always growing and always the same. Everything interests me and nothing holds my attention. I listen to everything while constantly dreaming;

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

In me every emotion is an image, and every dream a painting set to music. What I write may be bad, but it is more me than what I think … Or so I sometimes believe

The ability to complete something, whether good or bad — and while it will never be entirely good, it will often not be entirely bad either — yes, the ability to complete something probably provokes more envy in me than anything else.

We are living an entr’acte with orchestral accompaniment.

I’ve come to the realization that I’m always thinking and listening to two things at the same time. I expect everyone does that a little. Some impressions are so vague that only when we remember them afterwards are we aware of them at all. I think these impressions form a part (the internal part perhaps) of this double attention we all pay to things. In my case the two realities I attend to have equal weight. In that lies my originality. In that, perhaps, lie both my tragedy and the comedy of my tragedy.

To move is to live, to express oneself is to endure. There is nothing real in life that isn’t more real for being beautifully described. Small-minded critics often point out that such and such a poem, for all its generous rhythms, is saying nothing more profound than: it’s a nice day. But it’s not easy to say it’s a nice day, and the nice day itself passes. Our duty, then, is to preserve that nice day in endless, flowering memory and garland with new flowers and new stars the fields and skies of the empty, transient external world.

It’s Sunday and I have nothing to do. It’s such a lovely day, I don’t even feel like dreaming. I enjoy it with a sincerity of feeling to which my intelligence abandons itself. I walk around like a traveling salesman with no wife to go home to. I feel old merely in order to have the pleasure of feeling myself grow young again.

If a man of real sensitivity and correct reasoning feels concerned about the evil and injustice of the world, he naturally seeks to correct it first where it manifests itself closest to home, and that, he will find, is in his own being. The task will take him his whole lifetime. For us everything lies in our concept of the world; changing our concept of the world means changing our world, that is, the world itself, since it will never be anything other than how we perceive it.

Revolution? Change? What I most want, with every particle of my soul, is for the sluggish clouds that fill the sky with grubby lather to be gone; I want to see the blue beginning to show between them, a bright, clear truth, because it is nothing and wants nothing.

I could easily consecrate this moment by buying some bananas, for it seems to me that the natural floodlight of the day’s sun has poured all of itself into them. But I feel ashamed of rituals and symbols, of buying things in the street. They might not wrap the bananas properly, they might not sell them to me as they should be sold because I don’t know how to buy them as they should be bought. My voice might sound odd when I ask the price. Far better to write than dare to live, even if living means no more than buying bananas in the sunshine, as long as the sun lasts and there are bananas to sell. Later, perhaps … Yes, later … Another, perhaps … Maybe …

“All this is pure dream and phantasmagoria, and it matters little whether the dream is an entry in an accounts ledger or a piece of superb prose.”

the black mirror of the great well, is my own face watching me watching it. I’m like a playing card that belongs to some ancient and unknown suit, the only remnant of a lost pack. I have no meaning, I do not know my value, I have nothing to compare myself with in order to find myself, I have no purpose in life by which to know myself. And thus, in the successive images I use to describe myself — not untruthful but not truthful either — I become more image than me,

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