The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

by Fernando Pessoa

I would be happy if only I could sleep. At least that’s what I think now when I can’t sleep. The night is an immense weight pressing down on my dream of suffocating myself beneath the silent blanket. I have indigestion of the soul.

What distinguishes the superior man from the inferior man and from the latter’s animal brothers is the simple quality of irony.

I try to track down the general human emotion that has the tone, type and form of the emotion I’m feeling now for the inhuman and particular reason that I’m a weary bookkeeper or a bored citizen of Lisbon. And I discover that the type of ordinary emotion that produces that same emotion in an ordinary soul is a nostalgia for our lost childhood.

Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized that I am nobody, absolutely nobody.