The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

the ‘factless autobiography’ (Text 12) of a man who dedicated his life to not living,

Every editor of this Book, automatically guilty, should (and I hereby do) (1) apologize for tampering with the original non-order, (2) emphasize that the order presented can claim no special validity, and (3) recommend that readers invent their own order or, better yet, read the work’s many parts in absolutely random order.

His voice was hesitant and colourless, as in those who hope for nothing because it’s perfectly useless to hope.

I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up.

Yes, for me the Rua dos Douradores contains the meaning of everything and the answer to all riddles, except for the riddle of why riddles exist, which can never be answered.

Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while.

We never know self-realization. We are two abysses – a well staring at the sky.

In human eyes, even in lithographic ones, there’s something terrible: the inevitable warning of consciousness, the silent shout that there’s a soul there.

Whenever I see a dead body, death seems to me a departure. The corpse looks to me like a suit that was left behind. Someone went away and didn’t need to take the one and only outfit he’d worn.

With death? No, not even with death. Whoever lives like me doesn’t die: he terminates, wilts, devegetates.

It’s like being intoxicated with inertia, drunk but with no enjoyment in the drinking or in the drunkenness. It’s a sickness with no hope of recovery. It’s a lively death.

When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like an image in a mirror.

My castles were made of old, grubby playing cards from an incomplete deck that could never be used to play anything; they didn’t even fall but had to be knocked down by the impatient hand of the old maid, who wanted to put back the tablecloth that had been pulled to one side, because the hour for tea had struck like a curse from Fate.

I’m the ruins of buildings that were never more than ruins, whose builder, halfway through, got tired of thinking about what he was building.

I weep over my imperfect pages, but if future generations read them, they will be more touched by my weeping than by any perfection I might have achieved, since perfection would have kept me from weeping and, therefore, from writing. Perfection never materializes. The saint weeps, and is human. God is silent. That is why we can love the saint but cannot love God.

An absurd remembrance of my future death sends a shiver down my spine.

But the Entepfuhl road, if it is followed all the way to the end, returns to Entepfuhl; so that Entepfuhl, where we already were, is the same end of the world we set out to find.

The dream that promises us the impossible denies us access to it from the start, but the dream that promises the possible interferes with our normal life, relying on it for its fulfilment.

The superior man differs from the inferior man and his animal brothers by the simple trait of irony. Irony is the first sign that our consciousness has become conscious, and it passes through two stages: the one represented by Socrates, when he says, ‘All I know is that I know nothing,’ and the other represented by Sanches,* when he says, ‘I don’t even know if I know nothing.’