The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

The joy of being understood by others cannot be had by those who want to be understood, for they are too complex to be understood; and simple people, who can be understood by others, never have the desire to be understood.

While out walking I’ve formulated perfect phrases which I can’t remember once I get home. I’m not sure if the ineffable poetry of these phrases belongs totally to what they were (and which I forgot), or partly to what they after all weren’t.

Happy the man who doesn’t think, for he accomplishes instinctively and through organic destiny what the rest of us must accomplish through much meandering and an inorganic or social destiny. Happy the man who most resembles the animals, for he is effortlessly what the rest of us only are by hard work; for he knows the way home, which the rest of us can reach only through byways of fiction and hazy return routes; for he is rooted like a tree, forming part of the landscape and therefore of beauty, while we are but myths who cross the stage, walk-ons of futility and oblivion dressed in real-life costumes.

What to do? Isolate the moment like a thing, and be happy now, in the moment we’re feeling happiness, thinking of nothing but what we’re feeling and completely excluding everything else. Trap all thought in our sensation..... That’s what I believe this afternoon. It’s not what I’ll believe tomorrow morning, because tomorrow morning I’ll be someone else. What kind of believer will I be tomorrow? I don’t know; I would already have to be there to know. Not even God eternal, in whom today I believe, could know – today or tomorrow – anything about me tomorrow. Because today I’m I, and tomorrow it’s possible that he’ll have never existed.

When one of my Japanese teacups is broken, I imagine that the real cause was not the careless hand of a maid but the anxieties of the figures inhabiting the curves of that porcelain . Their grim decision to commit suicide doesn’t shock me: they used the maid as one of us might use a gun. To know this (and with what precision I know it!) is to have gone beyond modern science.

Tedium is not the disease of being bored because there’s nothing to do, but the more serious disease of feeling that there’s nothing worth doing. This means that the more there is to do, the more tedium one will feel.

Omar had a personality; I, for better or worse, have none. In an hour I’ll have strayed from what I am at this moment; tomorrow I’ll have forgotten what I am today. Those who are who they are, like Omar, live in just one world, the external one. Those who aren’t who they are, like me, live not only in the external world but also in a diversified, ever-changing inner world. Try as we might, we could never have the same philosophy as Omar’s. I harbour in me, like unwanted souls, the very philosophies I criticize. Omar could reject them all, for they were all external to him, but I can’t reject them, because they’re me.

always the same and always different, just like scenery.

Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveller. What we see isn’t what we see but what we are.

I’ve become so entirely the fiction of myself that any natural feeling I may have is immediately transformed, as soon as it’s born, into an imaginary feeling. Memories turn into dreams, dreams into my forgetting what I dreamed, and knowing myself into not thinking of myself. I’ve so stripped myself of my own being that existence consists of dressing up. I’m only myself when disguised. And all around me expiring, unknown sunsets gild the landscapes I’ll never see.

The point isn’t just that our suit has become an integral part of us; it’s the complexity of this suit and the curious lack of any real relationship between it and the features that make our body and our body’s movements naturally elegant. Were I asked to discuss the social causes responsible for my soul’s condition, I would speechlessly point to a mirror, a clothes hanger, and a pen.

How I would love right now to be able to see all this as somebody whose only relation to it was visual – to view everything as an adult traveller who has just arrived at the surface of life! To not have learned from birth to attach predetermined meanings to all these things. To be able to see them in their natural self-expression, irrespective of the expressions that have been imposed on them. To be able to recognize the fishwife in her human reality, independent of her being called a fishwife and my knowing that she exists and sells fish. To see the policeman as God sees him. To notice everything for the first time, not as apocalyptic revelations of life’s Mystery, but as direct manifestations of Reality.

I turn and walk slowly, though faster than I think, to the door that will lead me back up to my rented room. But I don’t enter; I hesitate; I keep going. Praça da Figueira,* gaping with variously coloured wares and filling up with customers, blocks the horizon from my view. I advance slowly, lifelessly, and my vision is no longer mine, it’s no longer anything: it’s merely the vision of a human animal that inexorably inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality, and all the other illusions that form the civilization in which I feel and perceive. Where are the living?

I’d like to be in the country to be able to like being in the city. I like being in the city in any case, but I’d like it twice over if I were in the country.

I lack the money to be a dreamer. Great melancholies and sorrows full of tedium can exist only in an atmosphere of comfort and solemn luxury. That’s why Poe’s Egaeus,* pathologically absorbed in thought for hours on end, lives in an ancient, ancestral castle where, beyond the doors of the lifeless drawing room, invisible butlers administer the house and prepare the meals.

The sunsets, to be sure, are somewhere else. But even from this fourth-floor room that looks out over the city, it’s possible to contemplate infinity. An infinity with warehouses down below, it’s true, but with stars up above… This is what occurs to me as I look out my high window at the close of day, with the dissatisfaction of the bourgeois that I’m not, and with the sadness of the poet that I can never be.

But we don’t sympathize with occultists when they act as apostles and champions of humanity; this strips them of their mystery. The only valid reason for an occultist to operate in the astral realm is for the sake of a higher aesthetic, not for the insidious purpose of doing good to others.

Today Death, tarrying longer than ever, came to sell at my doorstep. Slower than ever, she unfolded before me the rugs, silks and linens of her oblivion and her consolation. She smiled with satisfaction at the things she showed, without caring that I saw her smile. But as soon as I felt tempted to buy them, she said they weren’t for sale. She hadn’t come to make me want the things she showed but, through those things, to make me want her. The rugs, she said, were the kind that graced her far-away palace; the silks were the same ones worn in her castle of darkness; and even better linens than what she had showed me draped the altarpieces of her abode in the nether world.

And should I speak with someone far away, and should you who today are a cloud of the possible fall tomorrow as rain of reality over the earth, don’t ever forget your divine origin as my dream. Let whatever you are in real life serve as the dream of a loner, never as a lover’s refuge. Do your duty as a mere vessel. Fulfil your calling as a useless amphora. Let no one ever say of you what the river’s soul might say of its banks: that they exist to confine it. It were better not to flow in life, better to let the dream dry up.

We’re convalescents. Most of us are people who never learned an art or a trade, not even the art of enjoying life. Since we’re basically averse to prolonged social contact, even the greatest of friends tend to bore us after half an hour; we long to see them only when we think about seeing them, and the best moments we spend with them occur in our dreams. I don’t know if this is indicative of superficial friendship. Perhaps not. What I do know is that the things we love, or think we love, have their full weight and worth only when simply dreamed.

The man who must actively live and associate with people – and even in this case it’s possible to reduce intimacy with others to a minimum (intimacy with people, and not mere contact, is what’s detrimental) – will have to freeze the entire surface of his social self, so that every fraternal and friendly gesture he receives will slide off and not enter or make a lasting impression. This seems hard to do but isn’t. People are easy to drive away: all we have to do is not go near them.