The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

My ideal would be to live everything through novels and to use real life for resting up – to read my emotions and to live my disdain of them. For someone with a keen and sensitive imagination, the adventures of a fictional protagonist are genuine emotion enough, and more, since they are experienced by us as well as the protagonist. No greater romantic adventure exists than to have loved Lady Macbeth with true and directly felt love. After a love like that, what can one do but take a rest, not loving anyone in the real world? I don’t know the meaning of this journey I was forced to make, between one and another night, in the company of the whole universe. I know I can read to amuse myself. Reading seems to me the easiest way to pass the time on this as on other journeys. I occasionally lift my eyes from the book where I’m truly feeling and glance, as a foreigner, at the scenery slipping by – fields, cities, men and women, fond attachments, yearnings – and all this is no more to me than an incident in my repose, an idle distraction to rest my eyes from the pages I’ve been reading so intently.