The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

We should wash our destiny the way we wash our body, and change life the way we change clothes – not to preserve life, as when we eat and sleep, but out of objective respect for ourselves, which is what personal hygiene is all about.

But the horror that’s destroying me today is less noble and more corrosive. It’s a longing to be free of wanting to have thoughts, a desire to never have been anything, a conscious despair in every cell of my body and soul. It’s the sudden feeling of being imprisoned in an infinite cell. Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything?

I experience a feeling of inspiration and liberation as I passively reread those simple lines by Caeiro* that tell what naturally results from the smallness of his village. Since it is small, he says, there one can see more of the world than in the city, and so his village is larger than the city… Because I’m the size of what I see And not the size of my stature.

know nothing more simultaneously false and telling than the statement by Leonardo da Vinci that we cannot love or hate something until we’ve understood it.

Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me.

The mere thought of having to enter into contact with someone else makes me nervous. A simple invitation to have dinner with a friend produces an anguish in me that’s hard to define. The idea of any social obligation whatsoever – attending a funeral, dealing with someone about an office matter, going to the station to wait for someone I know or don’t know – the very idea disturbs my thoughts for an entire day, and sometimes I even start worrying the night before, so that I sleep badly. When it takes place, the dreaded encounter is utterly insignificant, justifying none of my anxiety, but the next time is no different: I never learn to learn.

I have no use for motor vehicles. I have no use for the products of science – telephones, telegraphs – which make life easy, nor for its fanciful by-products – phonographs, radios – which make life amusing for those who are amused by such things. None of that interests me, none of it appeals. But I love the Tagus because of the big city along its shore. I delight in the sky because I see it from the fourth floor on a downtown street. Nothing nature or the country can give me compares with the jagged majesty of the tranquil, moonlit city as seen from Graça or São Pedro de Alcântara.* There are no flowers for me like the variegated colouring of Lisbon on a sunny day.

The beauty of a naked body is only appreciated by cultures that use clothing. Modesty is important for sensuality like resistance for energy.

One who has never lived under constraints doesn’t know what freedom is.

The fundamental error of Romanticism is to confuse what we need with what we desire. We all need certain basic things for life’s preservation and continuance; we all desire a more perfect life, complete happiness, the fulfilment of our dreams and ..... It’s human to want what we need, and it’s human to desire what we don’t need but find desirable. Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what’s desirable with equal intensity, suffering our lack of perfection as if we were suffering for lack of bread. The Romantic malady is to want the moon as if it could actually be obtained.

Nearly all men dream, deep down, of their own mighty imperialism: the subjection of all men, the surrender of all women, the adoration of all peoples and – for the noblest dreamers – of all eras. Few men devoted, like me, to dreaming are lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of dreaming of themselves in this way.

Even I, who laugh at these seductions that play on the mind, very often catch myself thinking how nice it would be to be famous, how pleasant to be doted on, how colourful to be triumphant! But I’m unable to envision myself in these lofty roles without a hearty snicker from the other I that’s always near by, like a downtown street.

May I at least carry, to the boundless possibility contained in the abyss of everything, the glory of my disillusion like that of a great dream, and the splendour of not believing like a banner of defeat: a banner in feeble hands, but still and all a banner, dragged through mud and the blood of the weak but raised high for who knows what reason – whether in defiance, or as a challenge, or in mere desperation – as we vanish into quicksand. No one knows for what reason, because no one knows anything, and the sand swallows those with banners as it swallows those without. And the sand covers everything: my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.

And Moreira! Moreira, my supervisor, the epitome of monotonous constancy, looks much more alive than I! Even the office boy (and here I’m unable to repress a feeling that I tell myself isn’t envy) has a forthrightness of expression that is smiles away from my blank effacement, reminiscent of a sphinx from the stationer’s.* What does this mean? What is this truth that film doesn’t mistake? What is this certainty that a cold lens documents? Who am I, that I should look like that? Anyway… And the insult of the whole ensemble? ‘You came out really well,’ Moreira said suddenly. And then, turning to the sales representative: ‘It’s his spitting image – don’t you think?’ And the sales representative agreed with a happy affability that tossed me into the rubbish bin.

I consider it neither a human nor a literary error to attribute a soul to the things we call inanimate. To be a thing is to be the object of an attribution. It may be erroneous to say that a tree feels, that a river runs, that a sunset is sad or that the calm ocean (blue from the sky it doesn’t have) smiles (from the sun outside it). But it’s every bit as erroneous to attribute beauty to things. It’s every bit as erroneous to say that things possess colour, form, perhaps even being. This ocean is saltwater. This sunset is the initial diminishing of sunlight in this particular latitude and longitude. This little boy playing next to me is an intellectual mass of cells – better yet, he’s a clockwork of subatomic movements, a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in miniature. Everything comes from outside, and the human soul itself may be no more than the ray of sunlight that shines and isolates from the soil the pile of dung that’s the body.

In these considerations there may be an entire philosophy for someone with the strength to draw conclusions. It won’t be me. Lucid vague thoughts and logical possibilities occur to me, but they all dim in the vision of a ray of sunlight that gilds a pile of dung like wetly squished dark straw, on the almost black soil next to a stone wall. That’s how I am. When I want to think, I look. When I want to descend into my soul, I suddenly freeze, oblivious, at the top of the long spiral staircase, looking through the upper-storey window at the sun that bathes the sprawling mass of rooftops in a tawny farewell.

Then there are the conquerors from the bars and cafés, unwittingly sublime in the ecstasy of their self-centred chatter, or content to remain self-centredly silent, with no need to defend what they’re too stingy to say. But they’re all poets, poor devils, who drag past my eyes, as I drag past theirs, the same sorry sight of our common incongruity. They all have, like me, their future in the past.

Let the Gods change my dreams, but not my gift for dreaming.

My hapless peers with their lofty dreams – how I envy and despise them! I’m with the others, with the even more hapless, who have no one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I’m with these poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature besides their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live.

These people are happy, for they’ve been given the enchanted dream of stupidity. But those, like me, who’ve been given dreams without illusions .....

60 DOLOROUS INTERLUDE Should you ask me if I’m happy, I’ll answer that I’m not.

Let’s not forget to hate those who enjoy, just because they enjoy,

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.

Although love is a sexual instinct, it’s not with sexual instinct that we love but with the conjecture of some other feeling. And that conjecture is already some other feeling.

When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and the most self-absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they’re sleeping. For me there’s no discernible difference between killing a child and killing a sleeping man.

They go on their way with all the manners and gestures that define consciousness, and they’re conscious of nothing, for they’re not conscious of being conscious. Whether clever or stupid, they’re all equally stupid. Whether old or young, they’re all the same age. Whether men or women, all are of the same sex that doesn’t exist.

The cause of my profound sense of incompatibility with others is, I believe, that most people think with their feelings, whereas I feel with my thoughts. For the ordinary man, to feel is to live, and to think is to know how to live. For me, to think is to live, and to feel is merely food for thought.

I carefully study the overall impression I make on others, from which I then draw conclusions. I’m a fellow most people like, and they even have a vague and curious respect for me. But I don’t arouse ardent emotions. No one will ever passionately be my friend. That’s why so many are able to respect me.

There’s a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I can’t touch it.

Rationalize my sadness? What for, if rationalization takes effort? Sad people can’t make an effort.

I can’t even renounce those banal acts of life that I so abhor. To renounce is an effort, and I don’t hav...

However deeply I delve into myself, all of my dreams’ paths lead to clearings of anxiety.

Pathetic sensibility that depends on a slight movement of air to achieve what little tranquillity it knows! But so is all human sensibility, and I doubt that the arrival of unexpected cash or an unexpected smile counts any

The creation of something complete and whole, be it good or bad – and if it’s never entirely good, it’s very often not all bad – yes, the creation of something complete seems to stir in me above all a feeling of envy. A completed thing is like a child; although imperfect like everything human, it belongs to us like our own children.

Better either the complete work, which is in any case a work, even if it’s bad, or the absence of words, the unbroken silence of the soul that knows it is incapable of acting.

I write because I don’t know, and I use whatever abstract and lofty term for Truth a given emotion requires.

The only attitude worthy of a superior man is to persist in an activity he recognizes is useless, to observe a discipline he knows is sterile, and to apply certain norms of philosophical and metaphysical thought that he considers utterly inconsequential.

There was a time when I was irritated by certain things that today make me smile. And one of those things, which I’m reminded of nearly every day, is the way men who are active in day-to-day life smile at poets and artists. They don’t always do it, as the intellectuals who write in newspapers suppose, with an air of superiority. Often they do it with affection. But it’s as if they were showing affection to a child, someone with no notion of life’s certainty and exactness.

The dreamer’s superiority is due to the fact that dreaming is much more practical than living, and the dreamer gets far greater and more varied pleasure out of life than the man of action. In other and plainer words, the dreamer is the true man of action.

Better and happier those who, recognizing that everything is fictitious, write the novel before someone writes it for them and, like Machiavelli, don courtly garments to write in secret.

The truly wise man is the one who can keep external events from changing him in any way. To do this, he covers himself with an armour of realities closer to him than the world’s facts and through which the facts, modified accordingly, reach him.

There are times when everything wearies us, including what we would normally find restful.

Life is whatever we conceive it to be. For the farmer who considers his field to be everything, the field is an empire. For a Caesar whose empire is still not enough, the empire is a field. The poor man possesses an empire, the great man a field. All that we truly possess are our own sensations; it is in them, rather than in what they sense, that we must base our life’s reality. This has nothing to do with anything.

How little, from the real world, forms the support of the best reflections: the fact of arriving late for lunch, of running out of matches, of personally, individually throwing the matchbox out the window, of feeling out of sorts for having eaten late, the fact it’s Sunday virtually guaranteeing a lousy sunset, the fact I’m nobody in the world, and all metaphysics.

No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it. Collective thought is stupid because it’s collective. Nothing passes into the realm of the collective without leaving at the border – like a toll – most of the intelligence it contained.

In youth we’re twofold. Our innate intelligence, which may be considerable, coexists with the stupidity of our inexperience, which forms a second, lesser intelligence. Only later on do the two unite. That’s why youth always blunders – not because of its inexperience, but because of its non-unity.

Today the only course left for the man of superior intellig...

What’s the point of calling myself a genius, if I’m after all an assistant bookkeeper? When Cesário Verde* made sure the doctor knew that he was not Senhor Verde, an office worker, but Cesário Verde the poet, he used one of those self-important terms that reek of vanity. What he always was, poor man, was Senhor Verde, an office worker. The poet was born after he died, for it was only then that he was appreciated as a poet.

I can be what I want to be, but I have to want whatever it is.

Success consists in being successful, not in having the potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, ...