The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

‘I want you only to dream of you,’ they tell the beloved woman in verses they never send – they who dare not tell her anything. This ‘I want you only to dream of you’ is a verse from an old poem of mine. I record the memory with a smile, and don’t even comment on the smile.

I’m one of those souls women say they love but never recognize when they meet us – one of those souls that they would never recognize, even if they recognized us. I endure the sensitivity of my feelings with an attitude of disdain. I have all the qualities for which romantic poets are admired, and even the lack of those qualities, which makes one a true romantic poet. I find myself partially described in novels as the protagonist of various plots, but the essence of my life and soul is never to be a protagonist.

Everyone has his alcohol. To exist is alcohol enough for me. Drunk from feeling, I wander as I walk straight ahead. When it’s time, I show up at the office like everyone else. When it’s not time, I go to the river to gaze at the river, like everyone else. I’m no different. And behind all this, O sky my sky, I secretly constellate and have my infinity.

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept – our own selves – that we love.

This is true in the whole gamut of love. In sexual love we seek our own pleasure via another body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via our own idea. The masturbator may be abject, but in point of fact he’s the perfect logical expression of the lover. He’s the only one who doesn’t feign and doesn’t fool himself.

The scholiast who annotated Virgil was wrong. Understanding is what wearies us most of all. To live is to not think.

To organize our life in such a way that it becomes a mystery to others, that those who are closest to us will only be closer to not knowing us. That is how I’ve shaped my life, almost without thinking about it, but I did it with so much instinctive art that even to myself I’ve become a not entirely clear and definite individual.

All literature is an attempt to make life real. As all of us know, even when we don’t act on what we know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are all absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary. Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel and not what someone has taught them to feel. Once I heard a child, who wished to say that he was on the verge of tears, say not ‘I feel like crying,’ which is what an adult, i.e. an idiot, would say, but rather, ‘I feel like tears.’ And this phrase – so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it – decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. ‘I feel like tears’! That small child aptly defined his spiral.

Why should I care that no one reads what I write? I write to forget about life, and I publish because that’s one of the rules of the game. If tomorrow all my writings were lost, I’d be sorry, but I doubt I’d be violently and frantically sorry, as one might expect, given that with my writings would go my entire life. I would probably be like the mother who loses her son but is back to normal in a few months’ time. The great earth that cares for the hills would also, in a less motherly fashion, take care of the pages I’ve written. Nothing matters, and I’m sure there have been people who, looking at life, didn’t have much patience for this child that was still awake, when all they wanted was the peace that would come once the child went to bed.

Like all men endowed with great mental mobility, I have an irrevocable, organic love of settledness. I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places.

The idea of travelling nauseates me. I’ve already seen what I’ve never seen. I’ve already seen what I have yet to see.

Landscapes are repetitions. On a simple train ride I uselessly and restlessly waver between my inattention to the landscape and my inattention to the book that would amuse me if I were someone else. Life makes me feel a vague nausea, and any kind of movement aggravates it. Only landscapes that don’t exist and books I’ll never read aren’t tedious. Life, for me, is a drowsiness that never reaches the brain. This I keep free, so that I can be sad there.

Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! For someone who isn’t anything, like a river, forward motion is no doubt life. But for those who are alert, who think and feel, the horrendous hysteria of trains, cars and ships makes it impossible to sleep or to wake up.

From any trip, even a short one, I return as from a slumber full of dreams – in a dazed confusion, with one sensation stuck to an...

Travel is for those who cannot feel. That’s why travel books are always so unsatisfying as books of experience. They’re worth only as much as the imagination of the one who writes them, and if the writer has imagination, he can as easily enchant us with the detailed, photographic description – down to each tiny coloured pennant – of scenes he imagined as he can with the necessarily less detailed description of the scenes he thought he saw. All of us are near-sighted, except on the inside. Only the eyes we use for dreaming truly see.

The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.

Every soul worthy of itself desires to live life in the Extreme. To be satisfied with what one is given is for slaves. To ask for more is for children. To conquer more is for madmen, because every conquest is .....

The argonauts said* that it wasn’t necessary to live, only to sail. We, argonauts of our pathological sensibility, say that it’s not necessary to live, only to feel.

However it may be, I’ll let it be. And to whatever god or gods that be, I’ll let go of who I am, according as luck and chance determine, faithful to a forgotten pledge.

I don’t complain about the world. I don’t protest in the name of the universe. I’m not a pessimist. I suffer and complain, but I don’t know if suffering is the norm, nor do I know if it’s human to suffer. Why should I care to know?

I’m not a pessimist. I’m sad.

I’ve always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I’m not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect. Nothing would bother me more than if they found me strange at the office. I like to revel in the irony that they don’t find me at all strange. I like the hair shirt of being regarded by them as their equal. I like the crucifixion of being considered no different. There are martyrdoms more subtle than those recorded for the saints and hermits. There are torments of our mental awareness as there are of the body and of desire. And in the former, as in the latter, there’s a certain sensuality .....

I realize that if I’d had this imagined past, I wouldn’t now be able to write these pages, which are at least something, and therefore better than all the pages I would only have dreamed of writing in better circumstances.

If I had to list, in the blank space of a questionnaire, the main literary influences on my intellectual development, I would immediately jot down the name of Cesário Verde,* but I would also write in the names of Senhor Vasques my boss, of Moreira the head bookkeeper, of Vieira the local sales representative, and of António the office boy. And as the crucial address of them all I would write LISBON in big letters.

Yes, if I’d been wealthy, shielded, spruce, ornamental, I wouldn’t even have been this brief episode of pretty paper among crumbs;

But I’m not sure whether the supreme resolution of all these dead intentions – dead even when achieved – lies in the ecstatic resignation of the Buddha, who, once he understood the emptiness of things, stood up from his ecstasy saying, ‘Now I know everything’, or in the jaded indifference of the emperor Severus: ‘Omnia fui, nihil expedit – I’ve been everything, nothing’s worth the trouble.’

The simplest, truly simplest things, which nothing can make semi-simple, become complex when I live them. To wish someone a good day sometimes intimidates me. My voice gets caught, as if there were a strange audacity in saying these words out loud. It’s a kind of squeamishness about existing – there’s no other way to put it!

I feel in my soul a divine regret for everything, a choked and sobbing grief for the condemnation of dreams in the flesh of those who dreamed them. And I hate without hatred all the poets who wrote verses, all the idealists who saw their ideals take shape, all those who obtained what they wanted.

Sleep! To fall asleep! To have peace! To be an abstract consciousness that’s conscious only of breathing peacefully, without a world, without heavens, without a soul – a dead sea of emotion reflecting an absence of stars!

The burden of feeling! The burden of having to feel!

What’s travel and what good is it? Any sunset is the sunset; one doesn’t have to go to Constantinople to see it. The sensation of freedom that travel brings? I can have it by going from Lisbon to Benfica,* and have it more intensely than one who goes from Lisbon to China, because if the freedom isn’t in me, then I won’t have it no matter where I go. ‘Any road,’ said Carlyle,* ‘this simple Entepfuhl road, will lead you to the end of the World.’ 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.

Condillac begins his celebrated book* with: ‘No matter how high we climb or how low we descend, we never escape our sensations.’ We never disembark from ourselves. We never attain another existence unless we other ourselves by actively, vividly imagining who we are. The true landscapes are those that we ourselves create since, being their gods, we see them as they truly are, which is however we created them. None of the four corners of the world is the one that interests me and that I can truly see; it’s the fifth corner that I travel in, and it belongs to me.

Whoever has crossed all the seas has crossed only the monotony of himself. I’ve crossed more seas than anyone. I’ve seen more mountains than there are on earth. I’ve passed through more cities than exist, and the great rivers of non-worlds have flown sovereignly under my watching eyes. If I were to ...

The fact is that what I discern in them I don’t clearly see. The fact is that I think I’m the first to express in words the sinister absurdity of this incurable sensation. And yet I do cure it, by writing about it. Yes, for every truly profound desolation, one that’s not pure feeling but has some intelligence mixed in with it, there’s always the ironic remedy of expressing it. If literature has no other usefulness, it at least has this one, though it serves only a few.

I pity those who dream the probable, the reasonable and the accessible more than those who fantasize about the extraordinary and remote. Those who have grandiose dreams are either lunatics who believe in what they dream and are happy, or they’re mere daydreamers whose reveries are like the soul’s music, lulling them and meaning nothing. But those who dream the possible will, very possibly, suffer real disillusion. I can’t be too disappointed over not having become a Roman emperor, but I can sorely regret never once having spoken to the seamstress who at the street corner turns right at about nine o’clock every morning. 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 one kind of dream lives by itself, independently, while the other is contingent on what may or may not happen.

I feel old, just so I can have the pleasure of feeling myself being rejuvenated.

As I laid the paper down on the restaurant table, I was already thinking how a similar article, narrowing the focus, could have been written about the firm’s sales representative, more or less my acquaintance, who’s eating lunch at the table in the back corner, as he does every day. All that the millionaire had, this man has – in smaller measure, to be sure, but abundantly for his stature. Both men have had equal success, and there isn’t even a difference in their fame, for here too we must see each man in his particular context. There’s no one in the world who doesn’t know the name of the American millionaire, but there’s no one in Lisbon’s commercial district who doesn’t know the name of the man eating lunch in the corner. These men obtained all that their hand could grasp within arm’s reach. What varied in them was the length of their arm; they were identical in other respects. I’ve never been able to envy this sort of person. I’ve always felt that virtue lay in obtaining what was out of one’s reach, in living where one isn’t, in being more alive after death than during life, in achieving something impossible, something absurd, in overcoming – like an obstacle – the world’s very reality.

The American millionaire can’t believe that posterity will appreciate his poems, given that he didn’t write any. The sales representative can’t imagine that the future will admire his pictures, since he never painted any. I, however, who in this transitory life am nothing, can enjoy the thought of the future reading this very page, since I do actually write it; I can take pride – like a father in his son – in the fame I will have, since at least I have something that could bring me fame. And as I think this, rising from the table, my invisible and inwardly majestic stature rises above Detroit, Michigan, and over all the commercial district of Lisbon.

Some have a great dream in life that they never accomplish. Others have no dream, and likewise never accomplish it.

life (which always tire us). I stand up from the chair where, propped distractedly against the table, I’ve entertained myself with the narration of these strange impressions. I stand up, propping my body on itself, and walk to the window, higher than the surrounding rooftops, and I watch the city going to sleep in a slow beginning of silence. The large and whitely white moon sadly clarifies the terraced differences in the buildings opposite. The moonlight seems to illuminate icily all the world’s mystery. It seems to reveal everything, and everything is shadows with admixtures of faint light, false and unevenly absurd gaps, inconsistencies of the visible. There’s no breeze, and the mystery seems to loom larger. I feel queasy in my abstract thought. I’ll never write a page that sheds light on me or that sheds light on anything. A wispy cloud hovers hazily over the moon, like a coverture. I’m ignorant, like these rooftops. I’ve failed, like all of nature.

And without seeing, without thinking, my eyes now closed on my non-existent slumber, I meditate on what words can truly describe moonlight. The ancients would say that it is silvery or white. But this supposed whiteness actually consists of many colours. Were I to get out of bed and look past the cold panes, I know I would see that in the high lonely air the moonlight is greyish white, blued by a subdued yellow; that over the various, unequally dark rooftops it bathes the submissive buildings with a black white and floods the red brown of the highest clay tiles with a colourless colour. At the end of the street – a placid abyss where the naked cobblestones are unevenly rounded – it has no colour other than a blue which perhaps comes from the grey of the stones. In the depths of the horizon it must be almost dark blue, different from the black blue in the depths of the sky. On the windows where it strikes, the moonlight is a black yellow. From here in my bed, if I open my eyes, heavy with the sleep I cannot find, it looks like snow turned into colour, with floating threads of warm nacre. And if I think with what I feel, it’s a tedium turned into white shadow, darkening as if eyes were closing on this hazy whiteness.

My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will’s surrender. I begin because I don’t have the strength to think; I finish because I don’t have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.

Why do I write, if I can’t write any better? But what would become of me if I didn’t write what I can, however inferior it may be to what I am?

For me, to write is self-deprecating, and yet I can’t quit doing it. Writing is like the drug I abhor and keep taking, the addiction I despise and depend on.

Just as some people work because they’re bored, I sometimes write because I have nothing to say. Daydreaming, which occurs naturally to people when they’re not thinking, in me takes written form, for I know how to dream in prose. And there are many sincere feelings and much genuine emotion that I extract from not feeling.

But everything is absurd, and dreaming least of all.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a reformer. A reformer is a man who sees the world’s superficial ills and sets out to cure them by aggravating the more basic ills. A doctor tries to bring a sick body into conformity with a normal, healthy body, but we don’t know what’s healthy or sick in the social sphere.

I see humanity as merely one of Nature’s latest schools of decorative painting. I don’t distinguish in any fundamental way between a man and a tree, and I naturally prefer whichever is more decorative, whichever interests my thinking eyes. If the tree is more interesting to me than the man, I’m sorrier to see the tree felled than to see the man die. There are departing sunsets that grieve me more than the deaths of children. I keep my own feelings out of everything, in order to be able to feel.

All of life’s unpleasant experiences – when we make fools of ourselves, act thoughtlessly, or lapse in our observance of some virtue – should be regarded as mere external accidents which can’t affect the substance of our soul. We should see them as toothaches or calluses of life, as things that bother us but remain outside us (even though they’re ours), or that only our organic existence need consider and our vital functions worry about. When we achieve this attitude, which in essence is that of the mystics, we’re protected not only from the world but also from ourselves, for we’ve conquered what is foreign in us, contrary and external to us, and therefore our enemy.

Horace said* that the just man will remain undaunted, even if the world crumbles all around him. Although the image is absurd, the point is valid. Even if what we pretend to be (because we coexist with others) crumbles around us, we should remain undaunted – not because we’re just, but because we’re ourselves, and to be ourselves means having nothing to do with external things that crumble, even if they crumble right on top of what for them we are.