The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

I reduced my contact with others to a minimum. I did my best to lose all attachment to life ..... In time I even shed my desire for glory, like a sleepy man who takes off his clothes to go to bed.

Today I’m an ascetic in my religion of myself. A cup of coffee, a cigarette and my dreams can substitute quite well for the universe and its stars, for work, love, and even beauty and glory. I need virtually no stimulants. I have opium enough in my soul.

I have no theories about life. I don’t know or wonder whether it’s good or bad. In my eyes it’s harsh and sad, with delightful dreams interspersed here and there. Why should I care what it is for others?

One could say that since we don’t really know what evil is, we cannot rightfully affirm that something is bad or good, but it’s true that a pain, even if it’s for our ultimate good, is obviously bad in itself, and this is enough to prove that evil exists in the world. A toothache is enough to make one disbelieve in the goodness of the Creator. The basic error in this argument seems to lie in our complete ignorance of God’s plan, and our equal ignorance of what kind of an intelligent person the Intellectual Infinite might be. The existence of evil is one thing; the reason for its existence is another. The distinction may be subtle to the point of seeming sophistic, but it is nevertheless valid. The existence of evil cannot be denied, but one can deny that the existence of evil is evil. I admit that the problem persists, but only because our imperfection persists.

No one would love himself if he really knew himself, and without the vanity which is born of this ignorance and is the blood of the spiritual life, our souls would die of anemia. No one knows anyone else, and it’s just as well, for if he did, he would discover – in his very own mother, wife or son – his inveterate, metaphysical enemy.

We get along because we’re strangers at heart. What would become of so many happy couples if they could see into one another’s soul, if they could truly understand one another, as romantics say, without knowing the danger (albeit ultimately inconsequential) of what they’re saying? All marriages are flawed, because each partner holds inside, in a secret corner where the soul belongs to the Devil, the wispy image of the desired man who is nothing like the husband, the hazy figure of the sublime woman whom the wife doesn’t live up to.

All that we do, say, think or feel wears the same mask and the same costume. No matter how much we take off what we wear, we’ll never reach nakedness, which is a phenomenon of the soul and not of removing clothes.

There are supposedly great mathematicians who make errors in simple addition, but what I’m talking about here is ignorance, not error. I accept that a great mathematician can add two and two and get five: it can happen to anyone in a moment of distraction. What I don’t accept is that he not know what addition is or how it’s done. And this is the case of the overwhelming majority of occult masters.

If a man writes well only when he’s drunk, then I’ll tell him: Get drunk. And if he says that it’s bad for his liver, I’ll answer: What’s your liver? A dead thing that lives while you live, whereas the poems you write live without while.

Art consists in making others feel what we feel, in freeing them from themselves by offering them our own personality. The true substance of whatever I feel is absolutely incommunicable, and the more profoundly I feel it, the more incommunicable it is. In order to convey to someone else what I feel, I must translate my feelings into his language – saying things, that is, as if they were what I feel, so that he, reading them, will feel exactly what I felt. And since this someone is presumed by art to be not this or that person but everyone (i.e., that person common to all persons), what I must finally do is convert my feelings into a typical human feeling, even if it means perverting the true nature of what I felt.

Art lies because it is social. And there are two great forms of art: one that speaks to our deepest soul, the other to our attentive soul. The first is poetry, the second is the novel. The first begins to lie in its very structure; the second in its very intention. One purports to give us the truth through lines that keep strict metres, thus lying against the nature of speech; the other purports to give us the truth by means of a reality that we all know never existed.

To feign is to love. Whenever I see a pretty smile or a meaningful gaze, no matter whom the smile or gaze belongs to, I always plumb to the soul of the smiling or gazing face to discover what politician wants to buy our vote or what prostitute wants us to buy her. But the politician that buys us loved at least the act of buying us, even as the prostitute loved being bought by us. Like it or not, we cannot escape universal brotherhood. We all love each other, and the lie is the kiss we exchange.

In me all affections take place on the surface, but sincerely. I’ve always been an actor, and in earnest. Whenever I’ve loved, I’ve pretended to love, pretending it even to myself.

erudite

One of my life’s greatest tragedies is to have already read The Pickwick Papers. (I can’t go back and read them for the first time.)

Art frees us, illusorily, from the squalor of being. While feeling the wrongs and sufferings endured by Hamlet, prince of Denmark, we don’t feel our own, which are vile because they’re ours and vile because they’re vile.

Love, sleep, drugs and intoxicants are elementary forms of art, or rather, of producing the same effect as art. But love, sleep and drugs all have their disillusion. Love wearies or disappoints. We wake up from sleep, and while sleeping we haven’t lived. And we pay for drugs with the ruin of the very body they served to stimulate. But in art there is no disillusion, since illusion is accepted from the start. There’s no waking up from art, because we dream but don’t sleep in it. Nor do we pay a tax or penalty for having enjoyed art.

To possess is to lose. To feel without possessing is to preserve and keep, for it is to extract from things their essence.

It’s not love but love’s outskirts that are worth knowing…

Revolutionaries make a crass and grievous error when they distinguish between the bourgeoisie and the masses, the nobility and the common people, the ruling and the ruled. The only distinction is between those who adapt and those who don’t; the rest is literature, and bad literature. The beggar, if he adapts, can become king tomorrow, though in doing so he’ll forfeit the virtue of being a beggar. He’ll have crossed the border, losing his nationality.

These thoughts console me in this cramped office, whose grimy windows overlook a joyless street. These thoughts console me, and for company I have my fellow creators of the world’s consciousness – the reckless playwright William Shakespeare, John Milton the schoolteacher, Dante Alighieri the tramp,..... and even, if the reference be permitted, Jesus Christ, who was nothing in the world, his very existence being doubted by history. Quite a different class of men is formed by the likes of the state councillor Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the senator Victor Hugo, the chief of state Lenin, the chief of state Mussolini ..... Those of us in the shade, among the delivery boys and the barbers, constitute humanity .....

On the one hand there are the kings with their prestige, the emperors with their glory, the geniuses with their aura, the saints with their haloes, the leaders with their supremacy, the prostitutes, the prophets and the rich… On the other hand there’s us – the delivery boy on the corner, the reckless playwright William Shakespeare, the barber with his jokes, John Milton the schoolteacher, the shop assistant, Dante...

To be adept at deluding oneself is the first prerequisite for a statesman. Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.

I know no better antidote for that torrent of shadows than direct acquaintance with common human life – in its commercial reality, for instance, as exhibited on the Rua dos Douradores. With what relief I used to return from that madhouse of puppets to the real presence of Moreira, my supervisor, a genuine and competent bookkeeper, badly dressed and out of shape, but at any rate a man, something none of these others have succeeded in being.

Most men spontaneously live a fictitious and alien life. ‘Most people are other people,’* said Oscar Wilde, and he was right. Some spend their lives in pursuit of something they don’t want; others pursue something they want that’s useless to them; still others lose themselves .....

Those who lament the world’s woes are isolated – they lament only their own.

Indifferent to all this, humanity keeps on eating and loving, weeping over only what it must weep, and for as short a time as possible – over the death of a son, for instance, who is soon forgotten except on his birthday, or over the loss of money, which only causes weeping until more money comes along or one gets used to the loss. The will to live recovers and carries on. The dead are buried. Our losses are forgotten.

He left today for his home town, apparently for good. I mean the so-called office boy, the same man I’d come to regard as part of this human corporation, and therefore as part of me and my world. He left today. In the corridor, casually running into each other for the expected surprise of our farewell, he timidly returned my embrace, and I had enough self-control not to cry, as in my heart – independent of me – my ardent eyes wanted.

Whatever has been ours, because it was ours, even if only as a casual presence in our daily routine or in what we see, becomes part of us. The man who left today for a Galician town I’ve never heard of was not, for me, the office boy; he was a vital part, because visible and human, of the substance of my life. Today I was diminished. I’m not quite the same. The office boy left today.

To be born free is the greatest splendour of man, making the humble hermit superior to kings and even to the gods, who are self-sufficient by their power but not by their contempt of it.

Death ennobles, dressing our poor ridiculous bodies in finery they have never known. In death a man is free, even if he didn’t want freedom. In death he’s no longer a slave, even if he wept on giving up his slavery. Like a king whose greatest glory is his kingly title, and who as a man may be laughable but as a king is superior, so the dead man may be horribly deformed but is still superior, because death has freed him.

How confusing it all is! How much better it is to see rather than think, to read rather than write! What I see may deceive me, but I don’t consider it mine. What I read may distress me, but I don’t have to feel bad for having written it.

We worship perfection because we can’t have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.

We harbour a secret hatred of paradise. Our yearnings are like those of the poor wretch who hopes for the countryside in heaven. It’s not abstract ecstasies or marvels of the absolute that can enchant a feeling soul; it’s homesteads and hillsides, green islands in blue seas, wooded paths and restful hours spent on ancestral farms, even if we’ve never had these things. If there’s no land in heaven, then better there were no heaven. Better that everything be nothing and that the plotless novel come to an end.

To achieve perfection would require a coldness foreign to man, and he would lose the human heart that makes him love perfection. In awe we worship the impulse to perfection of great artists. We love their approximation to per...

All that has ever been done is ridden with errors, faulty perspectives, ignorance, signs of bad taste, shortcomings and oversights. To write a masterpiece large enough to be great and perfect enough to be sublime is a task no one has had the fortune or divine capacity to accomplish. Whatever can’t be done in a single burst suffers from the unevenness of our spirit.

The only method for achieving Perfection is to be God. Our greatest effort takes time; the time it takes passes through various stages of our soul, and each stage of the soul, being unlike any other, taints the character of the work with its own personality. All we can be certain of when we write is that we write badly; the only great and perfect works are the ones we never dream of realizing.

I’ll never write and how clearly I describe in my meditation the landscapes I could never describe! I fashion complete sentences with not a word out of place; detailed dramatic plots unroll in my mind; I sense the verbal and metrical cadence of great poems in each and every word, and a great enthusiasm follows me like an invisible slave in the shadows. But if I get up from the chair, where these nearly actualized sensations loll, and step over to the table to write them down, then the words flee, the dramas die, and the vital nexus underlying the rhythmic murmur vanishes, leaving only a distant nostalgia, a vestige of sunlight on faraway mountains, a wind that stirs leaves on the edge of a wilderness, a kinship that’s never revealed, the orgy other people enjoy, the woman whom we expect to turn around and look but who never quite exists.

How I envy those who produce novels, those who begin them and write them and finish them! I can imagine novels chapter by chapter, sometimes with the actual phrases of dialogue and the narrative commentary in between, but I’m incapable of committing these dreams of writing to paper .....

Wealth should never be envied except platonically. Wealth is freedom.

Money is beautiful, because it frees us. To want to die in Peking and not be able to is one of the things that weigh on me like a feeling of impending doom.

The buyers of useless things are wiser than is commonly supposed – they buy little dreams. They become children in the act of acquisition. When people with money succumb to the charms of those useless little objects, they possess them with the joy of a child gathering sea shells on the beach – the image that best expresses the child’s happiness. He gathers shells on the beach! No two are ever alike for a child. He falls asleep with the two prettiest ones in his hand, and when they’re lost or taken from him (A crime! They’ve made off with outward bits of his soul! They’ve stolen pieces of his dream!), he weeps like a God robbed of a just-created universe.

Everything is absurd. One man spends his life earning and saving up money, although he has no children to leave it to nor any hope that some heaven might reserve him a transcendent portion. Another man strives to gain posthumous fame without believing in an afterlife that would give him knowledge of that fame. Yet another wears himself out in pursuit of things he doesn’t really care for. Then there’s one who ..... One man reads so as to learn, uselessly. Another man enjoys himself so as to live, uselessly.

The only way you can have new sensations is by forging a new soul. It’s useless to try to feel new things without feeling them in a new way, and you can’t feel in a new way without changing your soul. For things are what we feel they are – how long have you known this without yet knowing it? – and the only way for there to be new things, for us to feel new things, is for there to be some novelty in how we feel them. Change your soul. How? That’s for you to figure out. From the time we’re born until we die, our soul slowly changes, like the body. Find a way to make it change faster, even as our body changes more rapidly when suffering or recovering from certain diseases.

We should never stoop down to delivering lectures, lest anyone think we have opinions or would condescend to speak with the public. Let the public read us, if they wish.

The world belongs to those who don’t feel. The essential condition for being a practical man is the absence of sensibility. The chief requisite for the practical expression of life is will, since this leads to action. Two things can thwart action – sensibility and analytic thought, the latter of which is just thought with sensibility. All action is by nature the projection of our personality on to the external world, and since the external world is largely and firstly made up of human beings, it follows that this projection of personality is basically a matter of crossing other people’s path, of hindering, hurting or overpowering them, depending on the form our action takes.

The best example of the practical man is the military strategist, in whom extreme concentration of action is joined to its extreme importance. All life is war, and the battle is life’s synthesis. The strategist is a man who plays with lives like the chess player with chess pieces. What would become of the strategist if he thought about how each of his moves brings night to a thousand homes and grief to three thousand hearts? What would become of the world if we were human? If man really felt, there would be no civilization.

Every man of action is basically cheerful and optimistic, because those who don’t feel are happy.

Today my boss, Senhor Vasques, closed a deal that brought a sick man and his family to ruin. As he negotiated the deal he completely forgot that this man existed, except as the opposing commercial party. After the deal was closed, he was touched by sensibility. Only afterwards, of course, since otherwise the deal would never have been made. ‘I feel sorry for the fellow,’ he told me. ‘He’s going to wind up being destitute.’ Then, lighting up a cigar, he added: ‘Well, if he needs anything from me’ – meaning some kind of charity – ‘I won’t forget that I have him to thank for a good business deal and a few thousand escudos.’

Walking along the street, I often hear snatches of private conversations, and they’re almost all about another woman, another man, a friend’s boyfriend or someone else’s girlfriend ..... Just to hear these shadows of human speech (which is all that occupies most conscious lives) fills me with a sickening tedium, an anguished feeling of being exiled among spiders, and a sudden awareness of my humiliation among real people, condemned to being looked upon by the landlord and the whole neighbourhood as a tenant just like everyone else on the block. And it’s with loathing that I peer through the bars of the storeroom’s back windows, seeing everybody’s rubbish heaped up in the rain in the grimy courtyard which is my life.