The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

I loathe the happiness of all these people who don’t know they’re unhappy. Their human life is full of what, in a true sensibility, would produce a surfeit of anxieties. But since their true life is vegetative, their sufferings come and go without touching their soul, and they live a life that can be compared only to that of a man with a toothache who won a fortune – the genuine good fortune of living unawares, the greatest gift granted by the gods, for it is the gift of being like them, superior just as they are (albeit in a different fashion) to happiness and pain. That’s why, in spite of everything, I love them all. My dear vegetables!

Believe me: if there were no intelligent people to point out humanity’s various woes, humanity wouldn’t even notice them. And sensitive people who suffer cause the rest to suffer by association. For the time being, since we live in society, our one duty as superiors is to reduce to a minimum our participation in the life of the tribe. We shouldn’t read newspapers, for example, or should read them only to find out what anecdotal and unimportant things are happening.

The highest honour for a superior man is to not know the name of his country’s chief of state, or whether he lives under a monarchy or a republic.

No one, I suppose, genuinely admits the real existence of another person. We may concede that the person is alive and that he thinks and feels as we do, but there will always be an unnamed element of difference, a materialized inequality. There are figures from the past and living images from books that are more real to us than the incarnate indifferences that talk to us over shop counters, or happen to glance at us in the trams, or brush against us in the dead happenstance of the streets. Most people are no more for us than scenery, generally the invisible scenery of a street we know by heart.

I feel more kinship and intimacy with certain characters described in books and certain images I’ve seen in prints than I feel with many so-called real people, who are of that metaphysical insignificance known as flesh and blood. And ‘flesh and blood’ in fact describes them rather well: they’re like chunks of meat displayed in the window of a butcher’s, dead things bleeding as if they were alive, shanks and cutlets of Destiny. I’m not ashamed of feeling this way, as I’ve discovered that’s how everyone feels. What seems to lie behind people’s mutual contempt and indifference, such that they can kill each other like assassins who don’t really feel they’re killing, or like soldiers who don’t think about what they’re doing, is that no one pays heed to the apparently abstruse fact that other people are also living souls.

Your necklaces of imitation pearls loved with me my finest hours. Carnations were our preferred flower, perhaps because they didn’t suggest pomp. Your lips solemnly celebrated the irony of your own smile. Did you really understand your destiny? It was because you knew it without understanding it that the mystery written in the sadness of your eyes had cast a pall on your resigned lips. Our Homeland was too far away for roses. In the cascades of our gardens the water was pellucid with silences. In the tiny hollows of the rocks over which the water flowed, there were secrets from our childhood and dreams the same size as our toy soldiers of old, which we could station on the cascades’ stones, in the static execution of a huge military operation, with nothing lacking in our dreams, and nothing lagging in our imagination. I know I’ve failed. I enjoy the vague voluptuosity of failure like one who, in his exhaustion, appreciates the fever that laid him up.

I’ve always lived alone, and ever more alone as I’ve become more self-aware.

Every gesture, however simple, violates an inner secret. Every gesture is a revolutionary act; an exile, perhaps, from the true of our intentions.

All ships are dreamed ships if we have the power to dream them.

There is no artist’s work that could not have been more perfect. When read line by line, the greatest of poems has few verses that couldn’t be improved, few scenes that couldn’t have been told more vividly, and the overall result is never so good that it couldn’t have been vastly better. Woe to the artist who notices this, who one day happens to think about it! Never again will he work with joy or sleep in peace. He’ll be a young man without youth, and grow old dissatisfied.

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.

Have you ever considered, beloved Other, how invisible we all are to each other? Have you ever thought about how little we know each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside ourself. The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe in our meanings of other people’s words. We hear death in words they speak to express sensual bliss. We read sensuality and life in words they drop from their lips without the slightest intention of being profound.

How sublime to waste a life that could have been useful, never to execute a work of art that was certain to be beautiful, to abandon midway a sure road to victory!

Why is art beautiful? Because it’s useless. Why is life ugly? Because it’s all aims, objectives and intentions. All of its roads are for going from one point to another. If only we could have a road connecting a place no one ever leaves from to a place where no one goes! If only someone would devote his life to building a road from the middle of one field to the middle of another – a road that would be useful if extended at each end, but that would sublimely remain as only the middle stretch of a road!

The beauty of ruins? That they’re no longer good for anything.

And I who am saying all this – why am I writing this book? Because I realize it’s imperfect. Dreamed, it would be perfection; written, it becomes imperfect; that’s why I’m writing it. And above all else, because I advocate uselessness, absurdity, – I write this book to lie to myself, to be unfaithful to my own theory. And the supreme glory of all this, my love, is to think that perhaps none of it is true and that I don’t even believe it’s true.

And when lying begins to bring us pleasure, let’s give it the lie by telling the truth. And when lying causes us anxiety, let’s stop so that the suffering can’t become even perversely pleasurable.

My head aches, which means I’m aware that matter has offended me, and, as happens when one is offended, I’m resentful and apt to be irritable with everyone, including whoever hasn’t offended me but happens to be near by.

What I feel like doing is dying, at least temporarily, but this, as I’ve indicated, is only because my head aches. And it suddenly occurs to me how much more eloquently a great prose stylist would say this. Sentence by sentence he would elaborate on the anonymous grief of the world; the imagining eyes behind his paragraphs would scan the earth’s various human dramas; and through the feverish throbbing of his temples an entire metaphysics of woe and misery would take shape on paper. But I don’t have an eloquent style. My head aches because my head aches. The universe hurts me because my head hurts. But the universe that actually hurts me is not the true one, which exists because it doesn’t know I exist, but that other universe which belongs only to me and which, should I pass my hands through my hair, makes me feel that each strand suffers for no other reason than to make me suffer.

In a far-away pseudo-slumber I remembered everything I had ever been, and as vividly as if it stood before my eyes I suddenly saw, before or after everything, the side of the old farm that opened on to the fields, and in the middle of the scene appeared the threshing-floor, empty. I immediately felt how futile life is. As if prompted by a dull pain in my elbows, everything I was seeing, feeling, remembering and forgetting merged with the faint din from the street and the slight sounds of work as usual in the quiet office.

‘To feel is a pain in the neck.’ This offhand remark, spoken by a stranger I met in a restaurant, has been glowing ever since on the floor of my memory. The very earthiness of the language gives the sentence spice.

What I most of all feel is weariness, and the disquiet that is its twin when the weariness has no reason to exist but to exist. I dread the gestures I have to make and am intellectually shy about the words I have to speak. Everything strikes me in advance as futile.

The unbearable tedium of all these faces, silly with intelligence or without it, nauseatingly grotesque in their happiness or unhappiness, hideous because they exist, an alien tide of living things that don’t concern me…

We’re all used to thinking of ourselves as primarily mental realities, and of other people as immediately physical realities. We vaguely see ourselves as physical people, in so far as we consider how we look to others. And we vaguely see others as mental realities, though only when we’re in love or in conflict does it really dawn on us that they, like we, are predominantly soul.

And so sometimes I lose myself in futile speculations about the sort of person I am in the eyes of others: how my voice sounds, what kind of impression I leave in their involuntary memory, how my gestures, my words and my visible life are inscribed on the retinas of their interpretation. I’ve never succeeded in seeing myself from the outside. No mirror can show us ourself from outside, because no mirror can take us out of ourself. We would need a different soul, a different way of looking and thinking. If I were an actor projected on a screen, or if I recorded my voice on records, I’m certain that I still wouldn’t know what I am on the outside, because like it or not, and no matter what I might record of myself, I’m always here inside, enclosed by high walls, on the private estate of my consciousness of me.

Everything is complex, or I’m the one who’s complex. But at any rate it doesn’t matter, because at any rate nothing matters. All of this, all these considerations that have strayed off the broad highway, vegetate in the gardens of excluded gods like climbing plants detached from their walls. And on this night as I conclude these inconclusive considerations, I smile at the vital irony which makes them appear in a human soul that was already, even before there were stars, an orphan of Fate’s grand purposes.

Because I wrote, I said nothing. My impression is that what exists is always in another region, beyond the hills, and that there are great journeys to be made if we have soul enough to make them.

But writing makes me calmer, as when a sick man breathes easier without the sickness having passed.

The things we dream have just one side. We can’t walk around them to see what’s on the other side. The problem with the things of life is that we can look at them from all sides. The things we dream have, like our souls,* only the side that we see.

A LETTER NOT TO POST I hereby excuse you from appearing in my idea of you. Your life ..... This is not my love; it’s merely your life. I love you the way I love the sunset or the moonlight: I want the moment to remain, but all I want to possess in it is the sensation of possessing it.

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.

The most abject of all needs is to confide, to confess. It’s the soul’s need to externalize. Go ahead and confess, but confess what you don’t feel. Go ahead and tell your secrets to get their weight off your soul, but let the secrets you tell be secrets you’ve never had. Lie to yourself before you tell that truth. Expressing yourself is always a mistake. Be resolutely conscious: let expression, for you, be synonymous with lying.

And then I’m visited by thoughts which are absurd but which I can’t reject as completely absurd. I wonder if a man who slowly thinks in a fast-moving car is going fast or slow. I wonder if the identical speeds of a suicide who jumps into the sea and a man on a terrace who accidentally falls in are equal. I wonder if my actions of smoking a cigarette, writing this passage and obscurely thinking – all of which occupy the same interval of time – are truly synchronous.

We can imagine that one of two wheels on the same axle will always be in front of the other, if only by a fraction of a millimetre. A microscope would magnify this fractional distance until it became almost unbelievable – impossible, were it not real. And why shouldn’t the microscope be right rather than our poor eyesight?

It’s not in open fields or in large gardens that I see spring arrive. It’s in the several scrawny trees of a small city square. There the greenness stands out like a special gift and is joyful like a warm sorrow. I love these lonely squares, tucked between streets with little traffic, and themselves with just as little. They are useless clearings, always there waiting, in between forgotten tumults. They’re a bit of village in the city.

Heat, like an invisible piece of clothing, makes one feel like taking it off.

It’s a rule of life that we can, and should, learn from everyone. There are solemn and serious things we can learn from quacks and crooks, there are philosophies taught us by fools, there are lessons in faithfulness and justice brought to us by chance and by those we chance to meet. Everything is in everything.

If I didn’t know who he is, I wouldn’t be able to tell by his appearance. I realize that great men need not conform to that heroic ideal of simple souls, whereby a great poet is always an Apollo in body and a Napoleon in expression, or at the very least a man of distinction with an expressive face. I realize that such notions are as absurd as they are human. But if we can’t expect everything, or almost everything, we can still expect something. And passing from the figure we see to the soul that speaks, although we can’t expect vivacity or verve, we should at least be able to count on intelligence and a hint of grandeur.

These are casual and useless speculations. I sometimes regret indulging in them. They don’t diminish the worth of the man, nor increase his body’s expressiveness. But then, there isn’t anything that changes anything, and what we say or do merely brushes the tops of the hills, in whose valleys everything sleeps.

The search for truth – be it the subjective truth of belief, the objective truth of reality, or the social truth of money or power – always confers, on the searcher who merits a prize, the ultimate knowledge of its non-existence. The grand prize of life goes only to those who bought tickets by chance. The value of art is that it takes us away from here.

It’s legitimate to break ordinary moral laws in obedience to a higher moral law. Hunger is no excuse for stealing a loaf of bread, but an artist can be excused for stealing ten thousand escudos to guarantee his sustenance and tranquillity for two years, provided his work seeks to advance human civilization; if it’s merely an aesthetic work, then the argument doesn’t hold.

We cannot love, son. Love is the most carnal of illusions. Listen: to love is to possess. And what does a lover possess? The body? To possess it we would have to incorporate it, to eat it, to make its substance our own. And this impossibility, were it possible, wouldn’t last, because our own body passes on and transforms, because we don’t even possess our body (just our sensation of it), and because once the beloved body were possessed it would become ours and stop being other, and so love, with the disappearance of the other, would likewise disappear.

Does anyone know the borders of his soul, that he can say ‘I am I’? But I know that I’m the one who feels what I feel. When someone else possesses this body, does he possess the same thing in it as I? No. He possesses another sensation. Is there anything that we possess? If we don’t know who we are, how can we know what we possess? If, referring to what you eat, you were to say, ‘I possess this’, then I would understand you. Because you obviously incorporate what you eat into yourself, you transform it into your substance, you feel it enter into you and belong to you. But it’s not with regard to what you eat that you speak of possession. What do you call possessing?

As a child I wanted to be the queen of one of the suits in a deck of old cards we had at home… This seemed to me like such a compassionately heraldic vocation… For a child, of course, such moral aspirations are common… Only later, when all our aspirations are immoral, do we really think about this…

Don’t apologize, and don’t pay any attention to what we’re talking about… Every good conversation should be a two-way monologue… We should ultimately be unable to tell whether we really talked with someone or simply imagined the conversation… The best and profoundest conversations, and the least morally instructive ones, are those that novelists have between two characters from one of their books.

Life is an experimental journey that we make involuntarily. It is a journey of the mind through matter, and since it is the mind that journeys, that is where we live. And so there are contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely and more turbulently than those who live externally. The end result is what counts. What was felt is what was lived. A dream can tire us out as much as physical labour. We never live as hard as when we’ve thought a great deal.

How much I’ve lived without having lived! How much I’ve thought without having thought!

The countryside appeals even to those who don’t like it.

If I were someone else, this would no doubt be a happy day for me, because I’d feel it without thinking about it. I would look forward to finishing my normal day’s work – which to me is monotonously abnormal day after day – and then take the tram to Benfica* with some friends. We would eat dinner right as the sun was setting, in one of the garden restaurants. Our happiness in that moment would be part of the landscape, and recognized as such by all who saw us. But since I am me, I merely take a little pleasure in the little that it is to imagine myself as that someone else. Yes, soon he-I, under a tree or bower, will eat twice what I can eat, drink twice what I dare drink, and laugh twice what I can conceive of laughing. Soon he, now I. Yes, for a moment I was someone else: in someone else I saw and lived this human and humble joy of existing as an animal in shirtsleeves. Great day that made me dream all this! The sky is sublimely blue, like my fleeting dream of being a hale and hearty sales representative on a sort of holiday when the day’s work is over.

The countryside is always where we aren’t. There, and there alone, do real trees and real shade exist.