The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

Life is the hesitation between an exclamation and a question.

If I close my eyes, I keep seeing, because I’m not really seeing. If I open them I see no more, because I wasn’t really seeing in the first place. I’m nothing but a vague nostalgia, not for the past nor for the future but for the present – anonymous, unending and unintelligible.

The only problem is that of reality, as insoluble as it is alive. What do I know about the difference between a tree and a dream? I can touch the tree; I know that I have the dream. What is all this really?

I have no soul, nobody here does – it’s all just work in this large office. Where millionaires live the good life, always in some foreign country or other, there is likewise work, and likewise no soul. And all that will remain is one or another poet. If only a phrase of mine could remain, just one thing I’ve written that would make people say ‘Well done!’, like the numbers I register, copying them in the book of my entire life.

I think that I shall always be an assistant bookkeeper in a fabric warehouse. I hope, with absolute sincerity, never to be promoted to head bookkeeper.

But what’s in the lofty air besides the lofty air, which is nothing? What’s in the sky besides a colour that’s not its own? What’s in these tatters that aren’t even of clouds (and whose very existence I doubt) besides a few glimmers of materially arriving rays from an already resigned sun? What’s in all this besides myself? Ah, but that, and that alone, is tedium. In all of this – the sky, the earth, the world – there is nothing at all but me!

Even the desire to sleep, remembered by the mind, has withered because mere yawning seems like too much of an effort.

If all who read me would learn – slowly, of course, as the subject matter requires – to be completely insensitive to other people’s opinions and even their glances, that would be enough of a garland to make up for my life’s scholastic stagnation.

My inability to act has always been an ailment with a metaphysical aetiology. I’ve always felt that to perform a gesture implied a disturbance, a repercussion, in the outer universe; I’ve always had the impression that any movement I might make would unsettle the stars and rock the skies. And so the tiniest gesture assumed for me early on a metaphysical significance of astonishing proportions. I developed an attitude of transcendental honesty with respect to all action, and ever since this attitude took firm hold in my consciousness, it has prevented me from having intense relations with the tangible world.

Ever since I’ve been using my idle moments to observe and meditate, I’ve noticed that people don’t agree or know the truth about anything that’s of real importance in life or that would be useful for living it.

The most exact science is mathematics, which lives in the cloister of its own laws and rules; when applied, yes, it elucidates other sciences, but it can elucidate only what they discover – it cannot help in the discovery. In the other sciences, the only sure and accepted facts are those that don’t matter for life’s supreme ends. Physics knows the expansion coefficient for iron, but it doesn’t know the true mechanics of the world’s composition. And the more we advance in what we’d like to know, the more we fall behind in what we do know. Metaphysics would seem to be the supreme guide, since it alone is concerned with ultimate truth and life’s supreme ends, but it isn’t even a scientific theory, just a pile of bricks that these or those hands form into awkward houses with no mortar holding them together.

I’ve also noticed that the only difference between humans and animals is the way they deceive themselves and remain ignorant about the life they live. Animals don’t know what they do: they’re born, they grow up, they live and they die without thought, reflection or a real future. And how many men live differently from animals? We all sleep, and the only difference is in what we dream, and in the degree and quality of our dreaming. Perhaps death will awaken us, but we can’t even be sure of that unless it’s...

To exist is to deny. What am I today, living today, but the denial of who and what I was yesterday? To exist is to contradict oneself. Nothing better symbolizes life than those news articles that contradict today what the newspaper said yesterday.

To want is to be unable to achieve. The man who wanted something he achieved didn’t want it until it was already in his power to achieve. The man who wants will never achieve, because he loses himself in wanting. These principles seem fundamental to me.

But I dreamily and digestively drowse. I have time, between synaesthesias. And it’s extraordinary to think that, if I were asked right now what I want for this short life, I could think of nothing better than these long, slow minutes, this absence of thought and emotion, of action and almost of sensation itself, this inner sunset of dissipated desire. And then it occurs to me, almost without thinking, that most if not all people live like this, with greater or lesser consciousness, moving forward or standing still, but with the very same indifference towards ultimate aims, the same renunciation of their personal goals, the same watered-down life.* Whenever I see a cat lying in the sun, I think of humanity. Whenever I see someone sleep, I remember that everything is slumber. Whenever someone tells me he dreamed, I wonder if he realizes that he has never done anything but dream.

To see and feel it makes me feel a great hope, but I realize that hope is literary. Morning, spring, hope – they’re linked in music by the same melodic intention; they’re linked in the soul by the same memory of an identical intention. No: if I observe myself as I observe the city, I realize that all I can hope is for the day to end, like all days. Reason also sees the dawn. Whatever hope I placed in the day wasn’t mine; it was of those who just live the passing hour and whose outer way of understanding I happened, for a moment, to embody.

Hope? What do I have to hope for? The day doesn’t promise me more than the day, and I know it has a certain duration and an end. The light heartens but does not improve me, for I’ll walk away as the same man – just a few hours older, a feeling or two happier, a thought or two sadder. When something is born, we can feel it as a birth or we can think about it having to die. Now, under the full light of the sun, the city landscape is like an open field of buildings – natural, vast and harmonious. But while seeing all this, can I forget that I exist? My consciousness of the city is, at its core, my consciousness of myself.

I suddenly remember when I was a child and saw, as today I cannot see, dawn breaking over the city. Back then it didn’t break for me but for life, because back then I (not being conscious) was life. I saw dawn break and felt happy; today I see dawn break, feel happy, and become sad. The child is still there but has fallen silent. I see the way I saw, but from behind my eyes I see myself seeing, and that is enough to darken the sun, to make the green of the trees old, and to wilt the flowers before they open. Yes, I once belonged here; but today, before each landscape, no matter how fresh, I stand as a foreigner, a guest and pilgrim before it, an outsider of what I see and hear, old to myself. I’ve seen everything, even what I’ve never seen nor will ever see. Even the memory of future landscapes flows in my blood, and my anxiety over what I’ll have to see again is already monotonous to me. And leaning on the windowsill to enjoy the day, gazing at the variegated mass of the whole city, just one thought fills my soul: that I profoundly wish to...

None of this is truly stoical. It’s only in words that my suffering is at all noble. I complain like a sick maid. I fret like a housewife. My life is totally futile and totally sad.

All I asked of life is what Diogenes* asked of Alexander: not to stand in the way of the sun.

I hesitate in everything, often without knowing why. How often I’ve sought – as my own version of the straight line, seeing it in my mind as the ideal straight line – the longest distance between two points.

I’ve always wanted to achieve what others have achieved almost without wanting it.

I’ve never known if it was my sensibility that was too much for my intelligence, or my intelligence that was too much for my sensibility.

The dreamers of ideals [?] – socialists, altruists, and humanitarians of whatever ilk – make me physically sick to my stomach. They’re idealists with no ideal, thinkers with no thought. They’re enchanted by life’s surface because their destiny is to love rubbish, which floats on the water and they think it’s beautiful, because scattered shells float on the water too.

An expensive cigar smoked with one’s eyes closed – that’s all it takes to be rich.

And to imagine the impossible may not be exclusive to us; I’ve seen cats look at the moon, and it may well be that they were longing to have it.

Happy the man who doesn’t think, for he accomplishes instinctively and through organic destiny what the rest of us must accomplish through much meandering and an inorganic or social destiny. Happy the man who most resembles the animals, for he is effortlessly what the rest of us only are by hard work; for he knows the way home, which the rest of us can reach only through byways of fiction and hazy return routes; for he is rooted like a tree, forming part of the landscape and therefore of beauty, while we are but myths who cross the stage, walk-ons of futility and oblivion dressed in real-life costumes.

There’s no happiness without knowledge. But the knowledge of happiness brings unhappiness, because to know that you’re happy is to realize that you’re experiencing a happy moment and will soon have to leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything else. Not to know, on the other hand, is not to exist.

What to do? Isolate the moment like a thing, and be happy now, in the moment we’re feeling happiness, thinking of nothing but what we’re feeling and completely excluding everything else. Trap all thought in our sensation.....

That’s what I believe this afternoon. It’s not what I’ll believe tomorrow morning, because tomorrow morning I’ll be someone else. What kind of believer will I be tomorrow? I don’t know; I would already have to be there to know. Not even God eternal, in whom today I believe, could know – today or tomorrow – anything about me tomorrow. Because today I’m I, and tomorrow it’s possible that he’ll have never existed.

407 God created me to be a child and willed that I remain a child. But why did he let Life beat me up, take away my toys and leave me alone during playtime, my weak hands clutching at my blue, tear-stained smock? If I couldn’t live without loving care, why was this thrown out with the rubbish? Ah, every time I see a child crying in the street, left there on his own, the jolting horror of my exhausted heart grieves me even more than the child’s sadness. I grieve with every pore of my emotional life, and it is my hands that wring the corner of the child’s smock, my mouth that is contorted by real tears, m...

How good it feels to be completely alone! To be able to talk to ourselves out loud, to walk around without being looked at, to lean back in an undisturbed reverie! Every house becomes an open field, every room has the breadth of a farm.

Pride is the emotional certainty of our own greatness. Vanity is the emotional certainty that others see this greatness or attribute it to us. These two sentiments don’t necessarily coincide, nor do they naturally oppose each other. They’re different but compatible. Pride all by itself, unaccompanied by vanity, manifests itself in timid behaviour. One who feels he’s great but isn’t convinced that others recognize him as such will be afraid to pit his opinion about himself against other people’s opinion. Vanity all by itself, unaccompanied by pride, which is rare but possible, manifests itself through audacity. One who is certain that others think highly of him will fear nothing from them. Both physical courage and moral courage can exist without vanity, but audacity cannot. And by audacity I mean boldness in taking the initiative. Audacity can exist without physical or moral courage, for these character traits are of a different, incommensurable order.

No, I’m not a pessimist. Happy those who are able to translate their suffering into a universal principle.

I like to think of life as half light, half darkness. I’m not a pessimist. I don’t complain about the horror of life; I complain about the horror of my life.

I can’t even consider my suffering a sign of Greatness. I don’t know if it is or isn’t. But I suffer things that are so trivial, and am hurt by things so banal, that this hypothesis – if I dared entertain it – would be an insult to the hypothesis that I might be a genius.

The splendour of a beautiful sunset saddens me with its beauty. When gazing at one I always think: what a thrill it must be for a happy man to see this!

Next to my pain, all other pains seem unreal or insignificant. They’re the pains of people who are happy or who live life and complain. My pains are of a man who finds himself incarcerated, cut off from life… Between me and life… And so I see all the things which cause anguish and feel none of the things which bring joy. And I’ve noticed that suffering is seen more than felt, whereas happiness is felt more than seen. Because if one doesn’t see or think, he will know a certain contentment, like that of the mystics and the bohemians and the riffraff. It’s by the door of thought and the window of observation that suffering comes into one’s house.

But the landscapes we dream are just shades of the landscapes we’ve seen, and the tedium of dreaming them is almost as great as the tedium of looking at the world.

I know no pleasure like that of books, and I read very little.

The words I write make me smile, but my heart is ready to break

Dreaming itself has become a torture. I’ve acquired such lucidity in my dreams that I see all dreamed things as real. And so all the value that they had as mere dreams has been lost.

While we’re actually suffering, our human pain seems infinite. But human pain isn’t infinite, because nothing human is infinite, and our pain has no value beyond its being a pain we feel.