The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

To know oneself is to err, and the oracle that said ‘Know thyself’ proposed a task more difficult than the labours of Hercules and a riddle murkier than the Sphinx’s. To consciously not know ourselves – that’s the way! And to conscientiously not know ourselves is the active task of irony. I know nothing greater, nor more worthy of the truly great man, than the patient and expressive analysis of the ways in which we don’t know ourselves, the conscious recording of the unconsciousness of our conscious states, the metaphysics of autonomous shadows, the poetry of the twilight of disillusion.

Revolutionary or reformer – the error is the same. Unable to dominate and reform his own attitude towards life, which is everything, or his own being, which is almost everything, he flees, devoting himself to modifying others and the outside world. Every revolutionary and reformer is a fugitive. To fight for change is to be incapable of changing oneself. To reform is to be beyond repair.* A sensitive and honest-minded man, if he’s concerned about evil and injustice in the world, will naturally begin his campaign against them by eliminating them at their nearest source: his own person. This task will take his entire life.

One day, when everything is finally and fully revealed, that other door will open and all that we were – rubbish of stars and souls – will be swept outside the house, so that what exists can start over.

My God, my God, who am I watching? How many am I? Who is I? What is this gap between me and myself?

Happy the man who doesn’t ask for more than what life spontaneously gives him, being guided by the instinct of cats, which seek sunlight when there’s sun, and when there’s no sun then heat, wherever they find it. Happy the man who renounces his personality in favour of the imagination and who delights in contemplating other people’s lives, experiencing not all impressions but the outward spectacle of all impressions. And happy, finally, the man who renounces everything, who has nothing that can be taken from him, nothing that can be diminished.

Even ambition, if we take pride in it, is a hindrance; we wouldn’t be proud of it if we realized it’s a string by which we’re pulled. No: no ties even to ourselves! Free from ourselves as well as from others, contemplatives without ecstasy, thinkers without conclusions and liberated from God, we will live the few moments of bliss allowed us in the prison yard by the distraction of our executioners. Tomorrow we will face the guillotine. Or if not tomorrow, then the day after. Let us stroll about in the sun before the end comes, deliberately forgetting all projects and pursuits. Without wrinkles our foreheads will glow in the sun, and the breeze will be cool for those who quit hoping.

We weary of everything, said the scholiast, except understanding. Let us understand, let us keep understanding, and let us make ghostly flowers out of this understanding, shrewdly entwining them into wreaths and garlands which are also doomed to wilt.

…the sacred instinct of having no theories…