The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

Everything we do, in art or in life, is the imperfect copy of what we thought of doing.

It’s the central error of the literary imagination: to suppose that others are like us and must feel as we do. Fortunately for humanity, each man is just who he is, it being given only to the genius to be a few others as well.

The man who has journeyed all over the world can’t find any novelty in five thousand miles, for he finds only new things – yet another novelty, the old routine of the forever new – while his abstract concept of novelty got lost at sea after the second new thing he saw.

Today the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. Today the right to live and triumph is awarded on virtually the same basis as admission into an insane asylum: an inability to think, amorality, and nervous excitability.

To think is to destroy. Thought itself is destroyed in the process of thinking, because to think is to decompose.

Fall gently final hour of this day in which those who believe and are mistaken engage in their usual labours with the joy of unconsciousness, even in their pain. Fall gently, final wave of light, melancholy of this useless afternoon, fogless haze that seeps into my heart. Fall gently and lightly, shimmering blue paleness of this aquatic afternoon – gently, lightly, sadly over the cold and simple earth. Fall gently, invisible grey, embittered monotony, sleepless tedium.

It seems that civilizations exist only to produce art and literature; words are what speak for them and remain.

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are. The sensation we come to have of ourselves is of a deserted field at dusk, sad with reeds next to a river without boats, its glistening waters blackening between wide banks.

Time! The past! Something – a voice, a song, a chance fragrance – lifts the curtain on my soul’s memories… That which I was and will never again be! That which I had and will never again have!

After a long incursion into lofty poetry, up to the heights of sublime yearning, to the cliffs of the transcendent and the occult, it tastes better than good, it feels like all that is warm in life, to return to the inn with its happily laughing fools and to drink with them as one more fool, as God made us, content with the universe we were given and leaving the rest to those who climb mountains to do nothing at the top.

Each new autumn is closer to the last autumn we’ll have, and the same is true of spring or summer; but autumn, by its nature, reminds us that all things will end, which is something we’re apt to forget when we look around us in spring or summer.

The more I meditate on our capacity for self-deception, the more my certainties crumble, slipping through my fingers as fine sand.

All of us in this world are living on board a ship that is sailing from one unknown port to another, and we should treat each other with a traveller’s cordiality.

This is my morality, or metaphysics, or me: passer-by of everything, even of my own soul, I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing – just an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a fallen sentient mirror reflecting the world’s diversity. I don’t know if I’m happy this way. Nor do I care.

There are certain phrases and sentences written in the wake of my adolescence that seem like the product of the person I am now, with all that I’ve learned in the intervening years. I see I’m the same as what I was. And since in general I feel that I’ve greatly progressed from what I was, I wonder where the progress is, if back then I was the same as now. There’s a mystery here that discredits and disturbs me.

I must not have known myself at all back then. How did I develop into what I already was? How have I come to know the I that I never knew back then? And everything becomes a confusing labyrinth where I stray, in myself, away from myself.

At other times I find pages that I not only don’t remember having written, which in itself doesn’t astonish me, but that I don’t even remember having been capable of writing, which terrifies me.

Everything I sought in life I abandoned for the sake of the search. I’m like one who absent-mindedly looks for he doesn’t know what, having forgotten it in his dreaming as the search got under way. The thing being searched for becomes less real than the real motions of the hands that search – rummaging, picking up, putting down – and that visibly exist, long and white, with exactly five fingers on each.

All stirrings of our sensibility, even the most pleasant ones, are bound to disturb the inscrutable inner life of that same sensibility. Tiny concerns as well as large worries distract us from ourselves, hindering the peace of mind we all aspire to, whether we know it or not. We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it’s towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses.

I’ve always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises. Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was, I’ve always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat. I was never convinced of what I believed in. I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through. Words were my only truth. When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been.

And all of this is a vision that vanishes as soon as it occurs, a winged interlude between nothing and nothing that takes place on high, in shades of sky and grief, diffuse and indefinite.

Nothing satisfies me, nothing consoles me; everything that has been and that hasn’t been jades me. I don’t want to have my soul and don’t want to renounce it. I want what I don’t want and renounce what I don’t have. I can’t be nothing nor be everything: I’m the bridge between what I don’t have and what I don’t want.

To submit to nothing, whether to a man or a love or an idea, and to have the aloof independence of not believing in the truth or even (if it existed) in the usefulness of knowing it – this seems to me the right attitude for the intellectual inner life of those who can’t live without thinking.

Life, said Tarde,* is the search for the impossible by way of the useless.

We weary of thinking, of having our own opinions, of trying to think in order to act. But we don’t weary of temporarily having other people’s opinions, just to feel their intrusion and not follow their lead.

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.

To stop trying to understand, to stop analysing… To see ourselves as we see nature, to view our impressions as we view a field – that is true wisdom.

The life we live is a flexible, fluid misunderstanding, a happy mean between the greatness that doesn’t exist and the happiness that can’t exist.

I don’t trust masters who can’t be down-to-earth. For me they’re like those eccentric poets who can’t write like everybody else. I accept that they’re eccentric, but I’d like them to show me that it’s because they’re superior to the norm rather than incapable of it.

Like it or not, we cannot escape universal brotherhood. We all love each other, and the lie is the kiss we exchange.

I don’t mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost. It’s not the concrete passing of my own days but the abstract flight of time that torments my physical brain with the relentless repetition of the piano scales from upstairs, terribly anonymous and far away. It’s the huge mystery of nothing lasting which incessantly hammers things that aren’t really music, just nostalgia, in the absurd depths of my memory.

I feel like screaming inside my head. I want to stop, to break, to smash this impossible phonograph record that keeps playing inside me, where it doesn’t belong, an intangible torturer. I want my soul, a vehicle taken over by others, to let me off and go on without me.

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.

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

I contemplated everything with the grand stupidity that comes from not sleeping.

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

In awe we worship the impulse to perfection of great artists. We love their approximation to perfection, but we love it because it is only an approximation.

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.

The world belongs to those who don’t feel.

And so we were left, each man to himself, in the desolation of feeling ourselves live. A ship may seem to be an object whose purpose is to sail, but no, its purpose is to reach a port. We found ourselves sailing without any idea of what port we were supposed to reach. Thus we reproduced a painful version of the argonauts’ adventurous precept:* living doesn’t matter, only sailing does.

Since we can’t extract beauty from life, let’s at least try to extract beauty from not being able to extract beauty from life. Let’s make our failure into a victory, into something positive and lofty, endowed with columns, majesty and our mind’s consent.

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’ve lived certain moments of respite in the presence of Nature, moments sculpted out of tender isolation, that will always be like medals for me. In these moments I forgot all of my life’s goals, all of the paths I wanted to follow. An immense spiritual tranquillity fell into the blue lap of my aspirations and allowed me to enjoy being nothing.

And why should anyone express himself? What little he may say would be better left unsaid. If I could really convince myself that renunciation is beautiful, how dolefully happy I would always be!

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.

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.

I honestly don’t know how to distinguish one state from the other, and it may be that I’m actually sleeping when I’m awake and that I wake up when I fall asleep.

We achieve nothing. Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, ‘Look at me move.’

A thin, wide-awake fog was disintegrating into shapeless shreds on the drowsy slopes. (It wasn’t cold except for the fact life had to resume.)

The tram slowly descended towards the avenues. As it approached the denser concentration of houses, he was vaguely seized by a sense of loss. Human reality was beginning to be visible.