The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

When I lean back and belong only remotely to life, then how fluently I dictate to my inertia the phrases 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.