The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

There’s a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I can’t touch it.

Pathetic sensibility that depends on a slight movement of air to achieve what little tranquillity it knows! But so is all human sensibility, and I doubt that the arrival of unexpected cash or an unexpected smile counts any more for other people than a briefly passing breeze counts for me.

I’m a child in a nightshirt carrying a dimly lit candle and traversing a huge empty house. Living shadows surround me – only shadows, offspring of the stiff furniture* and of the light I carry. Here in the sunlight they surround me but are people.

Let’s suppose there’s a girl with masculine gestures. An ordinary human creature will say, ‘That girl acts like a boy.’ Another ordinary human creature, with some awareness that to speak is to tell, will say, ‘That girl is a boy.’ Yet another, equally aware of the duties of expression, but inspired by a fondness for concision (which is the sensual delight of thought), will say, ‘That boy.’ I’ll say, ‘She’s a boy’, violating one of the basic rules of grammar – that pronouns must agree in gender and number with the nouns they refer to. And I’ll have spoken correctly; I’ll have spoken absolutely, photographically, outside the norm, the accepted, the insipid. I won’t have spoken, I’ll have told.

It is told of Sigismund, King of Rome,* that when someone pointed out a grammatical mistake he had made in a speech, he answered, ‘I am King of Rome, and above all grammar.’ And he went down in history as Sigismund super-grammaticam. A marvellous symbol! Every man who knows how to say what he has to say is, in his way, King of Rome.

I’m handed faith like a sealed package on a strange-looking platter and am expected to accept it without opening it. I’m handed science, like a knife on a plate, to cut the folios of a book whose pages are blank. I’m handed doubt, like dust inside a box – but why give me a box if all it contains is dust?

There’s infinity in a cell or a desert. One can sleep cosmically against a rock.

But there are times in our meditation – and they come to all who meditate – when everything is suddenly worn-out, old, seen and reseen, even though we have yet to see it. Because no matter how much we meditate on something, and through meditation transform it, whatever we transform it into can only be the substance of meditation.

This is true of some who meditate, not of others. And what is the difference between these two groups? Different brains? Different thoughts? I hope to live until the day when this is common knowledge, when the key thoughts can be discovered to unlock meditation without boredom (or lotus-eating).

Ah, no nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed! The longing I feel when I think of the past I’ve lived in real time, when I weep over the corpse of my childhood life – this can’t compare to the fervour of my trembling grief as I weep over the non-reality of my dreams’ humble characters, even the minor ones I recall having seen just once in my pseudo-life, while turning a corner in my envisioned world, or while passing through a doorway on a street that I walked up and down in the same dream. My bitterness over nostalgia’s impotence to revive and resurrect becomes a tearful rage against God, who created impossibilities, when I think about how the friends of my dreams – with whom I’ve shared so much in a make-believe life and with whom I’ve had so many stimulating conversations in imaginary cafés – have never had a space of their own where they could truly exist, independent of my consciousness of them!

The intensity of my sensations has always been less than the intensity of my awareness of them. I’ve always suffered more from my consciousness that I was suffering than from the suffering of which I was conscious.

I love you from the deck rail as when two ships pass, and there’s a mysterious longing and regret in their passing.

What men wanted and didn’t achieve, what they killed in order to achieve, and all that souls have secretly been – all of this filled the feeling soul with which I walked to the seashore.

Today I woke up very early, with a sudden and confused start, and I slowly got out of bed, suffocating from an inexplicable tedium. No dream had caused it; no reality could have created it. It was a complete and absolute tedium, but founded on something. The obscure depths of my soul had been the battleground where unknown forces had invisibly waged war, and I shook all over from the hidden conflict.

Everything seemed hollow, and I had the chilling impression that there is no solution for whatever the problem may be.

What a morning this grief is! And what shadows are retreating? What mysteries have taken place? None. There’s just the sound of the first tram, like a match to light up the soul’s darkness, and the loud steps of my first pedestrian, which are concrete reality telling me in a friendly voice not to be this way.

I always live in the present. I don’t know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing.

Knowing what my life has been up till now – so often and so completely the opposite of what I wanted –,

And this is the paradox of Pessoism (as opposed to pessimism) -- if you don't want anything, if you live in dreams, if you see reality through a thin glass pane, how can you be truly disappointed?

Life is whatever we conceive it to be. For the farmer who considers his field to be everything, the field is an empire. For a Caesar whose empire is still not enough, the empire is a field.

How many Caesars I’ve been! And the great men of history – how mean-spirited! Caesar, after his life was spared by a merciful pirate, ordered a search to find the pirate, who was then crucified. Napoleon, in the will he wrote in Saint Helena, made a bequest to a common criminal who tried to assassinate Wellington.

In youth we’re twofold. Our innate intelligence, which may be considerable, coexists with the stupidity of our inexperience, which forms a second, lesser intelligence. Only later on do the two unite. That’s why youth always blunders – not because of its inexperience, but because of its non-unity.

I find myself partially described in novels as the protagonist of various plots, but the essence of my life and soul is never to be a protagonist.

Everyone has his alcohol. To exist is alcohol enough for me. Drunk from feeling, I wander as I walk straight ahead. When it’s time, I show up at the office like everyone else. When it’s not time, I go to the river to gaze at the river, like everyone else. I’m no different. And behind all this, O sky my sky, I secretly constellate and have my infinity.

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept – our own selves – that we love. This is true in the whole gamut of love. In sexual love we seek our own pleasure via another body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via our own idea.

Two or three days like the beginning of love… The value of this for the aesthete is in the feelings it produces. To go further would be to enter the realm of jealousy, suffering and anxiety. In this antechamber of emotion there’s all the sweetness of love – hints of pleasure, whiffs of passion – without any of its depth. If this means giving up the grandeur of tragic love, we must remember that tragedies, for the aesthete, are interesting to observe but unpleasant to experience. The cultivation of life hinders that of the imagination. It is the aloof, uncommon man who rules. No doubt this theory would satisfy me, if I could convince myself that it’s not what it is: a complicated jabber to fill the ears of my intelligence, to make it almost forget that at heart I’m just timid, with no aptitude for life.

Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel and not what someone has taught them to feel. Once I heard a child, who wished to say that he was on the verge of tears, say not ‘I feel like crying,’ which is what an adult, i.e. an idiot, would say, but rather, ‘I feel like tears.’ And this phrase – so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it – decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. ‘I feel like tears’! That small child aptly defined his spiral.

Nothing matters, and I’m sure there have been people who, looking at life, didn’t have much patience for this child that was still awake, when all they wanted was the peace that would come once the child went to bed.

Half the sentences in the book could have "nothing matters, and" tacked onto the front.

I refuse to submit to the state or to men; I passively resist. The state can only want me for some sort of action. As long as I don’t act, there’s nothing it can get from me. Since capital punishment has been abolished, the most it can do is harass me; were this to occur, I would have to armour my soul even more, and live even deeper inside my dreams.

Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! For someone who isn’t anything, like a river, forward motion is no doubt life. But for those who are alert, who think and feel, the horrendous hysteria of trains, cars and ships makes it impossible to sleep or to wake up.

But I LIKE trains...

All of us are near-sighted, except on the inside. Only the eyes we use for dreaming truly see.

The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.

(Chapter on Indifference or something like that)

What a good chapter title!

I have times of great stagnation. It’s not, as happens to everyone, that I let days and days go by without sending a postcard in response to the urgent letter I received. It’s not, as happens to no one, that I indefinitely postpone what’s easy and would be useful, or what’s useful and would be pleasurable. There’s more subtlety in my self-contradiction. I stagnate in my very soul. My will, emotions and thought stop functioning, and this suspension lasts for days on end; only the vegetative life of my soul – words, gestures, habits – expresses me to others and, through them, to myself.

I don’t get indignant, because indignation is for the strong; I’m not resigned, because resignation is for the noble; I don’t hold my peace, because silence is for the great. And I’m neither strong, nor noble, nor great. I suffer and I dream. I complain because I’m weak. And since I’m an artist, I amuse myself by making my complaints musical and by arranging my dreams according to my idea of what makes them beautiful.

Happy the creators of pessimistic systems! Besides taking refuge in the fact of having made something, they can exult in their explanation of universal suffering, and include themselves in it.

Poor Pessoism, doesn't even get to be pessimism

I suffer, without knowing if I deserve to. (A hunted doe.) I’m not a pessimist. I’m sad.

The simplest, quickest summary of the entire book? Also refutes one of my earlier notes (though of course I'm not foolish enough to think that I can argue with Pessoa...)

Nothing would bother me more than if they found me strange at the office. I like to revel in the irony that they don’t find me at all strange. I like the hair shirt of being regarded by them as their equal. I like the crucifixion of being considered no different. There are martyrdoms more subtle than those recorded for the saints and hermits.

I often wonder what I would be like if, shielded from the winds of fate by the screen of wealth, I’d never been brought by the dutiful hand of my uncle to an office in Lisbon, nor risen from it to other offices, all the way up to this paltry pinnacle as a competent assistant bookkeeper, with a job that’s like a siesta and a salary that I can live on. I realize that if I’d had this imagined past, I wouldn’t now be able to write these pages, which are at least something, and therefore better than all the pages I would only have dreamed of writing in better circumstances.

The happiest Pessoa ever is, at least when he thinks about real things. (I'm treating Pessoa's characters, not even his central characters, as though they were him, but it's almost impossible not to)

But I’m not sure whether the supreme resolution of all these dead intentions – dead even when achieved – lies in the ecstatic resignation of the Buddha, who, once he understood the emptiness of things, stood up from his ecstasy saying, ‘Now I know everything’, or in the jaded indifference of the emperor Severus: ‘Omnia fui, nihil expedit – I’ve been everything, nothing’s worth the trouble.’

The way I see it, plagues, storms and wars are products of the same blind force, sometimes operating through unconscious microbes, sometimes through unconscious waters and thunderbolts, and sometimes through unconscious men. For me, the difference between an earthquake and a massacre is like the difference between murdering with a knife and murdering with a dagger. The monster immanent in things, for the sake of his own good or his own evil, which are apparently indifferent to him, is equally served by the shifting of a rock on a hilltop or by the stirring of envy or greed in a heart. The rock falls and kills a man; greed or envy prompts an arm, and the arm kills a man. Such is the world – a dunghill of instinctive forces that nevertheless shines in the sun with pale shades of light and dark gold.

Aaron-style humanism; or, The Mote in God's Eye; or, Yudkowsky's Beyond the Reach of God

All I asked of life is that it ask nothing of me.

The simplest, truly simplest things, which nothing can make semi-simple, become complex when I live them. To wish someone a good day sometimes intimidates me. My voice gets caught, as if there were a strange audacity in saying these words out loud. It’s a kind of squeamishness about existing – there’s no other way to put it!

All my life I’ve been metaphysically glib, serious at playing around. I haven’t done anything seriously, however much I may have wanted to.

The experience of life teaches nothing, just as history teaches nothing. True experience comes from restricting our contract with reality while increasing our analysis of that contact. In this way our sensibility becomes broader and deeper, because everything is in us – all we need to do is look for it and know how to look.

Some of the best advice in the book, even if twisted.

The sensation of freedom that travel brings? I can have it by going from Lisbon to Benfica,* and have it more intensely than one who goes from Lisbon to China, because if the freedom isn’t in me, then I won’t have it no matter where I go.

!!!

In the countries I’ve visited, I’ve been not only the secret pleasure of the unknown traveller, but also the majesty of the reigning king, the indigenous people and their culture, and the entire history of the nation and its neighbours. I saw every landscape and every house because they were me, made in God from the substance of my imagination.

Inside the coop where he’ll stay until he’s killed, the rooster sings anthems to liberty because he was given two roosts.

A more common thought than most thoughts Pessoa writes down, but I like the twist of "two roosts" rather than "a warm house" or something really useful. Not only is a second roost not useful, it's actually impossible to use! We trade something for nothing! Then again, to Pessoa, almost all somethings are nothing.

The most contemptible thing about dreams is that everyone has them. The delivery boy who dozes against the lamppost in between deliveries is thinking about something in his darkened mind. I know what he’s thinking about: the very same things into which I plummet, between one and another ledger entry, in the summer tedium of the stock-still office.

"That brain is thinking almost all the time" #Aaronism

I pity those who dream the probable, the reasonable and the accessible more than those who fantasize about the extraordinary and remote. Those who have grandiose dreams are either lunatics who believe in what they dream and are happy, or they’re mere daydreamers whose reveries are like the soul’s music, lulling them and meaning nothing. But those who dream the possible will, very possibly, suffer real disillusion. I can’t be too disappointed over not having become a Roman emperor, but I can sorely regret never once having spoken to the seamstress who at the street corner turns right at about nine o’clock every morning.

That’s why I love impossible landscapes and the vast empty stretches of plains I’ll never see. The historical ages of the past are sheer wonder, because I know from the outset that I can’t be part of them.

He smiles from the other side of the room and says ‘Good afternoon’ in a loud voice. I hate him like the universe.