The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

Should I one day take an earthly woman to wife, pray for me the following: that she at any rate be sterile. But also ask, should you pray for me, that I never come to have this hypothetical wife.

Let us remain eternally like a male figure in one stained-glass window opposite a female figure in another stained-glass window… And between us humanity passing by, shadows whose footsteps coldly echo

The search for truth – be it the subjective truth of belief, the objective truth of reality, or the social truth of money or power – always confers, on the searcher who merits a prize, the ultimate knowledge of its non-existence. The grand prize of life goes only to those who bought tickets by chance. The value of art is that it takes us away from here.

Useless landscapes like those that wind around Chinese teacups, starting out from the handle and abruptly ending at the handle. The cups are always so small… Where would the landscape lead to, and with what of porcelain, if it could continue past the teacup handle? Certain souls are capable of feeling heartfelt grief because the painted landscape on a Chinese fan isn’t three-dimensional.

How much I’ve lived without having lived! How much I’ve thought without having thought! I’m exhausted from worlds of static violence, from adventures I’ve experienced without moving a muscle. I’m surfeited with what I’ve never had and never will, jaded by gods that so far don’t exist. I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided. My muscles are sore from all the effort I have never even thought of making.

For a long time – I’m not sure if for days or for months – I haven’t recorded any impressions; I don’t think, therefore I don’t exist. I’ve forgotten who I am. I’m unable to write because I’m unable to be.

How often, remembering who I wasn’t, I think of myself young and forget all the rest! The landscapes that existed but that I never saw were different then, and the landscapes that didn’t exist but that I did see were new to me. Why do I care? I ended up in interstices, led on by chance, and now, as the sun itself seems to radiate coolness, the dark reeds by the river sleep coldly in the sunset that I see but do not have.

No one has yet defined tedium in a language comprehensible to those who have never experienced it. What some people call tedium is merely boredom; others use the term to mean a nagging discomfort; still others consider tedium to be weariness. But while tedium includes weariness, discomfort and boredom, it doesn’t resemble them any more than water resembles the hydrogen and oxygen of which it is composed.

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.

And my entire world of all these souls who don’t know each other casts, like a motley but compact multitude, a single shadow – the calm, bookkeeping body with which I lean over Borges’s tall desk, where I’ve come to get the blotter that he borrowed from me.

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.

The man I never was died. God forgot who I should have been. I’m just a vacant interlude. If I were a musician, I would compose my own funeral march, and with such good reason!

Life, for most people, is a pain in the neck that they hardly notice, a sad affair with some happy respites, as when the watchers of a dead body tell anecdotes to get through the long, still night and their obligation to keep watch. I’ve always thought it futile to see life as a valley of tears; yes, it is a valley of tears, but one in which we rarely weep.

To be happy, it’s necessary to know that one’s happy. The only happiness we get from sleeping without dreaming is when we wake up and realize that we’ve slept without dreaming. Happiness is outside of happiness.

He sang, in a soft and gentle voice, a song from a faraway country. The music made the strange words familiar. It sounded like the soul’s fado,* though it didn’t in the least resemble fado. Through its veiled words and human melody, the song told of things that are in the hearts of us all and that no one knows. He sang in a kind of stupor, a kind of ecstasy right there in the street, his gaze oblivious to his listeners. The crowd that had gathered listened to him without any discernible scoffing. The song belonged to everyone, and the words sometimes spoke to us – an oriental secret of some lost race. We didn’t hear the city’s noises, even if we heard them, and the carts passed by so close that one of them brushed against my coat. But I only felt it; I didn’t hear it. There was a rapt intensity in the stranger’s song that was soothing to what in us dreams or doesn’t succeed.

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.

Ah, but in those footsteps climbing the stairs I recognize someone who’s coming here, someone who will interrupt my amused solitude. My implicit empire is about to be invaded by barbarians.

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.

Let us mix paints on a palette without having a canvas on which to paint. Let us order stone for chiselling without having a chisel and without being sculptors. Let us make everything an absurdity and turn all our sterile hours into pure futilities. Let us play hide-and-seek with our consciousness of living.

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.

From among all the pains there are – the pain of not grasping the mystery of the world, the pain of not being loved, the pain of being treated unjustly, the pain of life oppressing us, suffocating and restraining us, the pain of a toothache, the pain of shoes that pinch – who can say which is the worst for himself, let alone for someone else, or for the generality of those who exist?

But I lift up my head to the blue sky that doesn’t know me, I let my face feel the unconsciously cool breeze, I close my eyelids after having looked, and I forget my face after having felt. This doesn’t make me feel better, but it makes me different. Seeing myself frees me from myself. I almost smile, not because I understand myself but because, having become another, I’ve stopped being able to understand myself.

Seeing and hearing are the only noble things in life. The other senses are plebeian and carnal. The only aristocracy is never to touch. Avoid getting close – that’s true nobility.

By nature I quickly strike up acquaintances. People are friendly to me right away. But I never receive affection. I’ve never been shown devotion. To be loved has always seemed impossible to me, like a stranger calling me by my first name.

No one imagined that at my side there was always another, who was in fact I. They always supposed I was identical to myself.

not. And as this light from the darkness fills with grey doubts the cracks around the shutters (far from hermetic, alas!), I begin to realize that I can no longer hold on to this refuge of staying in bed, of not sleeping but being able to, of dreaming without remembering truth and reality, of nestling between a cool warmth of clean sheets and an ignorance of my body’s existence beyond its feeling of comfort. I realize that I’m losing the happy unconsciousness with which I’ve been enjoying my consciousness, the animal drowsiness in which I observe – as through the slowly blinking eyelids of a cat in the sun – the movements described by my free imagination’s logic. I realize that the privileges of darkness are vanishing, and with them the slow rivers under the bowing trees of my glimpsed eyelashes, and the murmur of the cascades lost between the soft flowing of blood in my ears and the faint, steady rain. I’m losing myself to become alive.

Nothing is worse than the contrast between the natural splendour of the inner life, with its natural Indias and its unexplored lands, and the squalor (even when it’s not really squalid) of life’s daily routine. And tedium is more oppressive when there’s not the excuse of idleness. The tedium of those who strive hard is the worst of all.

Life, according to Tarde,* is the search for the impossible by way of the useless, which is what Omar Khayyám would have said, if he had said it.

after the brief period when I knew him, he must be a grown-up, a responsible idiot who fulfils his duties, perhaps as a married man, somebody’s provider – dead, that is, while still alive. And maybe he has even travelled in body, he who travelled so well in his soul. I just remembered: he knew the exact route of the train from Paris to Bucharest as well as the routes of all the trains in England, and as he mispronounced the strange names, I could see the glowing certainty of his greatness of soul. Today, yes, he probably exists as a dead man, but perhaps one day, in his old age, he will remember how it’s not only better but also truer to dream of Bordeaux than to actually go there.

Reading about the effects of wars and revolutions – there’s always one or the other in the news* – doesn’t make us feel horror but tedium. What really disturbs our soul isn’t the cruel fate of all the dead and wounded, the sacrifice of all who die in action or who die without seeing action, but the stupidity that sacrifices lives and property to some inevitably futile cause.

Modern things include (1) the development of mirrors; (2) wardrobes. We evolved, body and soul, into clothed creatures. Since the soul always conforms to the body, it developed an intangible suit. We advanced to having a soul that’s basically clothed, in the same way that we advanced – as physical humans – to the category of clothed animals.

Were I asked to discuss the social causes responsible for my soul’s condition, I would speechlessly point to a mirror, a clothes hanger, and a pen.

How I would love right now to be able to see all this as somebody whose only relation to it was visual – to view everything as an adult traveller who has just arrived at the surface of life! To not have learned from birth to attach predetermined meanings to all these things. To be able to see them in their natural self-expression, irrespective of the expressions that have been imposed on them. To be able to recognize the fishwife in her human reality, independent of her being called a fishwife and my knowing that she exists and sells fish. To see the policeman as God sees him. To notice everything for the first time, not as apocalyptic revelations of life’s Mystery, but as direct manifestations of Reality.

If it were possible to cut off completely all contact with things, then my sensibility would pose no problem. But this total isolation cannot be achieved. However little I do, I still breathe; however little I act, I still move. And so, having exacerbated my sensibility through isolation, I found that the tiniest things, which even for me had been perfectly innocuous, began to wrack me like catastrophes. I chose the wrong method of escape. I fled via an uncomfortable and roundabout route to end up at the same place I’d started from, with the fatigue of my journey added to the horror of living there.

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

From dealing so much with shadows, I myself have become a shadow – in what I think and feel and am. My being’s substance consists of nostalgia for the normal person I never was.

The buildings, all different, form a confused, self-contained mass, whose dead projections are arrested in the pearly, uncertain moonlight. There are rooftops and shadows, windows and middle ages, but nothing around which to have outskirts. There’s a glimmer of the far away in everything I see. Above where I’m standing there are black branches of trees, and all of the city’s sleepiness fills my disenchanted heart. Lisbon by moonlight and my weariness because of tomorrow! What a night! It pleased whoever fashioned the world’s details that for me there should be no better melody or occasion than these solitary moonlit moments when I no longer know the self I’ve always known.

Tomorrow I too – I this soul that feels and thinks, this universe I am for myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be the one who no longer walks these streets, whom others will vaguely evoke with a ‘What’s become of him?’. And everything I’ve done, everything I’ve felt and everything I’ve lived will amount merely to one less passer-by on the everyday streets of some city or other.

There we lived in a time that couldn’t possibly flow, in a space one could never even dream of measuring. A flowing that occurred outside of Time, an expanse that didn’t respect the norms of spatial reality… All those hours we spent there, O useless soulmate of my tedium! All those hours of joyful disquiet that pretended to be ours!… All those hours of spiritual ashes, days of spatial nostalgia, inner centuries of outer landscape… And we didn’t ask what it was all for, because we revelled in knowing that it was for nothing.

What nostalgia I felt for the idea I wanted to have of you when I learned, one day, that you were married! What a tragic day in my life that was! I wasn’t jealous of your husband. It had never even occurred to me to wonder if you had one. I simply felt nostalgia for my idea of you. Were I to learn the absurd fact that a woman in a painting – yes, a painting – was married, I would feel just as sorry.

How many hours I’ve spent in secret company with my idea of you! How much we’ve loved each other in my dreams! But I swear that even there I’ve never dreamed of possessing you. I’m a courteous and chaste man, even in my dreams. I have respect for the mere idea of a beautiful woman.

My life: a tragedy booed off stage by the gods,* never getting beyond the first act.

To give good advice is to disdain the faculty of erring that God gave to others. Not only that, we should be glad that other people don’t act like us. It makes sense only to ask for advice from others, so that we can be sure – by doing just the opposite – that we are totally ourselves, in complete disagreement with all Otherness.

The only advantage of studying is to take delight in all the things that other people haven’t said.

I pluck the petals of private glories in the gardens of my inner splendours, and between dreamed hedges my feet loudly tread the paths that lead to the Confused. I’ve pitched my Empires in the Confused, at the edge of silences, in the tawny war that will do away with the Exact.

A real sunset is imponderable and transitory. A dreamed sunset is fixed and eternal. Those who can write are those who know how to see their dreams with sharp clarity (and do so) and to see life as they see dreams, to see life immaterially, taking pictures of it with reverie’s camera, which is insensible to the rays of what’s heavy, useful and circumscribed, such things yielding nothing but a black blur on the photographic plate of the soul.

In me ceaseless daydreaming has replaced attention. Over everything I see, including things seen in dreams, I’ve taken to superimposing other dreams I have inside me.

This explains the ability I’ve acquired to focus on various ideas at the same time, to observe certain things while at the same time dreaming other, very different things, to dream simultaneously of a real sunset over the real Tagus River and a dreamed morning on an inner Pacific Ocean; and the two dreamed things crisscross without blending, without anything getting mixed up besides the different emotional states induced by each. It’s as if I saw a number of people walking down a street and felt all their souls inside me (which could occur only in a unity of feeling) at the same time that I saw their various bodies (these I could see only separately) crossing paths on the street full of legs in motion.

From the height of anguish may we see the day come into view! And if we see no day come, then let that be the day that comes into view! Shine, absence of sun! Glow, fading moon!…