The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

This book is a single state of soul, analysed from all sides, investigated in all directions. Has this attitude at least brought me something new? Not even this consolation is mine. Everything was already said long ago, by Heraclitus and Ecclesiastes: Life is a child’s game in the sand… vanity and vexation of spirit… And in that single phrase of poor Job: My soul is weary of my life.

And yet I have after all introduced something new, although I’m not responsible for it. It came from the Night and glows in me like a star… All of my effort couldn’t have produced it or snuffed it out… I’m a bridge between two mysteries, with no idea of how I got built.

For those who choose to make dreams their life, and to make a religion and politics out of cultivating sensations like plants in a hothouse, the sign that they’ve successfully taken the first step is when they feel the tiniest things in an extraordinary and extravagant way. That’s all there is to the first step. To know how to sip a cup of tea with the extreme voluptuousness that the normal man experiences only when overcome by joy at seeing his ambition suddenly fulfilled or himself suddenly cured of a terrible nostalgia, or when he’s in the final, carnal acts of love; to be able to achieve in the vision of a sunset or in the contemplation of a decorative detail that intensity of feeling which generally can’t occur

Arriving at this degree of sensation, however, causes the lover of sensations to feel griefs – both from the outside and from inside himself – with the same conscious intensity. It is when he realizes, and because he realizes, that to feel in the extreme can mean not only extreme pleasure but also acute suffering that the dreamer is led to take the second step in his self-ascension.

The second step for the dreamer should therefore be to avoid pain. He shouldn’t avoid it like the Stoics or the early Epicureans, by abandoning the nest, for that will harden him against pleasure as well as against pain. He should, instead, seek pleasure in pain, and then learn how to feel pain falsely – to feel some kind of pleasure, that is, whenever he feels pain. There are various paths for reaching this goal. One is to hyperanalyse our pain (but only after we’ve first trained ourselves to react to pleasure by exclusively feeling it, with no analysis). This is an easier technique than it seems, at least for superior souls. To analyse pain and to get in the habit of submitting all pains to analysis, until we do it automatically, by instinct, will endow every pain imaginable with the pleasure of analysing it. Once our ability and instinct to analyse grow large enough, our practice of it will absorb everything, and there will be nothing left of pain but an indefinite substance for analysis.

Everything belongs to others except my grief for not having any of it.