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‘Portugal’s greatest modern poet… deals with the only important question in the world, not less important because it is unanswerable: What am I?’ Anthony Burgess, Observer
I’m astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will’s surrender. I begin because I don’t have the strength to think; I finish because I don’t have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.
Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways.
The problem with Cogito, ergo sum, for Pessoa, wasn’t in the philosophical principle but in the grammatical subject. ‘Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!’ cried heteronym Álvaro de Campos in
‘We think, therefore we are’ is what, in effect, he says. And even this form of self-affirmation is chancy, for in his moments of greatest doubt and detachment, Pessoa looks within and whispers, with horror: ‘They think, therefore they are.’
Written under his own name, this long and languid prose text was presented in a literary magazine as an excerpt ‘from The Book of Disquiet, in preparation’. Pessoa worked on this book for the rest of his life, but the more he ‘prepared’ it, the more unfinished it became.
created various personalities within… I’ve so externalized myself on the inside that I don’t exist there except externally. I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays’
‘Only once was I truly loved’
‘Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life’ (Text 116). And isn’t it he, after all, who one day happened to look at his neighbour’s window and identified with a crumpled rag left on the sill?
Pessoa was the first one to forget Pessoa.
I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it – without knowing why.
Vigny,*
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To be a pessimist is to see everything tragically, an attitude that’s both excessive and uncomfortable. While it’s true that we ascribe no value to the work we produce and that we produce it to keep busy, we’re not like the prisoner who busily weaves straw to forget about his fate; we’re like the girl who embroiders pillows for no other reason than to keep busy.
I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach fro...
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Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up. I enjoy the breeze I’m given and the soul I was given to enjoy it with, and I no longer question or seek. If what I write in the book of travellers can, when read by others at some future date, also entertain them on their journey, then fine. If they don’t read it, or are not entertained, that’s fine too.
I have to choose what I detest – either dreaming, which my intelligence hates, or action, which my sensibility loathes; either action, for which I wasn’t born, or dreaming, for which no one was born. Detesting both, I choose neither; but since I must on occasion either dream or act, I mix the two things together.
Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day they’re full of meaningless activity; by night they’re full of a meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things. There is an equal, abstract destiny for men and for things; both have an equally indifferent designation in the algebra of the world’s mystery.
I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me – this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we’re mean-hearted but because we don’t feel like unbuttoning our coat.
Deeming that I earn too little, a friend of mine who’s a partner in a successful firm that does a lot of business with the government said the other day: ‘You’re being exploited, Soares.’ And I remembered that indeed I am. But since in life we must all be exploited, I wonder if it’s any worse to be exploited by Vasques and his fabrics than by vanity, by glory, by resentment, by envy or by the impossible. Some are exploited by God himself, and they are prophets and saints in this vacuous world.
And if the office on the Rua dos Douradores represents life for me, the fourth-floor room* where I live, on this same Rua dos Douradores, represents Art for me. Yes, Art, residing on the very same street as Life, but in a different place. Art, which gives me relief from life without relieving me of living, being as monotonous as life itself, only in a different place.
We never know self-realization. We are two abysses – a well staring at the sky.
What is there to confess that’s worthwhile or useful? What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only to us; if to everyone, then it’s no novelty, and if only to us, then it won’t be understood. If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.
I make landscapes out of what I feel.
S
My worthless self lives on at the bottom of every expression, like an indissoluble residue at the bottom of a glass from which only water was drunk.
We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.
All art
To heed the present moment isn’t a great or lasting concern of mine. I crave time in all its duration, and I want to be myself unconditionally.
Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I’d languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.
In dreams I am equal to the delivery boy and the seamstress. I differ from them only in knowing how to write. Yes, writing is an act, a personal circumstance that distinguishes me from them. But in my soul I’m their equal.
The creative pursuit
Whenever I’ve tried to free my life from a set of the circumstances that continuously oppress it, I’ve been instantly surrounded by other circumstances of the same order, as if the inscrutable web of creation were irrevocably at odds with me. I yank from my neck a hand that was choking me, and I see that my own hand is tied to a noose that fell around my neck when I freed it from the stranger’s hand. When I gingerly remove the noose, it’s with my own hands that I nearly strangle myself.
Whether or not they exist, we’re slaves to the gods.
Sadly
The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves. Absurdity is divine.
Today, feeling almost physically ill because of that age-old anxiety which sometimes wells up, I ate and drank rather less than usual in the first-floor dining room of the restaurant responsible for perpetuating my existence. And as I was leaving, the waiter, having noted that the bottle of wine was still half full, turned to me and said: ‘So long, Senhor Soares, and I hope you feel better.’ The trumpet blast of this simple phrase relieved my soul like a sudden wind clearing the sky of clouds. And I realized something I had never really thought about: with these café and restaurant waiters,
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It’s a hopelessly bad lithograph. I stare at it without knowing if I see it. It’s one among others in the shop window – in the middle of the window under the steps. She holds Spring against her breast and stares at me with sad eyes. Her smile shines, because the paper’s glossy, and her cheeks are red. The sky behind her is the colour of light blue cloth. She has a sculpted, almost tiny mouth, and above its postcard expression her eyes keep staring at me with an enormous sorrow. The arm holding the flowers reminds me of someone else’s. Her dress or blouse has a low neck that reveals one
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Literature – which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality – seems to me the end towards which all human effort would have to strive, if it were truly human and not just a welling up of our animal self. To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror.
s
The grand, tarnished panorama of History amounts, as I see it, to a flow of interpretations, a confused consensus of unreliable eyewitness accounts. The novelist is all of us, and we narrate whenever we see, because seeing is complex like everything.
Like a child of Mystery, a cock suddenly crows, unaware that it’s night-time. I can sleep, for it’s morning in me. And I feel my mouth smile, slightly displacing the soft pleats of the pillowcase pressed against my face. I can surrender to life, I can sleep, I can forget myself… And as incipient slumber wraps me in darkness, either I remember the cock that crowed, or it is the cock itself that crows a second time.
Art, if it frees us from the abstract idols of old, should also free us from magnanimous ideas and social concerns, which are likewise idols.
An object tossed into a corner, a rag that fell on to the road, my contemptible being feigns to the world.
I envy all people, because I’m not them. Since this always seemed to me like the most impossible of all impossibilities, it’s what I yearned for every day, and despaired of in every sad moment. A dull blast of grim sunlight burned my eyes’ physical sensation of seeing. A hot yellow languished in the black green of the trees. The torpor
It was just a moment, and I saw myself. I can no longer even say what I was. And now I’m sleepy, because I think – I don’t know why – that the meaning of it all is to sleep.
And then I wonder what this thing is that we call death. I don’t mean the mystery of death, which I can’t begin to fathom, but the physical sensation of ceasing to live. Humanity is afraid of death, but indecisively.
If death resembles sleep, we should suppose that we wake up from it, but this is not what the normal man imagines; he imagines death as a slumber no one wakes up from, which means nothing. Death doesn’t resemble slumber, I said, since in slumber one is alive and sleeping, and I don’t know how death can resemble anything at all for us, since we have no experience of it, nor anything to compare it to.
Whenever I see a dead body, death seems to me a departure. The corpse looks to me like a suit that was left behind. Someone went away and didn’t need to take the one and only outfit he’d worn.
I forget. I don’t see. I don’t think.
There are pigs repelled by their own filth that don’t draw away from it because the feeling of repulsion is so strong it paralyses, as when a frightened man freezes instead of fleeing the danger. There are pigs like me that wallow in their destiny, not drawing away from the banality of daily life because they’re enthralled by their own impotence. They’re like birds captivated by the thought of the snake, like flies that hover around branches without seeing a thing, until they’re within the sticky reach of the chameleon’s tongue.
That’s all, and we call it nothing; but not even this tragedy of negation can be staged to applause, for we don’t even know for sure if it’s nothing, we, these vegetable manifestations of both truth and life, dust on both the outside and the inside of the panes, grandchildren of Destiny and stepchildren of God, who married Eternal Night when she was widowed by the Chaos that fathered us.
To leave my desk for the Unknown… But with this journey intersected by Reason – the Great Book that says we existed.
But the horror that’s destroying me today is less noble and more corrosive. It’s a longing to be free of wanting to have thoughts, a desire to never have been anything, a conscious despair in every cell of my body and soul. It’s the sudden feeling of being imprisoned in an infinite cell. Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything?
experience a feeling of inspiration and liberation as I passively reread those simple lines by Caeiro* that tell what naturally results from the smallness of his village. Since it is small, he says, there one can see more of the world than in the city, and so his village is larger than the city… Because I’m the size of what I see And not the size of my stature.
…in the sad disarray of my confused emotions… A twilight sadness made of fatigue and false renunciations, a tedium of feeling anything at all, a pain as of a choked sob or a discovered truth… A landscape of abdications unfolds in my oblivious soul: walkways lined by abandoned gestures, high flower beds of dreams that weren’t even well dreamed, incongruities like hedges separating deserted paths, suppositions like old pools whose fountains are broken. It all gets entangled and squalidly looms in the sad disarray of my confused sensations.
