Anyone who has ever tried to write hoping to get published will know that hope itself can be elusive. But a true artist will write anyway, if only to speak to oneself and if lucky, to a few other people about things he or she deems worthy. Such is the tenor of Fernando Pessoa’s quirky title, The Book of Disquiet.
Part autobiography and part confessional journal, The Book of Disquiet is now recognized as a literary masterpiece. There’s nothing quite like it in western literature. Page after page is filled with short, often funny musings on the absurdities of life: the routine of a joyless job, the fragility of friendships, the tragic comedy of being alive and yet mentally stone-dead most of the time, the need to pour one’s darkness into words even when writing is a struggle, the “usefulness” of art in any form as a distraction from the squalor of existence and so on.
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher, and philosopher. He has been described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and The Book of Disquiet is undoubtedly his greatest work. Yet, it took decades for the book to be published, with the first edition (in Portuguese) appearing in print only in 1982. Part of the reason for the long delay in publication was the fragmentary nature of Pessoa’s work. The book consists of 500 fragments of writing which no one knows what order they should be placed in. Indeed, it hard to pin down on the genre of the book. Is it a novel or is it a journal? Is it a commonplace book, or something more akin to philosophy? In fact, it is a bit of everything. And with the appearance of the first English translation (in 1991), it didn’t take long for Pessoa’s work to be appreciated as a quirky masterpiece of modernist literature.
In the book, Pessoa takes on the persona of Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper in a Lisbon fabrics firm, who spends most of his time alone, musing on both the absurdities of life and “the somber majesty of feeling everything in every way.” One is not given a plot, much less a coherent story. Yet, the fragments that make up the book are pleasures enough for a reader to dip in and out as he or she pleases. Most assuredly, the reader will find many of Pessoa’s sentiments resonate with their own. While the book was written in the early 20th century, the essence of the human condition hasn’t changed one bit. We may keep ourselves busy with work, we may surround ourselves with friends (real or virtual), we may distract ourselves with social media, but ultimately, we are alone and always will be so. It is this existential problem that The Book of Disquiet grapples with, in a voice that is uniquely Pessoa, uniquely honest, by turns gloomy and sunny, at times poetic, and always poignant. Below, I’ve extracted some excerpts from the book to give you a glimpse of Pessoa’s intimations.
Excerpts from the Book of Disquiet
“Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self-expression of thousands of lives … In these moments my heart beats faster because I’m conscious of it. I live more because I live on high. I feel a religious force within me, a species of prayer, a kind of public outcry .. me in this fourth floor room, interrogating life, saying what souls feel!”
***
“I envy those for whom a biography could be written, or who could write their own. In these random impressions, …, I indifferently narrate my factless autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them, I say nothing, it’s because I have nothing to say.”
***
“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 , … and so it is with all of life.”
***
“With a kind of smile in my soul, I passively consider the definitive confinement of my life to the Rua dos Douradores, to this office, to the people who surround me. An income sufficient for food and drink, a roof over my head, and a little free time in which to dream and write, to sleep. What more can I ask of the Gods?”
***
“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 restaurants waiters, with barbers and with the delivery boys on street corners I enjoy a natural spontaneous rapport that I can’t say I have with those I supposedly know more intimately. Camaraderie has its subtleties.”
***
“All I want from life is to feel it being lost in these unexpected evenings, to the sound of strange children playing in gardens like this one, fenced in by the melancholy of the surrounding streets and topped, beyond the trees’ tallest branches, by the old sky where the stars are again coming out.”
***
“The presence of another person derails my thoughts … When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone … I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour, I just feel tired. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like an image in a mirror.”
***
“At a certain point we are overwhelmed by a yearning for life, by a desire to know without the intellect, to meditate with only our senses, to think in a tactile or sensory manner, from inside the object of our thought, as if it were a sponge and we were water.”
***
“Anything and everything. Depending on how one sees it, is a marvel or a hindrance, an all or a nothing, a path or a problem. To see something in constantly new ways is to renew and multiply it. This is why the contemplative person, without ever leaving his village, will nevertheless have the whole universe at his disposal.”
***
“Art frees us, through illusion, from the squalor of being.”
***
“Literature … is art married to thought. To express something is to conserve its virtue and remove its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers if described … with the air of imagination, will have colors with a durability not found in cellular life.”
***
“What moves lives. What is said endures. Small-minded critics point out that such-and-such poem, with its protracted cadences, in the end says merely that it’s a nice day. But to say it’s a nice day is difficult, and the nice day itself passes on. It’s up to us to conserve the nice day in a wordy, florid memory, sprinkling new flowers and new stars over the fields and skies of the empty, fleeting outer world.”
***
{Art (is) everything that delights us without being ours …To possess is to lose. To feel without possessing is to preserve and keep, for it is to extract from things, their essence.”
