17 Incredible Passages from Fernando Pessoa's 'The Book of Disquiet'
What’s become of the living?
The Book of Disquiet, one of the finest books of the 20th century, was originally found in fragments stuffed in an old dusty trunk shortly after the death of its ambiguous author, Fernando Pessoa. The masterpiece was to be eventually published 50 years after his death.
Pessoa was a man who sacrificed the entirety of his life for a literary project, dividing his works between numerous personalities — even giving them names and biographies of their own. He spread all his poetic works between these “alternate selves.”
The Portuguese poet was once deemed, “the man that never was.”
“Because I am nothing, I can imagine myself to be anything,” he once wrote.
He was a reclusive figure who dreamed immensely more than he lived. “I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.”
Pessoa never married and he lived alone in a series of cheap, rented rooms in Lisbon, where he worked as an office clerk till his death in 1935.
From the New Yorker:
In his magnum opus, “The Book of Disquiet”—a collage of aphorisms and reflections couched in the form of a fictional diary, which he worked on for years but never finished, much less published—Pessoa returns to the same theme: “Through these deliberately unconnected impressions I am the indifferent narrator of my autobiography without events, of my history without a life. These are my Confessions and if I say nothing in them it’s because I have nothing to say.”
Below are 17 of the most incredible passages from one of the greatest pieces of literature of all time. And yes, I just said that.
“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tambours I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”
“May this hour pass and be forgotten… May the night approach, grow, descend on all things and never end. May this soul be my eternal tomb …”
“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
“No one knows, because no one knows anything and the quicksands as readily swallow up those with flags as those without … And the sands cover everything, my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry with me, like a victory flag, the knowledge of my defeat.”
“I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”
“I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect”
“The life I drag around with me until night falls is not dissimilar to that of the streets themselves. By day they are full of meaningless bustle and by night full of an equally meaningless lack of bustle. By day I am nothing, by night I am myself. There is no difference between me and the streets around the Alfândega, except that they are streets and I am a human soul, and this, when weighed against the essence of all things, might also count for little.”
"Others, busily engaged outside their soul, gave themselves over to the cult of confusion and noise, thinking they were alive because they could be heard, thinking they loved when they merely stumbled against love’s outer walls. Life hurt us because we knew that we were alive; death held no terror for us because we had lost all normal notions of death.”
“I advance slowly, a dead man, and my vision, no longer my own, is nothing now: it is merely that of a human animal who unwittingly inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality and all the other illusions that make up the civilization in which I live and feel.”
“Action is a disease of thought, a cancer of the imagination. To act is to exile oneself. Every action is incomplete and imperfect. The poem that I dream is faultless until I try to write it down.”
“Man should not be able to see his own face. Nothing is more terrible than that. Nature gave him the gift of being unable to see either his face or into his own eyes. He could only see his own face in the waters of rivers and lakes. Even the posture he had to adopt to do so was symbolic. He had to bend down, to lower himself, in order to suffer the ignominy of seeing his own face…The creator of the mirror poisoned the human soul.”
“Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being.”
“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, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes.”
”The outside world exists like an actor on a stage: it’s there but it’s pretending to be something else.”
“Look, it grows dark!… The positive peace of everything fills me with rage, with something which is the bitter aftertaste of the air I breathe. My soul aches … In the distance a slow ribbon of smoke rises and disperses… A restless tedium blocks further thoughts of you … How unnecessary it all is! Us and the world and the mystery of both.”
“Ah the dead fields of my self! The rustic peace known only in dreams! My futile life like that of a vagabond who does not work but sleeps by the roadside with the smell of the fields seeping like mist into his soul, lulled by a cool, translucent sound, deep and rich with the understanding that nothing connects with nothing, a nocturnal, unknown, weary nomad beneath the cold compassion of the stars.”
“If I look closely at the lives men lead I can find nothing that differentiates them from the lives of animals. Both men and animals are launched unconsciously into the midst of objects and into the world; both intermittently enjoy themselves; they daily follow the same physical path; neither group ever thinks beyond the thoughts that naturally occur to them nor experiences anything beyond what their lives happen to offer them.”
Source: The Book of Disquiet, Penguin; New e. edition (May 30, 2002)