17 Incredible Passages from Fernando Pessoa's 'The Book of Disquiet'
What’s become of the living?
“There’s intoxication enough for me in just existing. Drunk on feeling, I drift but never stray…I’m just the same. But behind this sameness, I secretly scatter my personal firmament with stars and therein create my own infinity.”
— Fernando Pessoa
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 do believe that.
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