The Book of Disquiet

Once in a rarest while there comes a delightfully chaotic book that enchants as much as it frustrates, that heals as much as it scorches, and that sooths as much as it disturbs. Reading such a book in which thoughts, consciousness, and perceptions appear as fragments that do not combine to form a coherent whole, one is often left wondering how to make sense of it all. How should one come to grips with its determined melancholy, its breathtaking audacity, and its insistence that inaction, despair, and renunciation are the sine qua non of life? “The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa is one such modern masterpiece that I read last week. The book is an aggregation of disparate diary entries that are abstract, dense, and at times, eccentric. For its entire four hundred plus pages it offers a philosophy of a melancholic life, a philosophy of dreaming, and a philosophy of art. I have not read anything like this before and consider this to be quite a unique reading experience. The book is a congeries - a fragmentary collection of angst-ridden aphorisms, reflections, and musings in the form of diary entries found in a trunk after Pessoa’s death. In passage after passage that are at once lyrical and haunting, he bares his brooding soul while lying awake through insomniac nights when incessant rain falls on the rooftops of his beloved Lisbon where he lives in a cheap, rented room with cracked walls owned by a loathsome landlady. “Each drop of rain is my failed life weeping in nature. There’s something of my disquiet in the endless drizzle, then shower, then drizzle, then shower, through which the day’s sorrow uselessly pours itself out over the earth. It rains and keeps raining. My soul is damp from hearing it.” [p 128] Pessoa was a compulsive writer who penned his thoughts relentlessly, day and night, on whatever he could lay his hands upon – “…in notebooks, on loose sheets, on the backs of envelops, on paper scraps, and the margins of his own earlier texts.” To add to the confusion, Pessoa wrote under different names that he chose to call “heteronyms” – fictional alter egos with their own distinct biographies, writing styles, personalities, political attitudes, and individual pet peeves. These jottings, largely hand written and mostly undated, presented a challenge to the publishers who took years to compile them together into a book structure. The book records his meandering thoughts in which he constantly floats through gossamer boundaries that separate his real world from his dreams, his inaction from his thoughts, and his ambition from his weariness. “The dream that promises us the impossible denies us access to it from the start, but the dream that promises the possible interferes with our normal life, relying on it for its fulfillment. The one kind of dream lives by itself, independently, while the other is contingent on what may or may not happen. That’s why I love impossible landscapes and the vast empty stretches of plains I’ll never see. [p 143] Pessoa’s art consisted of poetry, prose, plays, philosophy, criticism, translations, linguistic theory, political writings, and horoscopes and assorted other texts that he wrote through more than four dozen invented heteronyms. Actually, he has credited “The Book of Disquiet” to Bernardo Soares, one such heteronym who is a bookkeeper by profession. Pessoa, as Soares, writes: “Perhaps my destiny is to remain forever a bookkeeper, with poetry or literature as a butterfly that alights on my head, making me look ridiculous to the extent it looks beautiful. [p 25] For Pessoa, literature is “the most agreeable way of ignoring life” because it “retreats from life by turning it into a slumber.” In a beautiful passage this is how he further explores literature: “To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colors with a durability not found in cellular life.” [p 30] Pessoa wrote poetry and prose both and in an insightful passage explains the difference between the two: “I consider poetry to be an intermediate stage between music and prose. Like music, poetry is bound by rhythmic laws, and even when these are not the strict laws of meter, they still exist as checks, constraints, automatic mechanisms of repression and censure. In prose we speak freely. We can incorporate musical rhythms, and still think. We can incorporate poetic rhythms, and yet remain outside them. An occasional poetic rhythm won’t disturb prose, but an occasional prose rhythm makes poetry fall down.” [P 199] After reading a few pages a day, I would often find myself adrift with thoughts on renunciation or solitude or tedium because, Pessoa ensnares you, seduces you, and grips you with his flights of imagination that are mesmerizing. When he talks about giving things up it is not because he doesn’t what them, but because he does. Can there be a more intriguing Gordian knot? Consider this: “Nothing satisfies me, nothing consoles me, everything—whether or not it has ever existed—satiates me. I neither want my soul nor wish to renounce it. I desire what I do not desire and renounce what I do not have. I can be neither nothing nor everything: I’m just the bridge between what I do not have and what I do not want.” [p 203] I read the book in dribs and drabs, savoring its flavor, enjoying the voluntary siege to which I surrendered myself. The majestic splendor of Pessoa’s prose often left me heady. Despite the dark and somber tone, there are luminous passages that brim with life. Here is one: “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 definitive being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.” [p 23] Although he was a prolific writer, Pessoa published merely four books during his lifetime. He left behind more than 25,000 manuscripts and typed pages that are still being deciphered and catalogued by experts. Perhaps he felt there was something noble in not being published because in a rather prescient manner, this is what he writes about an unpublished writer: “The only noble destiny for a writer who publishes is to be denied a celebrity he deserves. But the truly noble destiny belongs to the writer who doesn’t publish. Not who doesn’t write, for then he wouldn’t be a writer. I mean the writer in whose nature it is to write, but whose spiritual temperament prevents him from showing what he writes.” [p 187] Despite Pessoa’s assertion about noble virtues of a non-published writer, I am glad that Penguin has been updating its various editions from time to time as more and more material is getting deciphered. The literary world would have been a poorer place without this effort. I cannot but highly recommend this book that chronicles the life of one of the greatest flaneurs as he walked and worried through the streets of Lisbon assembling and disassembling his own eclectic mind.

Seering in his assessment of this world. so relevant are his ideas even after 90 years of his passing. A literary genius.

I stumbled upon Pessoa after finishing Salinger- The catcher of the rye. I picked up many books after reading Salinger, notably some of my favorite authors from years back like Chekhov, Kafka, but something felt missing. Then I openes up this innocous book from my bookshelf, and my world was shaken. I couldn't believe myself. It almost makes you bleed, softly, in blue, or shades of gray. It's a compelling read, and I'm taking it slow - and I'm pretty sure the next book isn't gonna come easy to me. Pessoa has surely ruined so many other books already.

Okay okay

relate so much with my guy pessoa 🥺should be read as a slow read with coffee ofcourse

One of the best books I ever read.

I loved the book a lot. Its a brooding slow paced book. Ever minuscule detail of the trivial things of a man's life is infused with a lyricism rare in today's fiction . there is no story as we understand in the common sense of the term but there is artistry no denying that. It is a book which will make you think and create an urge in you to question the fundamentals of life. Why do we live? How do we love? how do we end up being lonely? what is the meaning of this life? and it might create the urge in you to write. But few pages were torn and some were missing . If you are lucky you might get a good copy.

It’s a nice read and great ideas conveyed with no structure. But if you are looking for something structured and concrete, this is not your place.

Good condition.

Fernando Pessoa, in order to express various philosophical and poetic moods, constructed a series of what he termed “heteronyms.” The heteronym, although similar to the mask or persona, differs in that each one is equipped with a name, a personality, a biography, and a physical description, as well as a distinct writing style. Although Pessoa made use of more than five dozen heteronyms in the course of his thirty-five years, the best known are Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and Bernardo Soares. Of these four, his greatest creation--and perhaps the heteronym closest to Pessoa's self--is Bernardo Soares, the "author" of The Book of Disquiet. The Book of Disquiet, if not unique, is close to it. It is a little like a novel, often like a collection of prose poems, and often like a series of aphorisms and philosophical reflections. The heteryonum that is Soares enables Pessoa to communicate a disciplined, definite vision of the world, necessarily limited in scope, but intensified and concentrated. In this sense, it resembles Roman and English satire, its authorial mask as carefully crafted and resonant as those of Horace and Juvenal, Pope and Swift. Soares, however, takes no interest in vice, let alone the reform of humankind; in fact, he seems to care little about humanity in general, or people in particular. It is here that the novelistic aspect of this work becomes interesting. Soares is a shy, isolated man, a clerk at a Lisbon commercial firm who adds up columns of figures, and seems to do little else. Although he mourns his colleagues when they pass away, he never seems to communicate with them when they are alive; the closest he seems to get to fellowship are his encounters with the waiter in the little cafe where he eats his nightly dinner and consumes his nightly bottle of wine. At first, we feel sorry for him, for we feel his great isolation and are moved by his great passion and profound love for beauty which he can only express through his journal. Slowly, however, we begin to see that this isolation is a personal and artistic choice, a way of refining his art and his being . If he cares about human beings at all, it is only because they are useful adjuncts to his own magnificent loneliness, because they resonate as discrete elements of the poet's imagination, much as a certain play of light on a Lisbon street may reflect one particular color of the canvas that is the poet's consciousness. Perhaps this is why the book “The Book of Disquiet” reminds me of most is The Chants of Maldoror, that uncompromising paean to the magnificent isolation of evil. There is of course a great difference. Maldoror could only have been produced by a very young man hiding beneath a very old mask. His persona is a posture of isolation through which he begins to know himself. The Book of Disquiet, on the other hand, is the work of someone who knows himself well, and cares only about reaching a kind of existential purity: a clarity of view, a refinement of mood, the isolation of particular beauties that resonate more deeply and linger longer than the others. Soares is a monk of the poetic mind, for whom aloneness is a vocation. Its fruit, this memorable book, is rare and delicious, filled with vivid descriptions, evocative language, and refined reflections.

"B of D" is a work of pure genius written in gloriously lyrical, existential prose: it wants to be poetry and, at times, it is. Pessoa is a profoundly introspective and honest writer who defined existential themes based upon his frank study of his own life and dreams: it's possible that Pessoa is the most honest writer who ever lived. He is highly self-critical, self-effacing and suffers from the "disquiet" of his simple life as a bookkeeper in Lisbon. He wrote "B of D" in that richly germinal literary era in Europe of Proust and Joyce. He composed 481 fragments about the absurdity of life by which he means the inability of man to understand his own existence. "Each of us is a speck of dust that the wind lifts up and then drops." Pessoa's disquieting themes eventually grew into the philosophical worldview claimed by the existentialists but he was an existentialist before many of them. Pessoa writes with the passion of Nietzsche. He is Camus before Camus. He has Kafka's rich sense of the absurd. He experiences daily Sartre's nausea. I devoured every word of "B of D" by Pessoa who had the misfortune to remain largely undiscovered and unread until long after his death. His work is existential in the genre of Camus or Sartre ("I think, therefore, I am a mustache.") He is dark, at times, but his introspection is oceanic in its breadth, depth and turbulent existential Angst. His writing has been described as "semi-fiction" and "anti-literature" by his translator. Great writers inevitably challenge the logic of traditional syntax as well as the genres in which they write to transform their genres by the genius of their innovative literary styles which become legacies in themselves. Pessoa writes in fragments which are neither fiction nor poetry but are autobiographical and as such show his disconnect both with life and his own art -- there is no real flow between one fragment and the next like life itself in his existential worldview. He considered his life "an intermission with band music." He also wrote in heteronyms under several noms de plume as if to say he couldn't really even attest to his own single identity as a writer. His fragments are deep, consuming, intellectual dives into his own everyday life. Normally, autobiography is a sign of an immature writer, which Pessoa clearly is not. He writes about his dull job as an accountant among Lisbon's streets and his sightings while smoking at outdoor cafes as well as about thunderstorms, solitude, dreams, the absurdity and futility of life, art, sex, JJ Rousseau and his work. My only criticism of Pessoa comes from his odd observations and poor advice about sex. His translator, Richard Zenith, believes it was possible that Pessoa died a virgin. I make it a practice never ever to take advice on sex from priests, nuns and lifelong virgins. Richard Zenith's translation is truly luminous and he brings rich nuance into the discourse of every line. Like my copy of "The Recognitions" by William Gaddis, I have underlined fragments on nearly every page because it is so deeply relevant, honest and compelling in its pure intellectual grandeur. Here are a few favorite passages which stand out for me from "B of D": "Irony is the first sign that our consciousness has become conscious and it passes through two stages: the one represented by Socrates, when he says, "All I know is that I know nothing' and the other represented by Sanches, when he says, 'I don't even know if I know nothing.'" "No one understands anyone else... However much one soul strives to now another, he can know only what is told him by a word -- a shapeless shadow on the ground of his understanding... I love expressions because I know nothing of what they express." "I don't know the meaning of this journey I was forced to make, between one and another night, in the company of the whole universe... We achieve nothing. Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, 'Look at me move.'" "The only attitude worthy of a superior man is to persist in an activity he recognizes is useless, to observe a discipline he knows is sterile, and to apply certain norms of philosophical and metaphysical thought that he considers utterly inconsequential." "All life is a dream. No one knows what he's doing, no one knows what he wants, no one knows what he knows. We sleep our lives, eternal children of Destiny. That's why, whenever this sensation rules my thoughts, I feel an enormous tenderness that encompasses the whole of childish humanity, the whole of sleeping society, everyone, everything. It's an immediate humanitarianism, without aims or conclusions, that overwhelms me right now. I feel a tenderness as if I were seeing with the eyes of a god. I see everyone as if moved by the compassion of the world's only conscious being. Poor hapless men, poor hapless humanity! What are they all doing here?" He worked uselessly every business day for a brute capitalist and recognized by night that his writing was utterly hopelessly, inscrutably and irretrievably futile. The miracle, and the sense of this should not be lost upon you, is that every day he still writes anyway like Van Gogh painting despite making only one sale in his lifetime. I recognized Pessoa instantly from the first few fragments of his life in "B of D": I am Pessoa. And he is also you. "Book of Disquiet" is life changing. I can't remember ever having been so disappointed to see a book come to an end: it's that good. I implore you to read this immortal literary work of genius by Pessoa. It may be absurd, and even futile, to do so but sometimes the best answer to both is simply to be just as absurd.

英語版を読んで思ったのは、これは散文詩に近いのだなということだった。日本語版に接した折には、日々の思いを書き連ねたメモの集積、くらいに感じていたので、新鮮だった ポルトガル語の原書の趣は、たぶん英語の方がよく写しえているのだろう。日本語版を軽く見ているわけではない。英語版だと調子に任せて読み流してしまい、意味を追わない章がいくつもあったが、日本語版だとしっかり理解しようとする。ただあまり重要と思えない部分もあって、それは短く編集された日本語の版の方は省かれているわけだが、英語だと一種のヴァースとして読め、内容が薄いとは感じない 詠嘆調で書かれた部分など、本当に突き詰めた思考なのか、ペンの走るに任せたところがありはしないかと考えると、文学的工夫のない身辺雑記の集成ととらえる方が、すなわち非文学的である方が価値が高いと感じる人もあるだろう。もちろんポルトガル語で読まなければ何とも言えないわけだが、英語版の方が文学的ではある 作品の出来については日本語版の方にたくさんの賞賛が寄せられており、今更私が付け加えることはない