The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

  In the commonplace clutter of my literary drawers I sometimes find things I wrote ten or fifteen years ago, or longer, and many of them seem to be written by a stranger; I can’t recognize the voice as my own. But who wrote them, if not me? I felt those things, but in what seems to be another life, one from which I’ve now awoken, as if from someone else’s sleep.

  I often come across pages I wrote in my youth, when I was seventeen or twenty, and some of them reveal an expressive power I can’t remember having back then. There are certain phrases and sentences written in the wake of my adolescence that seem like the product of the person I am now, with all that I’ve learned in the intervening years. I see I’m the same as what I was. And since in general I feel that I’ve greatly progressed from what I was, I wonder where the progress is, if back then I was the same as now.

  There’s a mystery here that discredits and disturbs me.

  Just the other day I was bowled over by a short piece I wrote ages ago. I’m quite certain that the special care I take with language goes back only a few years, but in one of my drawers I found this much older piece of writing in which that same care was clearly evident. I must not have known myself at all back then. How did I develop into what I already was? How have I come to know the I that I never knew back then? And everything becomes a confusing labyrinth where I stray, in myself, away from myself.

  I let my mind wander, and I’m sure that what I’m writing I’ve already written. I remember. And I ask the one in me who presumes to exist if in the Platonism of sensations there might not be another, less vertical anamnesis – another pre-existing life that we vaguely remember but that belongs only to this life…

  My God, my God, who am I watching? How many am I? Who is I? What is this gap between me and myself?

  214

  Again I found pages of mine, this time in French, written some fifteen years ago. I’ve never been in France and was never in close contact with French people, so it’s not as if I had a familiarity with the language that waned over the years. Today I read as much French as I ever did. I’m older and more practised in thought; I should have progressed. Yet these pages from my distant past denote a confidence in the use of French that I no longer possess; they have a fluid style that today I couldn’t possibly achieve in that language; there are entire passages, complete sentences, grammatical forms and idioms that demonstrate a fluency I’ve lost without remembering that I ever had it. How can this be explained? Who did I replace inside myself?

  It’s easy enough to form a theory of the fluidity of things and souls, to understand ourselves as an inner flow of life, to imagine that we’re a large quantity, that we traverse ourselves, that we have been many… But in this case there’s something besides the flow of personality between its own banks: there’s an absolute other, an extraneous self that was me. That with age I should lose my imagination, my emotion, a certain kind of intelligence, a way of feeling – all of this, while causing regret, wouldn’t cause me any great wonder. But what am I confronting when I read myself as if reading a stranger? On what shore am I standing if I see myself in the depths?

  At other times I find pages that I not only don’t remember having written, which in itself doesn’t astonish me, but that I don’t even remember having been capable of writing, which terrifies me. Certain phrases belong to another mentality. It’s as if I’d found an old picture that I know is of me, with a different height and with features I don’t recognize, but undoubtedly me, terrifyingly I.

  215

  I have the most conflicting opinions, the most divergent beliefs. For it’s never I who thinks, speaks or acts. It’s always one of my dreams, which I momentarily embody, that thinks, speaks and acts for me. I open my mouth, but it’s I-another who speaks. The only thing I feel to be really mine is a huge incapacity, a vast emptiness, an incompetence for everything that is life. I don’t know the gestures for any real act.....

  I never learned how to exist.

  I obtain everything I want, as long as it’s inside me.

  I’d like the reading of this book to leave you with the impression that you’ve traversed a sensual nightmare.

  What used to be moral is aesthetic for us. What was social is now individual.

  Why should I look at twilights if I have within me thousands of diverse twilights – including some that aren’t twilights – and if, besides seeing them inside me, I myself am them, on the inside and the outside?

  216

  The sunset spreads over the scattered clouds that dot the entire sky. Soft hues of every colour fill the lofty, spatial diversities, absently floating amid the sorrows on high. On the crests of the half-coloured, half-shaded rooftops, the last slow rays of the departing sun take on colours that are not their own nor of the things they light up. An immense calm hangs over the noisy city, which is also growing calmer. Everything breathes beyond colour and sound, in a deep and hushed sigh.

  On the painted buildings that the sun doesn’t see, the colours are beginning to grey. There’s a coldness in these colours’ diversity. A mild anxiety dozes in the pseudo-valleys formed by the streets. It dozes and grows calm. And little by little, in the lowest of the high clouds, the hues begin to be shadowy. Only in that tiny cloud – a white eagle hovering above everything – does the far-off sun still cast its smiling gold.

  Everything I sought in life I abandoned for the sake of the search. I’m like one who absent-mindedly looks for he doesn’t know what, having forgotten it in his dreaming as the search got under way. The thing being searched for becomes less real than the real motions of the hands that search – rummaging, picking up, putting down – and that visibly exist, long and white, with exactly five fingers on each.

  All that I’ve had is like this high and diversely identical sky, tatters of nothing tinged by a distant light, fragments of pseudo-life gilded by death from afar with its sad smile of whole truth. All I’ve had has amounted to my not knowing how to search, like a feudal lord of swamps at twilight, solitary prince of a city of empty tombs.

  All that I am or was, or that I think I am or was, suddenly loses – in these thoughts and in that high cloud’s suddenly spent light – the secret, the truth, perhaps fortune, that was in some obscure thing that has life for a bed. All of this, like a sun that’s missing, is all I have left. Over the diversely high rooftops the light lets its hands slip away until, in the unity of those same rooftops, the inner shadow of everything emerges.

  Like a hazy flickering drop, in the distance the first small star glows.

  217

  All stirrings of our sensibility, even the most pleasant ones, are bound to disturb the inscrutable inner life of that same sensibility. Tiny concerns as well as large worries distract us from ourselves, hindering the peace of mind we all aspire to, whether we know it or not.

  We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it’s towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses.

  218

  I’m older than Time and Space, because I’m conscious. Things derive from me; the whole of Nature is the offspring of my sensations.

  I seek and don’t find. I want and can’t have.

  Without me the sun rises and expires; without me the rain falls and the wind howls. It’s not because of me that there are seasons, the twelve months, time’s passage.

  Lord of the world in me which, like earthly lands, I can’t take with me.....

  219

  That locus of sensations known as my soul sometimes walks with me, consciously, through the city’s nocturnal streets, in the wearisome hours when I feel like a dream among dreams of a different sort, by the gaslight, in the midst of the transitory sound of traffic.

  As my body penetrates the lanes and side streets, my soul loses itself in intricate labyrinths of sensation. All that can disturbingly convey the notion of unreality and feigned existence, all that can demonstrate – not to abstract re
ason but and concretely – how the place occupied by the universe is hollower than hollow: all this objectively unfolds before my detached spirit. I don’t know why, but I’m troubled by this objective network of wide and narrow streets, this succession of street lamps, trees, lighted and dark windows, opened and closed gates – heterogeneously nocturnal shapes which my near-sightedness makes even hazier, until they become subjectively monstrous, unintelligible and unreal.

  Verbal snatches of envy, lust and triviality collide with my sense of hearing. Whispered murmurs ripple towards my consciousness.

  Little by little I lose my clear awareness of the fact that I concurrently exist with all this, that I really move – seeing little but hearing – among shadows that represent beings and places where there actually are beings. It becomes gradually, darkly, indistinctly unintelligible to me how all of this can exist in the face of eternal time and infinite space.

  Through a passive association of ideas, I start thinking about the men whose consciousness of that space and time was so analytically and intuitively acute that it lost touch with the world. It seems ludicrous that on nights no doubt like this one, in cities surely not very different from the one in which I contemplate, there were men such as Plato, Scotus Erigena,* Kant and Hegel who virtually forgot about all this, who became different from these people. And they were from the same human race.....

  With what horrible clarity even I, as I walk here and think these thoughts, feel distant, alien, confused and.....

  I end my solitary peregrination. A vast silence, impassive to slight sounds, assaults and overwhelms me. In both body and spirit I feel sorely weary of things, all things, of simply being here, of finding myself in this present state. I almost catch myself wanting to scream because of a feeling that I’m sinking in an ocean of whose immensity has nothing to do with the infinity of space or the eternity of time, nor with anything that can be measured and named. In these moments of supremely silent terror, I don’t know what I materially am, what I normally do, what I usually want, feel and think. I feel cut off from myself, outside of my reach. The moral impulse to struggle, the intellectual effort to systematize and understand, the restless artistic yearning to produce something that I no longer fathom but that I remember having fathomed and that I call beauty – all of this vanishes from my sense of reality, all of this strikes me as not even worthy of being considered useless, empty and remote. I feel like a mere void, the illusion of a soul, the locus of a being, a conscious darkness where a strange insect vainly seeks at least the warm memory of a light.

  220

  DOLOROUS INTERLUDE

  What good is dreaming?

  What did I make of myself? Nothing.

  To be spiritualized in Night.....

  Inner Statue without contours, Outer Dream without a dream-essence.

  221

  I’ve always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises. Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was, I’ve always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat. I was never convinced of what I believed in. I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through. Words were my only truth. When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been.

  If it weren’t for my continuous dreaming, my perpetual state of alienation, I could very well call myself a realist – someone, that is, for whom the outer world is an independent nation. But I prefer not to give myself a name, to be somewhat mysterious about what I am and to be impishly unpredictable even to myself.

  I feel a certain duty to dream continuously since, not being more nor wanting to be more than a spectator of myself, I have to put on the best show I can. And so I fashion myself out of gold and silks, in imaginary rooms, on a false stage, with ancient scenery: a dream created to invisible music and the play of soft lights.

  I cherish, like the memory of a special kiss, my childhood remembrance of a theatre with a bluish, moonlit setting that depicted the terrace of an impossible palace, surrounded by a huge park, likewise painted. I spent my soul living all of that as though it were real. The music that softly played on this occasion of my mental experience of life gave the stage setting a feverish reality.

  The setting was definitely bluish and moonlight, but I don’t remember who appeared on stage. The play I place today in that remembered scenery comes from the verses of Verlaine and Pessanha,* but this isn’t the play (which I’ve forgotten) that was performed on the actual stage and had nothing to do with that reality of blue music. It’s my own, fluid play, a grandiose moonlit masquerade, a silver and nocturnal blue interlude.

  Then came life. That night they took me to The Gold Lion* for dinner. I can still taste the steaks on the palate of my nostalgia – steaks (I know because I imagine*) such as nowadays no one makes or I, at any rate, don’t eat. And it all gets mixed up – the childhood I live from afar, the tasty food at the restaurant, the moonlit setting, Verlaine future and I present – in a blurry diagonal, in a false gap between what I was and what I am.

  222

  As when a storm is brewing and the noises from the street talk in a loud and detached voice…

  The street winced in the stark white light, and the dull darkness trembled all around the world with a boom of echoing crashes. The harsh sadness of the heavy rain accentuated the air’s ugly black hue. Cold and warm and hot at the same time, the air was everywhere equivocal. Then a wedge of metallic light entered the large office, ripping into the peace of each human body, and a huge rock of sound struck with a chill shock on all sides, shattering into a hard silence. The sound of rain diminishes, becoming a soft voice. The noise from the street diminishes out of fear. A new light spreads its swift yellow over the silent darkness, but breathing was again possible before the fist of rumbling sound abruptly echoed from afar; like an angry farewell, the storm was beginning to draw away.

  …with a drawling, moribund murmur, with no light in the increasing light, the rumble of the storm subsided in the distant expanses – it circled over Almada*…

  A dreadful light suddenly cracked and splintered. It froze inside every brain and chamber. Everything froze. Hearts stopped for a moment. They’re all very sensitive people. The silence terrifies, as if death had struck. The sound of increasing rain, as if everything were weeping, is a relief. The air is like lead.

  223

  A sword of faint lightning darkly whirled in the large room. The rumble that followed, breaking in on a widespread gulp, trailed off into the distance. The sound of rain wept loudly, like mourners in between their chit-chatting. Here inside, each tiny sound stood out clearly, nervously.

  224

  …that episode of the imagination which we call reality.

  It’s been raining for two straight days, and the rain that falls from the cold grey sky has a colour that afflicts my soul. For two straight days… I’m sad from feeling, and I reflect it at the window, to the sound of the dripping water and pouring rain. My heart is overwhelmed, and my memories have turned into anxieties.

  Though I don’t feel tired and have no reason to feel tired, I’d love to go to sleep right now. Back when I was a child and happy, the voice of a colourful green parrot lived in a house off the courtyard next door. On rainy days his talking never became mournful, and he would cry out – sure of his shelter – a constant sentiment that hovered in the sadness like a phonograph before its time.

  Did I think about this parrot because I’m sad and my distant childhood brings it to mind? No, I actually thought about it because a parrot is right now frantically squawking in the courtyard opposite where I live today.

  Everything is topsy-turvy. When it seems like I’m remembering, I’m thinking of something else; if I look, I don’t recognize, and when distracted, I see clearly.

  I turn my back to the grey window with its panes that are cold to the touch, and by some magic of the penumbra I suddenly see the interior of our old house, next to which there was a courtyard wi
th a squawking parrot; and my eyes fall asleep from the irrevocable fact of having, in effect, lived.

  225

  Yes, it’s the sunset. Slowly and distractedly I reach the end of the Rua da Alfândega and see, beyond the Terreiro do Paço,* a clear view of the sunless western sky. It’s a blue sky tinged green and tending towards light grey, and on the left, over the hills of the opposite bank, there’s a cowering mass of brownish to lifeless pink fog. An immense peace that I don’t have is coldly present in the abstract fall air. Not having it, I experience the feeble pleasure of imagining it exists. But in reality there is no peace nor lack of peace, just sky, a sky with every fading colour: light blue, blue-green, pale grey between green and blue, fuzzy hues of distant clouds that aren’t clouds, yellowishly darkened by an expiring red. And all of this is a vision that vanishes as soon as it occurs, a winged interlude between nothing and nothing that takes place on high, in shades of sky and grief, diffuse and indefinite.

  I feel and forget. A nostalgia – the same one that everyone feels for everything – invades me as if it were an opium in the cold air. I have an inner, pseudo-ecstasy that comes from seeing.

  Towards the ocean, where the sun’s ceasing becomes increasingly final, the light dies out in a livid white which is blued by greenish cold. In the air there’s a torpor of what is never achieved. The panorama of the sky loudly hushes.

  In this moment when I’m bursting with feeling, I wish I had the gift of ruthless self-expression, the arbitrary whim of a style as my destiny. But no: this remote, lofty sky that’s disintegrating is everything right now, and the emotion I feel, which is many confused emotions bunched together, is merely this useless sky’s reflection in a lake in me – a lake secluded among steep rugged rocks, perfectly still, a kind of dead man’s gaze in which the heights distractedly observe themselves.