The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

  393

  … contemptible like the aims we live for, without our having chosen those aims.

  Most if not all men live a contemptible life: contemptible in all its joys, and contemptible in almost all its sorrows, except those that have to do with death, since Mystery plays a part in these.*

  Through the filter of my inattention, I hear fluid, scattered sounds which rise like intermittently flowing waves from outside, as if they came from another world: cries of vendors selling what’s natural, such as vegetables, or what’s social, such as lottery tickets; the round scraping of wheels from carts and wagons that hurriedly jerk forward; cars whose veering makes more noise than their motors; the shaking of some sort of cloth out of some window; the whistle of a little boy; the laughter from an upper floor; the metallic groan of the tram one street over; the jumble of sounds issuing from the cross street; a mishmash of loud noises, soft noises and silences; halting rumbles of traffic; some footsteps; beginnings, middles and ends of people’s utterances – and all of this exists for me, who am sleeping while thinking of it, like a stone poking out of a patch of grass where it doesn’t belong.

  Next, and coming through the wall of my rented room, it’s domestic sounds that flow together in a stream: footsteps, dishes, the broom, a song (fado?*) that’s cut short, last night’s balcony rendezvous, irritation because something is missing from the dining table, someone asking for the cigarettes left on top of the cabinet – all of this is reality, the anaphrodisiac reality that has no part in my imagination.

  Lightly fall the steps of the junior maid, whose slippers I picture having a red and black braid, and since that’s how I picture them, their sound takes on something of a red and black braid; loudly fall the boots of the family’s son, who’s going out and yells goodbye, the slam of the door cutting the echo of the later that follows the see you; a dead calm, as if the world on this fourth floor had ended; dishes being taken to the kitchen to get washed; water running; ‘Didn’t I tell you that’… and silence whistling from the river.

  But I dreamily and digestively drowse. I have time, between synaesthesias. And it’s extraordinary to think that, if I were asked right now what I want for this short life, I could think of nothing better than these long, slow minutes, this absence of thought and emotion, of action and almost of sensation itself, this inner sunset of dissipated desire. And then it occurs to me, almost without thinking, that most if not all people live like this, with greater or lesser consciousness, moving forward or standing still, but with the very same indifference towards ultimate aims, the same renunciation of their personal goals, the same watered-down life.* Whenever I see a cat lying in the sun, I think of humanity. Whenever I see someone sleep, I remember that everything is slumber. Whenever someone tells me he dreamed, I wonder if he realizes that he has never done anything but dream. The sound from the street gets louder, as if a door had opened, and the doorbell rings.

  It was nothing, for the door shut immediately. The footsteps die out at the end of the hallway. The washed plates raise their voice of water and porcelain. […] A passing truck shakes the back of the apartment, and since all things end, I get up from my thinking.

  394

  And I reason at will, in the same way I dream, for reasoning is just another kind of dreaming.

  O prince of better days, I was once your princess, and we loved each other with another kind of love, whose memory makes me grieve.

  395

  The so gentle and ethereal hour was an altar for prayer. The horoscope of our meeting was surely ruled by auspicious conjunctions – so subtle and silken was the vague substance of glimpsed dreams that had mingled with our awareness of feeling. Our bitter conviction that life wasn’t worth living had come to an end, like one more summer. There was a rebirth of that spring which we could now, albeit fallaciously, imagine had been ours. With humiliating similarity to humans, the pools among the trees also lamented, along with the roses in the unshaded flower beds and the indefinite melody of living – all irresponsibly.

  It’s useless to discern or foresee. The whole of the future is a mist that surrounds us, and when we glimpse tomorrow, it tastes like today. My destinies are the clowns that the caravan left behind, with no better moonlight than that of the open road, nor any quivering in the leaves except what the breeze causes, and the uncertainty of the moment, and our belief that they are quivering. Distant purples, fleeting shadows, the dream incomplete and no hope of death’s completing it, the rays of a dying sun, the light in the house on the hill, the anguished night, the perfume of death here among these books, all alone, with life outside, the trees smelling greenly in the vast night that is starrier on the other side of the hill… And so your sorrows had their solemn and benevolent union; your few words royally consecrated the voyage, no ships ever returned, not even the real ones, and the smoke of living stripped everything of its contours, leaving only the shadows and skeletons, the bitter waters of eerie ponds among boxwoods seen through gates that from a distance recall Watteau, anguish, and never again. Millenniums just for you to come, but the road has no curves and so you can never arrive. Goblets reserved for the inevitable hemlocks – not yours, but the life of us all, and even the street lamps, the nooks and crannies, the faint wings we only hear, while in the restless, suffocating night our thought slowly rises and paces across its anxiety… Yellow, green-black, love-blue: all dead, my divine nursemaid, all dead, and all ships are the ship that never set sail! Pray for me, and perhaps God will exist because it’s for me that you pray. The fountain softly pattering in the distance, life uncertain, the smoke fading to nothing in the village where night is falling, my memory so hazy, the river so far away… Grant that I may sleep, grant that I may forget myself, lady of Obscure Designs, Mother of Endearments and of Blessings incompatible with their own existence…

  396

  After the last rains left the sky for earth, making the sky clear and the earth a damp mirror, the brilliant clarity of life that returned with the blue on high and that rejoiced in the freshness of the water here below left its own sky in our souls, a freshness in our hearts.

  Whether we like it or not we’re servants of the hour and its colours and shapes, we’re subjects of the sky and earth. Even those who delve only in themselves, disdaining what surrounds them, delve by different paths when it rains and when it’s clear. Obscure transmutations, perhaps felt only in the depths of abstract feelings, occur because it rains or stops raining. They’re felt without our feeling them because the weather we didn’t feel made itself felt.

  Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways. At this very moment, jotting down these impressions during a break that’s excusable because today there’s not much work, I’m the one who is attentively writing them, I’m the one who is glad not to have to be working right now, I’m the one seeing the sky outside, invisible from in here, I’m the one thinking about all of this, I’m the one feeling my body satisfied and my hands still a bit cold. And my entire world of all these souls who don’t know each other casts, like a motley but compact multitude, a single shadow – the calm, bookkeeping body with which I lean over Borges’s tall desk, where I’ve come to get the blotter that he borrowed from me.

  397

  Falling between the buildings, in alternating patches of light and shadow (or of brighter and less bright light), the morning dawns over the city. It seems to come not from the sun but from the city itself, as if the sunlight emanated from the walls and rooftops – not from them physically, but because they happen to be there.

  To see and feel it makes me feel a great hope, but I realize that hope is literary. Morning, spring, hope – they’re linked in music by the same melodic intention; they’re linked in the soul by the same memory of an identical intention. No: if I observe myself as I
observe the city, I realize that all I can hope is for the day to end, like all days. Reason also sees the dawn. Whatever hope I placed in the day wasn’t mine; it was of those who just live the passing hour and whose outer way of understanding I happened, for a moment, to embody.

  Hope? What do I have to hope for? The day doesn’t promise me more than the day, and I know it has a certain duration and an end. The light heartens but does not improve me, for I’ll walk away as the same man – just a few hours older, a feeling or two happier, a thought or two sadder. When something is born, we can feel it as a birth or we can think about it having to die. Now, under the full light of the sun, the city landscape is like an open field of buildings – natural, vast and harmonious. But while seeing all this, can I forget that I exist? My consciousness of the city is, at its core, my consciousness of myself.

  I suddenly remember when I was a child and saw, as today I cannot see, dawn breaking over the city. Back then it didn’t break for me but for life, because back then I (not being conscious) was life. I saw dawn break and felt happy; today I see dawn break, feel happy, and become sad. The child is still there but has fallen silent. I see the way I saw, but from behind my eyes I see myself seeing, and that is enough to darken the sun, to make the green of the trees old, and to wilt the flowers before they open. Yes, I once belonged here; but today, before each landscape, no matter how fresh, I stand as a foreigner, a guest and pilgrim before it, an outsider of what I see and hear, old to myself.

  I’ve seen everything, even what I’ve never seen nor will ever see. Even the memory of future landscapes flows in my blood, and my anxiety over what I’ll have to see again is already monotonous to me.

  And leaning on the windowsill to enjoy the day, gazing at the variegated mass of the whole city, just one thought fills my soul: that I profoundly wish to die, to cease, to see no more light shining on this city or any city, to think no more, to feel no more, to leave behind the march of time and the sun like a piece of wrapping paper, to remove like a heavy suit – next to the big bed – the involuntary effort of being.

  398

  I’m intuitively certain that for people like me no material circumstance can be propitious, no situation have a favourable outcome. If I already had good reasons for withdrawing from life, this is yet another one. Those courses of events that make success inevitable in an ordinary man have an unexpected, adverse effect in my case.

  This observation sometimes causes me a painful impression of divine hostility. It seems that only by some conscious manipulation of events, to make them work against me, could the series of disasters that define my life have happened.

  The result of all this is that I never make much of an effort. Let luck come my way, if it will. I know all too well that my greatest effort won’t achieve what it would in other people. That’s why I give myself up to luck, without expecting anything from it. What should I expect?

  My stoicism is an organic necessity; I need to shield myself against life. Since stoicism is after all just a stringent form of Epicureanism, I try to get some amusement out of my misfortune. I don’t know to what extent I achieve this. I don’t know to what extent I achieve anything. I don’t know to what extent anything can be achieved…

  Where another man would succeed not so much by his effort as by a circumstantial inevitability, I wouldn’t and couldn’t succeed, whether by that inevitability or by that effort.

  I seem to have been born, spiritually speaking, on a short winter day. Night fell early on my being. The only way I can live my life is in frustration and desolation.

  None of this is truly stoical. It’s only in words that my suffering is at all noble. I complain like a sick maid. I fret like a housewife. My life is totally futile and totally sad.

  399

  All I asked of life is what Diogenes* asked of Alexander: not to stand in the way of the sun. There were things I wanted, but I was denied any reason for wanting them. As for what I found, it would have been better to have found it in real life. Dreaming.....

  While out walking I’ve formulated perfect phrases which I can’t remember once I get home. I’m not sure if the ineffable poetry of these phrases belongs totally to what they were (and which I forgot), or partly to what they after all weren’t.

  I hesitate in everything, often without knowing why. How often I’ve sought – as my own version of the straight line, seeing it in my mind as the ideal straight line – the longest distance between two points. I’ve never had a knack for the active life. I’ve always taken wrong steps that no one else takes; I’ve always had to make an effort to do what comes naturally to other people. I’ve always wanted to achieve what others have achieved almost without wanting it. Between me and life there were always sheets of frosted glass that I couldn’t tell were there by sight or by touch; I didn’t live that life or that dimension. I was the daydream of what I wanted to be, and my dreaming began in my will: my goals were always the first fiction of what I never was.

  I’ve never known if it was my sensibility that was too much for my intelligence, or my intelligence that was too much for my sensibility. I’ve always been late, I’m not sure if for the former or for the latter, or perhaps for both, or perhaps it was the third thing that was late.

  The dreamers of ideals [?] – socialists, altruists, and humanitarians of whatever ilk – make me physically sick to my stomach. They’re idealists with no ideal, thinkers with no thought. They’re enchanted by life’s surface because their destiny is to love rubbish, which floats on the water and they think it’s beautiful, because scattered shells float on the water too.

  400

  An expensive cigar smoked with one’s eyes closed – that’s all it takes to be rich.

  Like someone who revisits a place where he lived in his youth, with a cheap cigarette I can return – heart and soul – to the time in my life when I used to smoke them. Through the mild flavour of the smoke, the whole of the past comes back to me.

  At other times it’s a certain sweet. A mere piece of chocolate can shake up my nerves with the surfeit of memories it provokes. Childhood! And as my teeth sink into the dark, soft mass, I chew and savour my humble joys as the happy companion of my toy soldiers, as the knight in perfect accord with whatever stick happened to be serving as my horse. Tears well up in my eyes, and along with the flavour of the chocolate I can taste my bygone happiness, my long lost childhood, and I voluptuously bask in the sweetness of my sorrow.

  This ritual of taste, however simple it may be, is as solemn as any other.

  But it’s cigarette smoke that most subtly, spiritually, reconstructs my past. Since it just barely grazes my awareness of taste, it evokes the moments to which I’ve died in a more general way, by a kind of displacement; it makes them more remotely present, more like mist when they envelop me, more ethereal when I embody them. A menthol cigarette or a cheap cigar wraps certain of my moments in a sweet softness. With what subtle plausibility – taste combined with smell – I recreate the dead stage settings and reinvest them with the colours of a past, always so eighteenth century in its weary and mischievous aloofness, always so medieval in its irreparable lostness!

  401

  Elevating disgrace into splendour, I created for myself a pageantry of pain and effacement. I didn’t make a poem out of my pain, but I used it to make a cortège. And from the window that looks on to myself I contemplate in awe the deep-red sunsets, the wispy twilights of my sorrows without cause, where the dangers, burdens and failures of my innate incapacity for existing march by in processions of my aimlessness. The child in me that never died still watches and excitedly waves at the circus I stage for myself. He laughs at the clowns, who exist only in the circus; he fixes his eyes on the stunt men and the acrobats as if they were the whole of life. And thus all the unsuspected anguish of a human soul about to burst, all the incurable despair of a heart forsaken by God, sleeps the innocent child’s sleep, without joy and yet contented, within the four walls of my room with their ugly, peeling
paper.

  I walk not through the streets but through my sorrow. The flanking rows of buildings are all the incomprehension that surrounds my soul;..... my footsteps resound against the pavement like a ridiculous death knell, a frightful noise in the night, final like a receipt or a tomb.

  Stepping back from myself, I see that I’m the bottom of a well.

  The man I never was died. God forgot who I should have been. I’m just a vacant interlude.

  If I were a musician, I would compose my own funeral march, and with such good reason!

  402

  To be reincarnated in a stone or a speck of dust – my soul weeps with this yearning.

  I’m losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless.

  403

  I have no meaning I can fathom… Life weighs on me… Any emotion is too much for me… Only God knows my heart… What cortèges from my past cause a tedium of unremembered splendours to cradle my nostalgia? And what canopies? what starry sequences? what lilies? what pennants? what stained-glass windows?

  What shady path of mystery was followed by our best fantasies, which so vividly remember this world’s trickling waters, cypress trees and boxwoods, and which can find no canopies for their processions except in the fruits of abdication?

  KALEIDOSCOPE

  Don’t speak… You happen too much… If only I didn’t see you… When will you be just a fond memory of mine? How many women you’ll be until that happens! And my having to suppose I can see you is an old bridge no one uses… Yes, this is life. The others have dropped their oars… The cohorts have lost their discipline… The knights left at daybreak with the sound of their lances… Your castles passively waited to be deserted… No wind abandoned the rows of trees on the summit… Useless porticos, hidden silverware, prophetic signs – all of this belongs to vanquished twilights in ancient temples and not to our meeting in this present moment, for there is no reason for lindens to give shade apart from your fingers and their belated gesture…