The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

  ADVICE TO UNHAPPILY MARRIED WOMEN (I)

  (Unhappily married women include all who are married and some who are single)

  Beware, above all else, of cultivating humanitarian sentiments. Humanitarianism is a vulgarity. I write coldly, rationally, thinking of your own good, you poor unhappily married women.

  The essence of all art, all freedom, is to submit one’s spirit as little as possible, letting the body be submitted instead.

  Immoral behaviour is inadvisable, for it demeans your personality in the eyes of others and makes it banal. But to be inwardly immoral while being held in high esteem by everyone around you, to be a dedicated and corporally chaste wife and mother while at the same time mysteriously catching diseases from all the men in the neighbourhood, from the grocers to – this is the height of gratification for anyone who really wants to enjoy and expand her individuality without stooping to the base method of naturally base housemaids or else falling into the rigid virtuousness of profoundly stupid women, whose virtue is merely the offspring of self-interest.

  According to your superiority, female souls who read me, will you be able to grasp what I write. All pleasure is in the mind; all crimes that occur are committed in dreams and in dreams alone! I remember a beautiful, authentic crime. It never happened. The beautiful crimes aren’t the ones we know. Borgia committed beautiful crimes? Believe me that he didn’t. The one who committed beautiful, lavish, fruitful crimes was our dream of Borgia, the idea we have of Borgia. I’m certain that the Cesare Borgia* who existed was banal and stupid. He must have been, because to exist is always stupid and banal.

  I offer you this advice disinterestedly, applying my method to a case which doesn’t personally interest me. My dreams are of empire and glory, with nothing sensual about them. But I’d like to be useful to you, if for no other reason than to annoy myself, because I hate what’s useful. I’m an altruist in my own way.

  ADVICE TO UNHAPPILY

  MARRIED WOMEN (II)

  I will now teach you how to cheat on your husbands in your imagination.

  Make no mistake: only an ordinary woman really and truly cheats on her husband. Modesty is a sine qua non for sexual pleasure, and to yield to more than one man destroys modesty.

  I grant that female inferiority requires the male species, but I think that each woman should limit herself to just one male, making him, if necessary, the centre of an expanding circle of imaginary males.

  The best time for doing this is in the days immediately preceding menstruation.

  Like so:

  Picture your husband with a whiter body. If you’re good at this, you’ll feel his whiteness on top of you.

  Refrain from excessively sensual gestures. Kiss the husband on top of your body and replace him in your imagination – remember the man who lies on top of you in your soul.

  The essence of pleasure is in multiplication. Open your shutters to the Feline in you.

  How to upset your husband…

  It’s important that your husband gets angry now and then.

  Learn to feel attracted to repulsive things without relaxing your outward discipline. The greatest inward unruliness combined with the greatest outward discipline makes for perfect sensuality. Every gesture that realizes a dream or desire unrealizes it in reality.

  Substitution is less difficult than you think. By substitution I mean the practice of imagining an orgasm with man A while copulating with man B.

  ADVICE TO UNHAPPILY

  MARRIED WOMEN (III)

  My wish for you, my dear disciples, is that by faithfully following my advice you’ll experience vastly multiplied sensual pleasures with, not in the acts of, the male animal to whom Church and State have tied you by your womb and a last name.

  It’s by digging its feet in the ground that the bird takes off in flight. May this image, daughters, serve as a perpetual reminder of the only spiritual commandment there is.

  The height of sensuality, if you can achieve it, is to be the lewdest slut imaginable and yet never unfaithful to your husband, not even with your eyes.

  To be a slut on the inside, to be unfaithful to your husband on the inside, to cheat on him as you hug him, to kiss him with kisses that aren’t for him – that is sensuality, O superior women, O my mysterious and cerebral disciples.

  Why don’t I give the same advice to men? Because the man is a different kind of creature. If he’s inferior, I recommend that he seduce as many women as he can, resorting to my contempt when ..... The superior man doesn’t need women. He can have sensuality without sexual possession. This is something a woman, even a superior one, could never accept. The woman is a fundamentally sexual creature.

  APOCALYPTIC FEELING

  Since every step I took in life brought me into horrifying contact with the New, and since every new person I met was a new living fragment of the unknown that I placed on my desk for my frightful daily meditation, I decided to abstain from everything, to go forward in nothing, to reduce action to a minimum, to make it hard for people and events to find me, to perfect the art of abstinence, and to take abdication to unprecedented heights. That’s how badly life terrifies and tortures me.

  To make a decision, to finalize something, to emerge from the realm of doubt and obscurity – these are things that seem to me like catastrophes or universal cataclysms.

  Life, as I know it, is cataclysms and apocalypses. With each passing day I feel that much more incompetent even to trace gestures or to conceive myself in clearly real situations.

  With each passing day the presence of others – which my soul always receives like a rude surprise – becomes more painful and distressing. To talk with people makes my skin crawl. If they show an interest in me, I run. If they look at me, I shudder. If .....

  I’m forever on the defensive. 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.

  Life makes me cold. My existence is all damp cellars and lightless catacombs. I’m the disastrous defeat of the last army that sustained the last empire. Yes, I feel as if I were at the end of an ancient ruling civilization. I, who was used to commanding others, am now alone and forsaken. I, who always had advisers to guide me, now have no friend or guide.

  Something in me is always begging for compassion, and it weeps over itself as over a dead god whose altars were all destroyed when the white wave of young barbarians stormed the borders and life came and demanded to know what the empire had done with happiness.

  I’m always afraid others might talk about me. I’ve failed in everything. I didn’t dare think of being something; I didn’t even dream of thinking about being something, because even in my dreams – in my visionary state as a mere dreamer – I realized I was unfit for life.

  No feeling in the world can lift my head from the pillow where I’ve let it sink in desperation, unable to deal with my body or with the idea that I’m alive, or even with the abstract idea of life.

  I don’t speak the language of any reality, and I stagger among the things of life like a sick man who finally got up after being bedridden for months. Only in bed do I feel like part of normal life. It pleases me to get a fever, since it seems perfectly natural to my recumbent state. Like a flame in the wind I flutter and get dizzy. Only in the dead air of closed rooms do I breathe the normality of my life.

  I don’t even miss the ocean breeze. I’ve become resigned to having my soul for a cloister and to being no more to myself than an autumn in an arid expanse, with only a glimmer of living life, as of a light which expires in the canopied darkness of pools, with no energy and colour but that of the violet splendour of exile when the sun dips behind the hills…

  I have no other real pleasure besides the analysis of my pain, nor any other sensual delight besides the morbid dribbling of sensations when they crumble and rot �
� light footsteps in the murky shadows, and we don’t even turn around to find out whose they are; faint songs in the distance, the words of which we don’t try to catch, for we are lulled more by the vagueness of what they’re saying and by the mystery of where they come from; hazy secrets of pallid waters, filling the and nocturnal spaces with ethereal far-aways; bells of distant carriages, and who knows where they’re returning from or what laughs and gaiety they contain, because from here they’re just distant, drowsy carriages in the dull torpor of an afternoon in which summer is giving way to autumn…

  The flowers in the garden have died and withered to become other flowers – older and more noble, their dead yellow more compatible with mystery, silence and solitude. The water bubbles that surface in the pools have their place in dreams. The distant croaking of frogs! O lifeless countryside within me! O rustic peacefulness of dreams! O my life, futile as that of a shiftless vagabond who sleeps on the side of the road, in a fresh and transparent slumber, with the fragrance of the meadows entering his soul like a mist, profound and full of eternity like everything that’s not linked to anything, nocturnal, anonymous, nomadic and weary beneath the stars’ cold compassion.

  I follow wherever my dreams lead, making the images into steps that lead to other images; I unfold – like a fan – each chance metaphor into a large, inwardly visible picture; I cast off my life like a suit that’s too tight. I hide among trees, far away from the roads. I lose myself. And for a few tenuous moments I’m able to forget my taste for life, to bury the thought of daylight and bustle, and to consciously, absurdly terminate in my sensations, with an empire in agonizing ruins but also with a grand entrance amid victory banners and drums into a glorious final city where I would weep over nothing and desire nothing, asking no one – not even myself – for so much as the right to exist.

  It’s me who suffers from the sickly surfaces of the pools I’ve created in dreams. Mine is the paleness of the moon I envision over wooded landscapes. Mine is the weariness of the stagnant autumn skies that I remember but have never seen. All of my dead life, all my flawed dreams and all that I had that wasn’t mine oppresses me in the blue of my inner skies, in the visible rippling of my soul’s rivers, and in the vast, restless serenity of the wheat on the plains which I see but don’t see.

  A cup of coffee, a bit of tobacco whose aroma passes through me when I smoke it, my eyes half shut in a half-dark room – this, and my dreams, are all I want from life. If it doesn’t seem to me like too little? I don’t know. How should I know what’s a little and what’s a lot?

  O summer afternoon outside, how I’d like to be utterly different… I open the window. Everything outside is soft, but it cuts me like an indefinite pain, like a vague feeling of dissatisfaction.

  And one last thing cuts me, tears me, rips my soul to pieces. It’s that I, in this moment and at this window, thinking these sad and soft things, ought to be an attractive, aesthetic figure, like a figure in a painting – and I’m not even that…

  Let the moment pass and be forgotten… Let the night come, let it grow, let it fall over everything and never lift back up. Let this soul be my tomb for ever, and become sheer darkness, and may I never be able to live again without feelings and desires.

  THE ART OF EFFECTIVE DREAMING (I)

  Make sure, first of all, that you respect nothing, believe nothing, nothing. But while showing disrespect, you should hold on to the desire to respect something; while despising what you don’t love, you should retain the painful longing to love someone; and while disdaining life, you should preserve the idea that it must be wonderful to live and cherish it. Having done this, you’ll have laid the foundations for the edifice of your dreams.

  Remember that you’re embarking on the loftiest task of all. To dream is to find ourselves. You’re going to be the Columbus of your soul. You’re going to set out to discover your own landscapes. Make sure you’re on the right track and that your instruments can’t mislead you.

  The art of dreaming is difficult, because it’s an art of passivity, in which we concentrate our efforts on avoiding all effort. If there were an art of sleeping, it would no doubt be somewhat similar.

  Note that the art of dreaming is not the art of directing our dreams. To direct is to act. The true dreamer surrenders to himself, is possessed by himself.

  Avoid all material stimulants. In the beginning you’ll be tempted to masturbate, to consume alcohol, to smoke opium..... This is all effort and seeking. To be a good dreamer, you have to be nothing but a dreamer. Opium and morphine are purchased in pharmacies – how can you expect to dream through them? Masturbation is a physical thing – how can you expect.....

  Now if you dream about masturbating, all fine and good. If you dream about smoking opium or taking morphine, and become intoxicated from the idea of the opium, of the morphine of your dreams, then you deserve to be praised: you are performing like a perfect dreamer.

  Always think of yourself as sadder and more miserable than you are. There’s no harm in it. It even serves as a kind of trick ladder to the world of dreams.

  THE ART OF EFFECTIVE DREAMING (II)

  Postpone everything. Never do today what you can leave for tomorrow.* In fact you need not do anything at all, tomorrow or today.

  Never think about what you’re going to do. Don’t do it.

  Live your life. Don’t be lived by it. Right or wrong, happy or sad, be your own self. You can do this only by dreaming, because your real life, your human life, is the one that doesn’t belong to you but to others. You must replace your life with your dreaming, concentrating only on dreaming perfectly. In all the acts of your real life, from that of being born to that of dying, you don’t act – you’re acted; you don’t live – you’re merely lived.

  Become an inscrutable sphinx to others. Shut yourself in your ivory tower, but without slamming the door. Your ivory tower is you.

  And if someone tells you this is false and absurd, don’t believe it. But don’t believe in what I say either, because one ought not believe in anything.

  Disdain everything, but in such a way that your disdain doesn’t disturb you. Don’t think you’re superior because you disdain. This is the key to the art of noble disdain.

  THE ART OF EFFECTIVE DREAMING (III)

  By virtue of dreaming everything, everything in life will make you suffer more.....

  That’s the cross you will have to bear.

  THE ART OF EFFECTIVE DREAMING FOR METAPHYSICAL MINDS

  Reason, – everything is easy and , because everything for me is a dream. I decide to dream something and I dream it. Sometimes I create in myself a philosopher, who methodically expounds philosophies while I, a young page, pay court to his daughter, whose soul I am, outside the window of her house.

  I’m limited, of course, by what I know. I can’t create a mathematician. But I’m content with what I have, which already allows for infinite combinations and countless dreams. And perhaps, through dreaming, I’ll achieve still more. Though it’s not really worth the bother. I’m already quite satisfied.

  Pulverization of the personality: I don’t know what my ideas are, nor my feelings or my character… When I feel something, I feel it only vaguely, in the visualized person of some being or other that appears in me. I’ve replaced my own self with my dreams. Each person is merely his own dream of himself. I’m not even that.

  Never read a book to the end, nor in sequence and without skipping.

  I’ve never known what I felt. Whenever people spoke to me of such and such emotion and described it, I always felt they were describing something in my soul, but when I thought about it later, I always doubted. I never know if what I feel I am is what I really am or merely what I think I am. I’m a character of* my own plays.

  Effort is useless but entertains. Reason is sterile but amusing. To love is tiresome but is perhaps preferable to not loving. Dreaming, however, substitutes for everything. In dreams I can have the impression of effort without actual effort. I can ente
r battles without the risk of getting scared or being wounded. I can reason without aiming to arrive at some truth (which I would never arrive at in any case), without trying to solve some problem (which I know I would never solve)..... I can love without worrying about being rejected or cheated on, and without getting bored. I can change my sweetheart and she’ll always be the same. And should I wish to be cheated on or spurned, I can make it happen, and always in the way I want, always in the way that gives me pleasure. In dreams I can experience the worst anxieties, the harshest torments, the greatest victories. I can experience all of it as if it happened in life; it depends only on my ability to make my dreams vivid, sharp, real. This requires study and inner patience.

  There are various ways of dreaming. One is to surrender completely to your dreams, without trying to make them clear and sharp, letting yourself go in the hazy twilight of the sensations they arouse. This is an inferior, tiresome form of dreaming, for it’s monotonous, always the same. Rather different is the clear and directed dream, but the effort expended on directing it makes the dream too obviously artificial. The supreme artist – the kind of dreamer I am – expends only the effort of wanting his dream to be such and such, in accord with his whims, and it unfolds before him exactly as he would have desired but could never have conceived, because the mental effort would have worn him out. I want to dream of myself as a king. I decide all of a sudden that this is what I want, and lo and behold I’m the king of some country. Which one and what kind, the dream will tell me. For I’ve so triumphed over my dreams that they always unexpectedly bring me what I want. By focusing more sharply, I can perfect those scenes of life that come to me as only vague impressions. I would be utterly incapable of consciously picturing the various Middle Ages of diverse eras on diverse Earths that I’ve experienced in dreams. I’m amazed at the wealth of imagination that I never realized was in me. I let my dreams go their own way… They’ve become so pure that they always surpass my expectations. They’re always even more beautiful than what I wanted. But only the most advanced dreamer can hope to reach this point. I’ve spent years dreamingly striving for this, and today I achieve it without effort.