Fernando Pessoa

The book of disquiet

The Book of Disquiet is one of the great literary works of the twentieth century. Written over the course of Fernando Pessoa's life, it was first published in 1982, pieced together from the thousands of individual manuscript pages left behind by Pessoa after his death in 1935. Now this fragmentary modernist masterpiece appears in a major new edition that unites Margaret Jull Costa's celebrated translation with the most complete version of the text ever produced. It is presented here, for the first time in English, by order of original composition, and accompanied by facsimiles of the original manuscript. Narrated principally by an assistant bookkeeper named Bernardo Soares - an alias of sorts for Pessoa himself - The Book of Disquiet is 'the autobiobraphy of someone who never existed', a mosaic of dreams, of hope and despair; a hymn to the streets and cafs of 1930s Lisbon, and an extraordinary record of the inner life of one of the century's most important writers. This new edition represents the most complete vision of Pessoa's genius.

The Complete Edition

The Book of Disquiet

Noreen Farsai

The possession of definite, firm opinions, instincts, passions and a fixed, recognizable character, all this contributes to the horror of making of our soul a fact, of making it material and external. Liy- ing in a sweet, fluid state of ignorance about all things and about oneselfis the only way of life guaranteed to suit and bring comfort to the sage. The ability constantly to interpose oneself between self and other things shows the highest degree of knowledge and prudence. Our personality should be impenetrable even to ourselves: thať's why our duty should be always to dream ourselves and to include ourselves in our dreams so that it is impossible for us to hold any opinions about ourselves. And we should especially avoid the invasion of our personality by others. Any interest others take in us is a grave indelicacy. The only thing that prevents the everyday greeting of "How are you rom being an unforgivable insult is the fact that in general it is utterly empty and insincere.

I am, of course, limited by my own knowledge. I cannot create a mathematician ... However, I am contented with what I have. which allows for infinite combinations and innumerable dreams. Who knows, by dint of dreaming, I might achieve much more, but it's not worth the effort. I'm fine as I am.

Annie Millman

My one desire is to die, at least temporarily, but this, as I said, is only because I have a headache.

When one reads of wars and revolutions - there's always one or the other going on - one feels not horror but boredom.  It isn't the cruel fate of all those dead and wounded, the sacrifice of those who die as warriors or onlookers, that weighs so heavy on the heart; it's the stupidity that sacrifices lives and possessions to anything so unutterably vain. All ideals and ambitions are just the ravings of gossiping men. No empire merits even the smashing of a child's doll. No ideal merits even the sacrifice of one toy train. What empire is really useful, what ideal really profitable? Everything comes from humanity and humanity is always the same - changeable but incapable of perfection, vacillating but incapable of progress. Given this irredeemable state of affairs, given a life we were given we know not how and will lose we know not when, given the ten thousand chess games that make up the struggles of life lived in society, given the tedium of vainly contemplating what will never be achieved [...] - what can the wise man do but beg for rest, for a respite from having to think about living (as if having to live were not enough), for a small space in the sun and the open air and at least the dream that somewhere beyond the mountains there is peace." 

Livro do desassossego

Nikas

Mas nenhuma simpatia violenta desperto. Ninguém será nunca comovidamente meu amigo. 

In the first few days of this sudden autumn, when the darkness seems in some way premature, it feels as if we have lingered too long over our daily tasks and, even in the midst of the daily round, I savour in advance the pleasure of not working that the darkness brings with it, for darkness means night and night means sleep, home, freedom. When the lights go on in the big office, banishing the darkness, and we move seamlessly from day to evening shift, I am assailed by an absurd sense of comfort, like the memory of another, and I feel as contented with what I write as if I were sitting reading myself to sleep in bed.

After the last of the rain had fallen from the sky and come to earth - leaving the sky clear and the earth damp and gleaming - the world below grew joyful in the cool left by the rain, and the greater clarity of life that returned with the blue of the heavens furnished each soul with its own sky, each heart with a new freshness.

With its astounding hardcover reviews Richard Zenith's new complete translation of THE BOOK OF DISQUIET has now taken on a similar iconic status to ULYSSES, THE TRIAL or IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME as one of the greatest but also strangest modernist texts. An assembly of sometimes linked fragments, it is a mesmerising, haunting 'novel' without parallel in any other culture.

"I sleep and unsleep. Behind me, on the other side of where I'm lying down, the silence of the apartment touches infinity. I hear time fall, drop by drop, and nor one drop that falls can be heard. My physical heart is physically oppresed by the memory - reduced to nothing - of all that has been or that I've been. I feel my head materially supported by the pillow in which it makes a valley. My skin and the skin of the pillowcase are like two people touching in the shadows. Even the ear on which I'm lying mathematicaly engraves itself on my brain."

"In the day's limpid perfection, the sun-filled air nevertheless stagnantes. It's not the present pressure of the future storm, not a malaise in our involuntary bodies, not a vague haziness in the truly blue sky. It's the lethargy that the thought of not working makes us feel, a feather tickling our dozing face. It's sultry but it's summer. The countryside appeals even to those who don't like it."

"I love you the way I love the sunset or the moonlight: I want the moment to remain, but all I want to possess in it is the sensation of possessing it"

“I don’t even suffer. My disdain for everything is so complete that I even disdain myself. The contempt I have for the suffering of others I also have for my own. And so all my suffering is crushed under the foot of my disdain. Ah, but this makes me suffer more… 

Because to value one’s own suffering is to gild it with the sun of pride.

 Intense suffering can give the sufferer the illusion of being the Chosen One of Pain. Thus…”

Why is art beautiful? Because it is useless. Why is life ugly? Because it is all aims and purposes and intentions. All its roads are intended to go from A to B. If only we could be given a road built between a place that no one ever leaves and another that no one ever goes to! If only someone were to dedicate their life to building a road beginning in the middle of a field and ending in the middle of another, and which, is extended, would be useful but which remained sublimely, simply, the middle of a road.

What kills the dreamer is not living while he dreams; what wounds the man of action is not dreaming while he lives. 

I am no pessimist. Happy are those who can make of their suffering something universal. 

In the plausible intimacy of approaching evening, as I stand waiting for the stars to begin at the window of this fourth floor room that looks out on the infinite, my dreams move to the rhythm required by long journeys to countries as yet unknown, or to countries that are simply hypothetical or impossible.

Stella Meier

Happy the makers of pessimistic systems! Not only do they take comfort in having made something, they take pleasure in things explicable and feel part of universal suffering. I do not complain about the world. I do not protest in the name of the universe. I am not a pessimist. I suffer and I complain, butI don't know if suffering is the general rule or if it is human to suffer. Why should I care if this is true or not? I suffer, possibly deservedly. (A doe pursued.) I am not a pessinmist, I am merely sad. 

The beauty ofruins? The fact that they were no longer of any use. The sweetness of the past? Being able to remember it, because to remember the past is to make it the present again, and the past is not and cannot be the present-the absurd, my love, the absurd.

Lexi D

All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does.

Roel Christian Yambao

Júlia Pedroso

"There is a distinguished mind at work beneath the totally acceptable dullness of clerking. The mind is that of Pessoa. We must be given the chance to learn more about him."—Anthony Burgess, Observer

Seated at his desk in the Lisbon’s Rua dos Douradores, Bernardo Soares, an assistant book-keeper, writes his diary—a self-deprecating reflection on the sheer distance between the loftiness of his feelings and the humdrum reality of his everyday life.

"This is a prize-winning translation of a classic of existential literature—a book acknowledged by the critics as "the most beautiful diary of the century."

Fernando Pessoa grew up in Durban, South Africa, where his stepfather was Portuguese consul. He returned to Lisbon in 1905 and worked as a clerk until his death in 1935.

madina

Ren 

The depression in these diary entries is too palpable it feels claustrophobic. Ruminations about life, despite how tedious it might be, feels like a heavy manacle weighing me down. Is exploring the meaning of existentialism always get this disquieting, I wonder? Every musing this (imaginary) man has regarding existential despair carried me like a riptide, made me unable to differentiate the waves of reality and the torrent of my own thoughts. It seems by accepting the notion that life is indeed meaningless, I found the meaning of life instead. Now that this stupendous voyage has ended, I am filled with incomprehensible sorrow.

jess

made this my travel essential book. finished it after a year, in multiple trips and places. now i’m filled with deep inexplicable sadness. not because of its melancholic proses, existential pondering, beautiful musings of life and of human condition, and the everlasting symphony of verging through the gales of life in solitude; of poet’s inner light in making sense of our poignant abyss that left an indelible mark in my soul: but because it has finally ended, words filled with essence of life have been written, elucidated, observed, experienced. i would probably never find a book that dives me through the tumultuous tide of sublime words that haunts the luminaries and depths of one self: of Bernardo Soares, of illuminating the profound and the true in every turn of his phrases.

Saying this moved me would be such an understatement … this is just .. the best? I love Pessoa’s reverence of the mundane, his ability to draw attention to seemingly minor things (when in reality they are in fact, everything). I’m floored, in awe, heartbroken that this book had to come to an end.

haifa

Reading Pessoa is like inhabiting his consciousness, watching it expand. There is very little of the outside world at all. It's full of his insistence on staying rooted to the self, to be drawn inward by the gravity of his own mind.

Sometimes reading Pessoa is overbearing loneliness. But it's the loneliness I keep revisiting and overstaying.

Gavin

In one sentence: Eventless autobiographical sketches about working a shit job in a shit town, and but the beauty of self-obsession.
 To be read when: unable to sleep; e.g. at 3am or when travelling for more than 15 hours.

  I asked very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me - this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we're mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our coat.

Pessoa's uniqueness was invisible during his life; this is a shining, astonishing instance of what we now call neuroatypicality and of the everyday sublime. He's obsessed with cute fatalism, with his own inadequacy, with nothingness and loneliness, but almost every passage is wise or funny or beautiful. I catch no despair off him. Turning shite to gold. Like Larkin if Larkin were likeable; like Montaigne if terser and darker. 

  
And at this table in my absurd room, I, a pathetic and anonymous office clerk, write words as if they were the soul's salvation, and I gild myself with the impossible sunset of high and vast hills in the distance, with the statue I received in exchange for life's pleasures, and with the ring of renunciation on my evangelical finger, the stagnant jewel of my ecstatic disdain.


Floreat inertia! the worker-poet distinctive and supreme. I first read this on a 22-hour international journey, unsleeping, undrinking, unreal; I prescribe the same conditions for you when you read him.

  
I feel love for all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love... even though nothing truly merits the love of any soul, if, out of sentiment, we must give it, I might as well lavish it on the smallness of an inkwell as on the grand indifference of the stars.


This paperback is a super-slim selection of the full chaotic archive he left behind; only a tenth of the full Desassossego archive has been translated in to English; this is a great temptation towards a language I presently have no other reason to learn. 


 
    Galef type: 
Data 1 - a window onto an interesting piece of the world, &
 Value 3 - written from a holistic value structure, letting you experience that value structure from the inside, &
 Style 2 - from which you can learn a style of thinking by studying the author’s approach to the world.
 
  

 


  
One of my constant preoccupations is trying to understand how it is that other people exist, how it is that there are souls other than mine and consciousnesses not my own, which, because it is a consciousness, seems to me unique. I understand perfectly that the man before me uttering words similar to mine and making the same gestures I make, or could make, is in some way my fellow creature. However, I feel just the same about the people in illustrations I dream up, about the characters I see in novels or the dramatis personae on the stage who speak through the actors representing them.

I suppose no one truly admits the existence of another person. One might concede that the other person is alive and feels and thinks like oneself, but there will always be an element of difference, a perceptible discrepancy, that one cannot quite put one's finger on. There are figures from times past, fantasy-images in books that seem more real to us than these specimens of indifference-made-flesh who speak to us across the counters of bars, or catch our eye in trams, or brush past us in the empty randomness of the streets. The others are just part of the landscape for us, usually the invisible landscape of the familiar.

I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I've seen in engravings, that with many supposedly real people, with that metaphysical absurdity known as 'flesh and blood'. In fact 'flesh and blood' describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid on the butcher's marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive, the sirloin steaks and cutlets of Fate.

I'm not ashamed to feel this way because I know it's how everyone feels. The lack of respect between men, the indifference that allows them to kill others without compunction (as murderers do) or without thinking (as soldiers do), comes from the fact that no one pays due attention to the apparently abstruse idea that other people have souls too.

composto por Bernardo Soares, ajudante de guarda-livros na cidade de Lisboa

Nelson Zagalo

É magistralmente difícil definir a experiência de ler o "Livro do Desassossego”, tanto quanto a intensidade do que se sente enquanto se lê, já que ao ler nos separamos de nós e nos juntamos ao autor, para com ele sentir e compreender, assumindo a nossa inabilidade de o explicar, menos ainda definir. Só o próprio Fernando Pessoa compreendeu a envergadura daquilo a que se propôs, tendo para tal construído um segundo eu, Bernardo Soares, para por seu intermédio se poder olhar a Si de fora, e assim escavar e desconstruir a Alma. E por isso a definição da experiência desta leitura só podia ser dada pelo próprio Pessoa ao dizer-nos: "Quero que a leitura deste livro vos deixe a impressão de terdes atravessado um pesadelo voluptuoso.”

Até aqui, só tinha encontrado tamanha intensidade literária aos pés de Proust. 

“Quem sou eu?” é o motor do texto, ou centenas de textos, que compõe o “Livro do Desassossego”, sinto contudo que o autor na sua ânsia por responder à questão, se manifesta como uma espécie de metafísico esteta, alguém com um sentido analítico de investigador, dotado de uma curiosidade científica profunda, capaz de o conduzir por entre os caminhos mais recônditos da sua busca, e por outro lado, alguém com um sentido artístico entranhado, mais interessado na busca, nos caminhos, processos, e componentes, e menos nas suas explicações, sem preocupações de formular categorias, definições ou respostas. Se Pessoa me recorda, repetidas vezes, Descartes, sempre que abandona a abstração metafísica e concretiza afasta-se deste para assumir o seu traço próprio de artista inquisidor. Era a forma que lhe interessava, não a sua definição.

“Triste noção tem da realidade quem a limita ao orgânico, e não põe a ideia de uma alma dentro das estatuetas e dos lavores. Onde há forma há alma.” (416)

“Dominamos outrora o mar físico, criando a civilização universal; dominaremos agora o mar psíquico, a emoção, a mãe temperamento, criando a civilização intelectual.” (438)

“Os classificadores de coisas, que são aqueles homens de ciência cuja ciência é só classificar, ignoram, em geral, que o classificável é infinito e tanto se não pode classificar. Mas o em que vai meu pasmo é que ignorem a existência de classificáveis incógnitos, coisas da alma e da consciência que estão nos interstícios do conhecimento.” (378)

Toda a obra se percorre de um tom melancólico, porque é de “desassossego” que se fala, outro tom seria inadequado, contudo contagiado por um sentir maior, que vai além da tristeza e da dor, que apresenta o viver como apesar de angustiante totalmente inebriante porque potenciador do ato contínuo criativo.

“É debruçado ao parapeito, gozando do dia, sobre o volume vário da cidade inteira, só um pensamento me enche a alma — a vontade íntima de morrer, de acabar, de não ver mais luz sobre cidade alguma, de não pensar, de não sentir, de deixar atrás, como um papel de embrulho, o curso do sol e dos dias, de despir, como um traje pesado, à beira do grande leito, o esforço involuntário de ser.” (397)

“Viajar? Para viajar basta existir. Vou de dia para dia, como de estação para estação, no comboio do meu corpo, ou do meu destino, debruçado sobre as ruas e as praças, sobre os gestos e os rostos, sempre iguais e sempre diferentes, como, afinal, as paisagens são.
Se imagino, vejo. Que mais faço eu se viajo? Só a fraqueza extrema da imaginação justifica que se tenha que deslocar para sentir.” (451)

“A arte consiste em fazer os outros sentir o que nós sentimos, em os libertar deles mesmos, propondo-lhes a nossa personalidade para especial libertação.
O que sinto, na verdadeira substância com que o sinto, é absolutamente incomunicável; e quanto mais profundamente o sinto, tanto mais incomunicável é. Para que eu, pois, possa transmitir a outrem o que sinto, tenho que traduzir os meus sentimentos na linguagem dele, isto é, que dizer tais coisas como sendo as que eu sinto, que ele, lendo-as, sinta exatamente o que eu senti. E como este outrem é, por hipótese de arte, não esta ou aquela pessoa, mas toda a gente, isto é, aquela pessoa que é comum a todas as pessoas, o que, afinal, tenho que fazer é converter os meus sentimentos num sentimento humano típico, ainda que pervertendo a verdadeira natureza daquilo que senti.” (260)

Do meu lado, e em jeito de explicação do espanto e admiração, descodifico esta obra em dois elementos-chave: a prosa e o tema. No campo da prosa, Pessoa está acima de qualquer adjetivação, o modo como trabalha a língua portuguesa é absolutamente ímpar, elevando-a a níveis insondáveis, capaz de nos transportar por entre as palavras, fazendo-nos sentir a leveza e a impalpabilidade do que nos quer dizer. No tema, o trabalhar metafísico na tentativa de compreender aquilo que somos, Pessoa tem momentos de tanta elevação que quase parece levar-nos a sentir o toque direto sobre a alma, como se ela se pudesse apresentar ali, naquelas letras, palavras, ideias, como se Pessoa fosse Soares, e ambos fossem um, e se fundissem no texto, fossem alma vertida nas folhas, no papel.

Publicado em VI (http://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/2...).

Ture Strange Nilsson

Lily

All fragments and no thread, like stones tossed into a stream in a summer haze, glimmering briefly before the eye as they disappear into the shimmering folds of the water. The way to consume this work, confront it, deal with it, is to let go of any effort to read it in a specific way. Read it from back to front. Open it randomly and pick an entry to read. The entries are quite self-contained. Forego the intuition to find a story. Read as if you are having conversations through whispers with faceless strangers, in a daze that you would one day remember as a dream.

How can I describe this book? It's perfect. My favorite book forever and ever. I just don't know what to say about this. PLEASE READ IT, and when you do, please contact me because I want to talk about this book with someone. 

A prize-winning international classic, first published in English in 1993, now with a new foreword by William Boyd.

The book of disquiet

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