Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. by Richard Zenith (Penguin, 2002)T h e M o s t I m p o r t a n t B o o k O f T h e 20th C e n t u r y
"Was 18 March 1914 the most extraordinary date in modern literature? On that day, Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa (1888-1935) took a sheet of paper, went to a tall chest of drawers in his room and began to write standing up, as he customarily did. 'I wrote 30-odd poems in a kind of trance whose nature I cannot define. It was the triumphant day of my life, and it would be impossible to experience such a one again.'
Other poets, notably Rilke, have experienced such hours of explosive prodigality. But Pessoa's case is different and, probably, unique. The first set of poems was by one 'Alberto Caeiro' - 'my Master had appeared inside me.' The next six were composed by Pessoa struggling against the 'inexistence' of Caeiro. But Caeiro had disciples, one of whom, 'Ricardo Reis', contributed further poems. A fourth individual 'burst impetuously on the scene. In one fell swoop, at the typewriter, without hesitation or correction, there appeared the "Ode Triumphal" by "Alvaro de Campos" - the Ode of that name and the man with the name he now has.'
Pseudonymous writing is not rare in literature or philosophy (Kierkegaard provides a celebrated instance). 'Heteronyms', as Pessoa called and defined them, are something different and exceedingly strange. For each of his 'voices', Pessoa conceived a highly distinctive poetic idiom and technique, a complex biography, a context of literary influence and polemics and, most arrestingly of all, subtle interrelations and reciprocities of awareness. Octavio Paz defines Caeiro as 'everything that Pessoa is not and more'.
He is a man magnificently at home in nature, a virtuoso of pre-Christian innocence, almost a Portuguese teacher of Zen. Reis is a stoic Horatian, a pagan believer in fate, a player with classical myths less original than Caeiro, but more representative of modern symbolism. De Campos emerges as a Whitmanesque futurist, a dreamer in drunkenness, the Dionysian singer of what is oceanic and windswept in Lisbon. None of this triad resembles the metaphysical solitude, the sense of being an occultist medium which characterise Pessoa's 'own' intimate verse.
Other masks followed, notably one 'Bernardo Soares'. At some complex generative level, Pessoa's genius as a polyglot underlies, is mirrored by, his self-dispersal into diverse and contrasting personae. He spent nine of his childhood years in Durban. His first writings were in English with a South African tincture. He turned to Portuguese only in 1910 (there are significant analogies with Borges).
Pessoa earned his living as a translator. His legacy, enormous and in large part unpublished, comports philosophy, literary criticism, linguistic theory, writings on politics in Portuguese, English and French. Like Borges, Beckett or Nabokov, Pessoa shows up the naive, malignant falsehood still current in certain Fenland English faculties whereby only the monoglot and native speaker is inward with style and literary insight.
The fragmentary, the incomplete is of the essence of Pessoa's spirit. The very kaleidoscope of voices within him, the breadth of his culture, the catholicity of his ironic sympathies - wonderfully echoed in Saramago's great novel about Ricardo Reis - inhibited the monumentalities, the self-satisfaction of completion. Hence the vast torso of Pessoa's Faust on which he laboured much of his life. Hence the fragmentary condition of The Book of Disquiet which contains material that predates 1913 and which Pessoa left open-ended at his death. As Adorno famously said, the finished work is, in our times and climate of anguish, a lie.
It was to Bernardo Soares that Pessoa ascribed his Book of Disquiet, first made available in English in a briefer version by Richard Zenith in 1991. The translation is at once penetrating and delicately observant of Pessoa's astute melancholy. What is this Livro do Desassossego? Neither 'commonplace book', nor 'sketchbook', nor 'florilegium' will do. Imagine a fusion of Coleridge's notebooks and marginalia, of Valery's philosophic diary and of Robert Musil's voluminous journal. Yet even such a hybrid does not correspond to the singularity of Pessoa's chronicle. Nor do we know what parts thereof, if any, he ever intended for publication in some revised format.
What we have is a haunting mosaic of dreams, psychological notations, autobiographical vignettes, shards of literary theory and criticism and maxims. 'A Letter not to Post', an 'Aesthetics of Indifference', 'A Factless Autobiography' and manual of welcomed failure (only a writer wholly innocent of success and public acclaim invites serious examination).
If there is a common thread, it is that of unsparing introspection. Over and over, Pessoa asks of himself and of the living mirrors which he has created, 'Who am I?', 'What makes me write?', 'To whom shall I turn?' The metaphysical sharpness, the wealth of self-scrutiny are, in modern literature, matched only by Valery or Musil or, in a register often uncannily similar, by Wittgenstein. 'Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other's presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.' This very scrutiny, moreover, is fraught with danger: 'To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving.' These findings arise out of a uniquely spectral yet memorable landscape: 'A firefly flashes forward at regular intervals. Around me the dark countryside is a huge lack of sound that almost smells pleasant.'
Throughout, Pessoa is aware of the price he pays for his heteronomity. 'To create, I've destroyed myself... I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.' He compares his soul to 'a secret orchestra' (shades of Baudelaire) whose instruments strum and bang inside him: 'I only know myself as the symphony.' At moments, suicidal despair, a 'self-nihilism', are close. 'Anything, even tedium', a finely ironising reservation, rather than 'this bluish, forlorn indefiniteness of everything!' Is there any city which cultivates sadness more lovingly than does Lisbon? Even the stars only 'feign light'.
Yet there are also epiphanies and passages of deep humour. In the 'forests of estrangements', Pessoa comes upon resplendent Oriental cities. Women are a chosen source of dreams but 'Don't ever touch them'. There are snapshots of clerical routine, of the vacant business of bureaucracy worthy of Melville's Bartleby. The sense of the comedy of the inanimate is acute: 'Over the pyjamas of my abandoned sleep...' The juxtapositions have a startling resonance: 'I'm suffering from a headache and the universe.' A sort of critical, self-mocking surrealism surfaces: 'To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.' Or that fragment of a sentence which may come close to encapsulating Pessoa's unique reckoning: '... intelligence, an errant fiction of the surface'.
This is not a book to be read quickly or, necessarily, in sequence. Wherever you dip, there are 'rich hours' and teasing depths. But it will, indeed, be a banner year if any writer, translator or publisher brings to the reader a more generous gift." - George Steiner
"[Pessoa’s] chief accomplishment during his lifetime was his body of poetry, but his most lasting monument is surely The Book of Disquiet.. It is difficult to really find anything to compare these pieces with in order to discuss them fruitfully, but I think parts of The Book of Disquiet can be compared without creating confusion to Kerouac’s Some of the Dharma, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Thoreau’s Walden. One of the chief similarities in these pieces is the author’s use of aphorism and metaphor. More so than the content of these books The Book of Disquiet resembles them in style, but perhaps its chief resemblance is the almost telepathic rendition of a man’s thoughts and experiences into prose. The book was written over many years and the style is not one hundred percent consistent throughout, but the effect of submersing yourself in another’s being is keenly felt whether you merely browse the book or apply yourself to it like a maniac.
To give you a better idea of the style of the thing let me quote a couple of sections in full:
48
To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving. I know nothing more simultaneously false and telling than the statement by Leonardo da Vinci that we cannot love or hate something until we have understood it.
Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other’s presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.
271
It is not love, but love’s outskirts that are worth knowing…
The repression of love sheds much more light on its nature than does the actual experience of it. Virginity can be a key to profound understanding. Action has its rewards but brings confusion. To possess is to be possessed, and therefore to lose oneself. Only the idea can fathom reality without getting ruined.
313
I loathe the happiness of all these people who don’t know they’re unhappy. Their human life is full of what, in a true sensibility, would produce a surfeit of anxieties. But since their true life is vegetative, their sufferings come and go without touching their soul, and they live a life that can be compared only to that of a man with a toothache who won a fortune—the genuine good fortune of living unawares, the greatest gift granted by the gods, for it is the gift of being like them, superior just as they are (albeit in a different fashion) to happiness and pain.
That’s why, in spite of everything, I love them all. My dear vegetables!
I see now that I have for some reason made three selections that each dealt with love in some way. That probably distorts scope of the book and says more about me than it does about Pessoa, but I do think it is one of his typical areas of concern. Oh, what the heck, let me leave you with one more of his brief pieces that does not concern love:
424
Every day things happen in the world that can’t be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they’re mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can’t be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows." - Edwine Smith
"...The Book of Disquiet is a diary, but of a self that is several and precarious, and always more potential than actual. Its floating boundaries expand and contract, lazily animated by “the horror of making our soul a fact.” As Pessoa/Soares writes, “I’m always astonished whenever I finish anything. Astonished and depressed. My desire for perfection should prevent me from ever finishing anything; it should prevent me even from starting.” Presumably it was this desire that prevented Pessoa from publishing more than one book in Portuguese during his life. That was a book of poetry, a nationalistic collection called Mensagem (Message), and for many years Pessoa was known only as a poet, Portugal’s greatest since the equally nationalistic Camões. He and his three main heteronyms are indeed very good poets, but it seems that it was as Soares and in the prose of The Book of Disquiet, where he wrote of the “desire to die another person beneath unknown flags,” that he found himself more truly.
...Reading a page or two a day, I would find myself curiously preoccupied along certain lines for a week or more—weird: in the sunlight I’d been thinking constantly of rain—and then the topic would change and, like a spell of weather, move on. I suppose this is just as well if Pessoa is right and
No problem is soluble. None of us unties the Gordian knot; we either give up or cut it. We brusquely resolve with our feelings problems of the intellect and do so because we are tired of thinking, because we are too timid to draw conclusions, because of an absurd need for support, or because of our gregarious impulse to rejoin the others and rejoin life.
...Certain philosophers passed much of the twentieth century in an effort to exorcise the ghost of Descartes—to rid us of the notion that every self is split between subject and object, one who is versus one who thinks, a watcher versus a doer. But Pessoa represents a kind of kudzu Cartesianism: a crazy interior multiplication of egos, each thought or feeling producing a separate spectator self, a subject then made into the object of a brand new subject, and so on indefinitely. From The Book of Disquiet:
I created various personalities within myself. I create them constantly. Every dream, as soon as it is dreamed, is immediately embodied by another person who dreams it instead of me.
In order to create, I destroyed myself; I have externalized so much of my inner life that even inside I now exist only externally.
...The Book of Disquiet most often seduced me as a perversely cheerful apologia for withdrawal from everything, for “the sweetness of having neither family nor companions, the gentle pleasure akin to that of exile, in which we feel the pride of distance shade into a hesitant voluptuousness.” Behold the paradise of Bernardo Soares: “A cup of coffee, a cigarette, the penetrating aroma of its smoke, myself sitting in a shadowy room with my eyes half-closed.” Elsewhere he is more elaborate: “To live a dispassionate, cultured life beneath the dewfall of ideas, reading, dreaming and thinking about writing, a life slow enough to be always on the edge of tedium, but considered enough not to slip into it. To live a life removed from emotions and thoughts, enjoying only the thought of emotions and the emotion of thoughts. To stagnate, golden, in the sun like a dark lake surrounded by flowers.” The best guess is that the bending flowers themselves are narcissi.
And it’s easy and correct enough to say that Pessoa and his work are simply narcissistic. He and the heteronyms seem intent on nothing so much as their arrested development; they are life-long adolescents, addicts of potential. The less one acts, the more potential is conserved, or so you can believe. Pessoa and Soares et al. are not, therefore, the best group to fall in with in your twenties. The big task of people my age, those who haven’t yet found a partner or exactly settled on a profession, must be to enter the really existing world without getting broken in the process, to distinguish realism from selling-out and also ideals from excuses. Pessoa’s work, on the other hand, is testimony to the melancholy pleasure of shirking this task permanently and devotedly. Like a temp, Soares has taken his job as an assistant bookkeeper reluctantly, because he must: “Anyone reading the earlier part of this book will doubtless have formed the opinion that I’m a dreamer. If so, they’re wrong. I don’t have enough money to be a dreamer.” But this only means that he lacks enough to dream full-time. Getting called a good-for-nothing would not affront him. He enjoys quoting the French philosopher Gabriel Tarde: “Life is a search for the impossible via the useless.”
Work and love are alleged to be the keys to happiness, but Soares and Pessoa, who have each other, demur. Pessoa is never more audacious, characteristic, or sinister than when he says such things as: “Woman is a rich source of dreams. Never touch her.” Friendship doesn’t fare much better in his account: “The only possible reason for asking other people’s advice is to know, when we subsequently do exactly the contrary of what they told us to do, that we really are ourselves, acting in complete disaccord with all that is other.”
All throughout the year of my reading The Book of Disquiet I was also finishing up grad school; making a first go of a freelance career; eating and dressing a little better than before, and a little beyond my means; hanging out with the friends who have, like me, ended up in the huge funnel of New York; and alternately suffering and enjoying an on-again, off-again love affair, or affaire maudite, with that girlfriend whom I loved and often avoided. I was also working on a novel—the completion of which seemed to recede further away the more I wrote. I’m referring to “the horror of making our soul a fact.” Yet it doesn’t seem impossible or even all that unlikely that I will more or less get what I want and what I’d come here for, in this city that more than any other is consecrated to such desires. No doubt I would have hesitated in the face of a threatened fulfillment no matter what book I’d left by my bedside for months, but it remains hard to imagine one that would have more exacerbated my hesitations, or better improved upon them, as the case may be, than The Book of Disquiet.
“I like to read the way a chorus girl does,” E. M. Cioran writes, “identifying myself with the author and the book.” So it is for me too. In many ways Pessoa and I couldn’t be more different. My politics are to the left, I’m reasonably abstemious, I travel when I can, I have more than enough friends, and to my barbaric ear, Portuguese—Pessoa’s “clear, majestic language”—sounds like Spanish as spoken by Eastern Europeans. Yet The Book of Disquiet, the work of a royalist loner and virgin dead sixty-seven years ago from too much drink, has often seemed as intimate a book as if the words were mine. At times it was as if someone had drawn up my confession, to which I need only supply the crime.
I seemed to savor my life by my reluctance to live it. The romance I was in, as I finished The Book of Disquiet, was presumed to be ending again, and again not actually acting like it was. In my politics too there were issues of “commitment.” The power of my left-wing analysis seemed constantly to increase while—despite the rallies attended, the petitions signed—the power of the left itself steadily diminished. And the great novel I was writing I suspended or abandoned in order to work on something shorter and less important to me. Even in small things—what to do next week with a friend—I was hesitant and uncertain. Decisiveness seemed to shear the edges off time, permitting the days to lapse by too quickly, and I didn’t know—I still don’t—any better way of slowing things down than to enter a pleasant little agony of abulia. The Book of Disquiet, involved in all this, had become my book of hours.
...But I think my susceptibility to Pessoa’s “cold in the soul” had to do with his own susceptibility. Where the others make arguments, he confesses himself in fragments. The transvaluation of values he proposes—all the customary grails turned upside down—is more persuasive to me than Nietzsche’s much more strenuous operation, not only because Pessoa will have nothing to do with the despicable will-to-power, but because he suffers his truths at least as much as he advances them. After all, he is giving things up not because he doesn’t want them, but because he does. The image of the Gordian knot isn’t an idle one:
The further we advance in life, the more we become convinced of two contradictory truths. The first is that, confronted by the reality of life, all the fictions of literature and art pale into insignificance… They are just dreams from which one awakens, not memories or nostalgic longings with which we might later live a second life.
The second is this: every noble soul wishes to live life to the full, to experience everything and every feeling, to know every corner of the earth and, given that this is impossible, life can only be lived to the full subjectively, only lived in its entirety once renounced.
These two truths are mutually irreducible…
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. This bridge—Pessoa is often writing about bridges—is also between the self and the world. Pessoa’s intuition was that the two could not both be real at once. Meanwhile there was the bridge, nothing solid on either side.
These days it often seems to me high time that I try to take a single shape in the world, that I make a sincere effort to live the best of my possible lives. At such times my way of reading The Book of Disquiet appears in retrospect as a bad habit and a symbol of undisclosed troubles. What did this book do for me but aggravate my indecision and help perfect my bad conscience? The advice anyone would give is to get it together and be serious, and although I can quote chapter and verse against this counsel—“The world belongs to the unfeeling. The essential condition for being a practical man is the absence of any sensitivity” — I feel guilty not taking it.
And there are other arguments to be made against Pessoa-ism, or Soares-itis, or whatever it is. For one thing, Pessoa rarely specifies the contents of his dreams, and while this strange emptiness invites the reader to take the book as his own, it doesn’t only do that. It also breeds the suspicion that Pessoa is more capable of relishing his dreams than of having them. For how long can he keep up their production without believing in or really desiring their realization?
Yet just as often as I am tempted to give in to misgivings and guilt, I feel something else—I feel that I’m right to clutch the thought of The Book to me, and to prefer, to any satisfaction I might obtain, the excitement and dread of being solitary and unrealized. This is especially so when I’m back in my apartment, alone with my books. Then I wonder again if it’s true that “Freedom is the possibility of isolation.” Meanwhile, “Life, obvious and unanimous, flows past outside me in the footsteps of the passers-by.” All that is quoting Pessoa, with whom I may have identified too strongly, as a patient becomes a part of his disease, or disquiet. Yet the ideal reader is an invalid. He lies in bed and imagines the life he might lead once recovered. If the illness is prolonged, what was a chance occurrence, an event separate from him, alters his character somewhat and becomes a part of it. Of course I’m not sick at all, and in reading The Book of Disquiet I took all the pleasure that is the mark of good health. Nevertheless, even now that I haven’t taken the book down from its shelf in my bedroom for several months, sometimes when I am walking through New York, with its hurry and din and its large portion of purposeful and enviable people (I have sometimes even heard that I am one of them), I look around and think, thinking of The Book of Disquiet, “I’ll never set foot in this world.” Whether this sentence, uttered silently in a voice not quite my own, amounts to a boast, a bizarre lie, or a statement of sad fact is one of many things I don’t know and, if the example of Pessoa is any guide, may contrive never to learn." - Benjamin Kunkel
