The Book of Disquiet (58 page)

Once we’re able to see this world as an illusion and a phantasm, then we can see everything that happens to us as a dream, as something that pretended to exist while we were sleeping. And we will become subtly and profoundly indifferent towards all of life’s setbacks and calamities. Those who die turned a corner, which is why we’ve stopped seeing them; those who suffer pass before us like a nightmare, if we feel, or like an unpleasant daydream, if we think. And even our own suffering won’t be more than this nothingness. In this world we sleep on our left side, hearing even in our dreams the heart’s oppressed existence.

Nothing else… A little sunlight, a slight breeze, a few trees framing
the distance, the desire to be happy, regret over time’s passing, our always doubtful science, and the always undiscovered truth… That’s all, nothing else… No, nothing else…

To attain the satisfactions of the mystic state without having to endure its rigours; to be the ecstatic follower of no god, the mystic or epopt* with no initiation; to pass the days meditating on a paradise you don’t believe in – all of this tastes good to the soul that knows it knows nothing.

The silent clouds drift high above me, a body inside a shadow; the hidden truths drift high above me, a soul imprisoned in a body… Everything drifts high above… And everything high above passes on, just like everything down below, with no cloud leaving behind more than rain, no truth leaving behind more than sorrow… Yes, everything that’s lofty passes high above, and passes on; everything that’s desirable is in the distance and distantly passes on… Yes, everything attracts, everything remains foreign, and everything passes on.

What’s the point of knowing that in the sun or in the rain, as a body or a soul, I will also pass on? No point – just the hope that everything is nothing and nothing, therefore, everything.

Every sound mind believes in God. No sound mind believes in a definite God. There is some being, both real and impossible, who reigns over all things and whose person (if he has one) cannot be defined, and whose purposes (if he has any) cannot be fathomed. By calling this being God we say everything, since the word God – having no precise meaning – affirms him without saying anything. The attributes of infinite, eternal, omnipotent, all-just or all-loving that we sometimes attach to him fall off by themselves, like all unnecessary adjectives
when the noun suffices. And He who, being indefinite, cannot have attributes, is for that very reason the absolute noun.

The same certainty and the same obscurity exist with respect to the soul’s survival. We all know that we die; we all feel that we won’t die. It’s not just a desire or hope that brings us this shadowy intuition that death is a misunderstanding; it’s a visceral logic that rejects .....

Instead of eating lunch – a necessity I have to talk myself into every day – I walked down to the Tagus, and I wandered back along the streets without even pretending that it did me good to see it. Even so…

Living isn’t worth our while. Only seeing is. To be able to see without living would bring happiness, but this is impossible, like virtually everything we dream. How great would be the ecstasy that didn’t include life!

To create at least a new pessimism, a new negativity, so that we can have the illusion that something of us – albeit something bad – will remain!

‘What are you laughing about?’ the voice of Moreira harmlessly wondered beyond the two bookshelves that mark the boundary of my pinnacle.

‘I mixed up some names,’ I answered, and my lungs calmed.

‘Oh,’ he said quickly, and dusty silence fell once more over the office and over me.

The Viscount of Chateaubriand doing the books! Professor Amiel* sitting here on a high royal stool! Count Alfred de Vigny debiting
Grandela Department Store! Senancour on the Rua dos Douradores!

Not even poor miserable Bourget, whose books are as tiresome as a building without an elevator… I turn and lean out the window to look once more at my Boulevard Saint Germain, and precisely at that moment the ranch owner’s partner is spitting from the next window over.

And between thinking about this and smoking, and not connecting one thing to the other, my mental laughter finds the smoke, gets tangled in my throat, and expands into a mild attack of audible laughter.

It will seem to many that my diary, written just for me, is too artificial. But it’s only natural for me to be artificial. How else can I amuse myself except by carefully recording these mental notes? Though I’m not very careful about how I record them. In fact I jot them down in no particular order and with no special care. The refined language of my prose is the language in which I naturally think.

For me the outer world is an inner reality. I feel this not in some metaphysical way but with the senses normally used to grasp reality.

Yesterday’s frivolity is a nostalgia that gnaws at my life today.

There are cloisters in this moment. Night has fallen on all our evasions. A final despair in the blue eyes of the pools reflects the dying sun. We were so many things in the parks of old! We were so voluptuously embodied in the presence of the statues and in the English layout of the paths. The costumes, the foils, the wigs, the graceful motions and the processions were so much a part of the substance of our spirit! But who does ‘our’ refer to? Just the fountain’s winged water in the deserted garden, shooting less high than it used to in its sad attempt to fly.

… and lilies on the banks of remote rivers, cold and solemn, on a never-ending close of day in the heart of real continents.

With nothing else, and yet utterly real.

(lunar scene)

The entire landscape is in no place at all.

Far below, sloping down in a tumult of shadows from the heights where I gaze, the icy city sleeps in the moonlight.

An anxiety for being me, forever trapped in myself, floods my whole being without finding a way out, shaping me into tenderness, fear, sorrow and desolation.

An inexplicable surfeit of absurd grief, a sorrow so lonely, so bereft, so metaphysically mine .....

The silent, hazy city spreads out before my wistful eyes.

The buildings, all different, form a confused, self-contained mass, whose dead projections are arrested in the pearly, uncertain moonlight. There are rooftops and shadows, windows and middle ages, but nothing around which to have outskirts. There’s a glimmer of the far away in everything I see. Above where I’m standing there are black branches
of trees, and all of the city’s sleepiness fills my disenchanted heart. Lisbon by moonlight and my weariness because of tomorrow!

What a night! It pleased whoever fashioned the world’s details that for me there should be no better melody or occasion than these solitary moonlit moments when I no longer know the self I’ve always known.

No breeze, no person interrupts what I’m not thinking. I’m sleepy in the same way that I’m alive. But there is feeling in my eyelids, as if something were making them heavy. I hear my breathing. Am I asleep or awake?

To drag my feet homeward weighs like lead on my senses. The caress of extinction, the flower proffered by futility, my name never pronounced, my disquiet like a river contained between its banks, the privilege of abandoned duties, and – around the last bend in the ancestral park – that other century, like a rose garden…

I went into the barbershop as usual, with the pleasant sensation of entering a familiar place, easily and naturally. New things are distressing to my sensibility; I’m at ease only in places where I’ve already been.

After I’d sat down in the chair, I happened to ask the young barber, occupied in fastening a clean, cool cloth around my neck, about his older colleague from the chair to the right, a spry fellow who had been sick. I didn’t ask this because I felt obliged to ask something; it was the place and my memory that sparked the question. ‘He passed away yesterday,’ flatly answered the barber’s voice behind me and the linen cloth as his fingers withdrew from the final tuck of the cloth in between my shirt collar and my neck. The whole of my irrational good mood abruptly died, like the eternally missing barber from the adjacent chair. A chill swept over all my thoughts. I said nothing.

Nostalgia! I even feel it for people and things that were nothing to me, because time’s fleeing is for me an anguish, and life’s mystery is a torture. Faces I habitually see on my habitual streets – if I stop seeing
them I become sad. And they were nothing to me, except perhaps the symbol of all of life.

The nondescript old man with dirty gaiters who often crossed my path at nine-thirty in the morning… The crippled seller of lottery tickets who would pester me in vain… The round and ruddy old man smoking a cigar at the door of the tobacco shop… The pale tobacco shop owner… What has happened to them all, who because I regularly saw them were a part of my life? Tomorrow I too will vanish from the Rua da Prata, the Rua dos Douradores, the Rua dos Fanqueiros. Tomorrow I too – I this soul that feels and thinks, this universe I am for myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be the one who no longer walks these streets, whom others will vaguely evoke with a ‘What’s become of him?’. And everything I’ve done, everything I’ve felt and everything I’ve lived will amount merely to one less passer-by on the everyday streets of some city or other.

Pessoa, in a note on how to organize
The Book of Disquiet
(in Appendix III), considered publishing some of the passages with titles in a separate volume. The titled texts included in this section all date from the 1910s and have been ordered alphabetically. Roman numerals have been used to distinguish among the separate fragments that Pessoa left for certain texts, such as ‘Advice to Unhappily Married Women’.

A
DVICE TO
U
NHAPPILY
M
ARRIED
W
OMEN
(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.

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.