The Book of Disquiet (71 page)

I love with my gaze, and not even with fantasy. Because there’s nothing I fantasize about the figure that captivates me. I don’t imagine myself linked to it in any other way, because my decorative love has no psychological depth. I’m not interested in knowing the identity, activities or opinions of the human creature whose outward appearance I see.

The vast succession of persons and things that make up the world is for me an endless gallery of paintings, whose inner dimension doesn’t interest me. It doesn’t interest me, because the soul is monotonous and
always the same in everybody; only its personal manifestations change, and the best part of the soul spills over into dreams, behaviour and gestures, thereby entering the painting which captivates me and in which I see faces that are faithful to my affection.

A human creature, as far as I’m concerned, has no soul. The soul is his own affair.

It is thus in pure vision that I experience the animated exterior of things and beings, indifferent – like a god from another world – to their spirit content. I delve into their being by exploring the surface; when I want depth, I look for it in myself and in my concept of things.

What can I gain from personal acquaintance with people I love merely as décor? Not disillusion, since I harbour no fantasies and love only their appearance, which won’t be affected by their stupidity or mediocrity; I hoped for nothing from them but their appearance, which was already there and which persists. But personal acquaintance is harmful because it’s useless; materially useless things are always harmful. What’s the point of knowing the person’s name? And yet it’s inevitably the first thing I’m told when we’re introduced.

Personal acquaintance should also mean the freedom to contemplate, which is my way of loving. But we can’t freely regard or contemplate someone we know personally.

From the artist’s viewpoint, anything extra counts as a deficit, for it interferes with and thus diminishes the desired effect.

My natural destiny is to be a visual lover of nature’s shapes and forms, an objectifier of dreams, a passionate and indefinite contemplator of appearances and the manifestations of things.....

It’s not a case of what psychiatrists call psychic onanism, nor is it what they term erotomania. I don’t fantasize, as in psychic onanism; I don’t imagine myself as a carnal lover or even as a casual friend of the person I gaze at and remember. Nor, as in erotomania, do I idealize and remove the person from the concretely aesthetic sphere; I don’t think about or desire anything more from the person than what I receive from my eyes and from the pure, direct memory of what my eyes have seen.

And I avoid spinning webs of fantasy around the figures I contemplate to entertain myself. I see them, and their value for me consists only in their being seen. Anything I might add to them would only diminish them, for it would diminish their ‘visibility’.

Whatever I might fantasize about them would instantly hit me with its obvious falseness; and while dreamed things please me, false things disgust me. I’m enchanted by pure dreams, those which have no relation to reality nor even any point of contact with it. But imperfect dreams, which have their basis in life, fill me with loathing, or would fill me with loathing were I to indulge in them.

I see humanity as a vast decorative motif that lives through our eyes and ears, as well as through psychological emotion. All I want from life is to observe humanity. All I want from myself is to observe life.

I’m like a being from another existence who passes, with a certain amount of interest, through this one. I’m alien to it in every way. There’s a kind of glass sheet between me and it. I want the glass to be perfectly clear, so that it will in no way hinder my examination of what’s behind it, but I always want the glass.

For every scientifically minded spirit, to see in something more than what’s there is to see it less. Materially adding to it spiritually diminishes it.

This attitude is no doubt responsible for my aversion to museums. The only museum for me is the whole of life, in which the picture is always absolutely accurate, with any inaccuracy being due to the spectator’s imperfection. I do what I can to reduce that imperfection, and if I can’t do anything, then I rest content with the way it is, because, like everything else, it can’t be any other way.

It was at a vaguely autumnal twilight hour that I set out on the voyage I never made.

The sky, as I impossibly remember, was tinged by a purplish remnant of sad gold, and the clear, agonizing line of the hills was wrapped by a deathly-coloured glow that penetrated and softened the accuracy of
its contours. On the other side of the ship (the night was colder and farther advanced under that side of the deck awning) lay the open ocean, trembling all the way out to where the eastern horizon was growing sad and where a darker air, placing shadows of early night on the obscure liquid line of the sea’s visible limit, hovered like haze on a hot day.

The sea, I remember, had shadowy hues mixed in with wavy patches of faint light – and it was all mysterious like a sad idea in a happy hour, portending I don’t know what.

I didn’t set out from any port I knew. Even today I don’t know what port it was, for I’ve still never been there. And besides, the ritual purpose of my journey was to go in search of non-existent ports – ports that would be merely a putting-in at ports; forgotten inlets of rivers, straits running through irreproachably unreal cities. You will doubtless think, on reading me, that my words are absurd. That’s because you’ve never journeyed like I have.

I set out? I wouldn’t swear to you that I set out. I found myself in other lands, in other ports, and I passed through cities that were not the one I started from, which, like all the others, was no city at all. I can’t swear to you that it was I who set out and not the landscape, that it was I who visited other lands and not they that visited me. Not knowing what life is, nor if I’m the one living it rather than it living me (whatever the hollow verb ‘live’ may mean), I’m not about to swear anything.

I made a voyage. I presume it’s not necessary to explain that my voyage didn’t last for months or for days or for any other quantity of measurable time. I journeyed in time, to be sure, but not on this side of time, which we count by hours, days and months. My voyage took place on the other side of time, where it cannot be counted or measured but where it nevertheless flows, and it would seem to be faster than the time that has lived us. You are no doubt asking me, within yourselves, what meaning these sentences have. Don’t make that mistake. Say goodbye to the childish error of asking words and things what they mean. Nothing means anything.

On what ship did I make this voyage? On the steamer
Whichever
. You laugh. Me too, and perhaps at you. How do you (or even I) know that I’m not writing symbols for the gods alone to understand?

No matter. I set out at twilight. In my ears I can still hear the clanging iron of the anchor being pulled up. In the corner of my memory’s eye I can still see the arms of the crane – which some hours before sailing had tortured my vision with countless crates and barrels – slowly moving until at last they enter their position of rest. These crates and barrels, secured by a chain, would suddenly appear over the gunwale, after first hitting against it and making a scraping sound; then, swaying, they were pushed along to the hatchway, where they abruptly descended....., until with a dull wooden, crashing thud they arrived at some invisible place in the hold. From below came the sound of them being untied, and then the chain would rise up by itself, jingling, and everything would start over in seeming futility.

Why am I telling you this? Because it’s absurd to be telling you this, after having said I would talk about my voyages.

I visited New Europes and was greeted by different Constantinoples as I sailed into the ports of pseudo-Bosporuses. It baffles you that I sailed in? You read me right. The steamer in which I set out came into port as a sailboat […]. That’s impossible, you say. That’s why it happened to me.

Other steamboats brought us news of imaginary wars in impossible Indias. And when we heard about those lands, we felt an annoying nostalgia for our own land, but only, of course, because it was no land at all.*

I hide behind the door, so that Reality won’t see me when it enters. I hide under the table, from where I can jump out and give Possibility a scare. Thus I cast off, like the two arms of an embrace, the two huge tediums that squeeze me – the tedium of being able to live only the Real, and the tedium of being able to conceive only the Possible.

In this way I triumph over all reality. You say my triumphs are castles of sand?… And what divine substance constitutes the castles which are not of sand?

How do you know that my kind of voyaging doesn’t rejuvenate me in some obscure way?

Child of absurdity, I relive my early years, playing with ideas of
things as with toy soldiers, which in my infant hands did things that went against the very notion of a soldier.

Drunk on errors, for a little while I stray and quit feeling myself live.

Shipwrecks? No, I never suffered any. But I have the impression that I shipwrecked all my voyages, and that my salvation lay in interspaces of unconsciousness.

Hazy dreams, blurry lights, confused landscapes – that’s all that remains in my soul from all the travelling I did.

I have the impression that I’ve known hours of every colour, loves of every flavour, yearnings of every size. Throughout my life I lived to excess, and I was never enough for myself, not even in my dreams.

I must explain to you that I really did travel. But everything seems to indicate that I travelled without living. From one end to the other, from north to south and from east to west, I bore the weariness of having had a past, the disquiet of living the present, and the tedium of having to have a future. But I strive so hard that I remain completely in the present, killing inside me both past and future.

I strolled along the banks of rivers whose names I suddenly realized I didn’t know. At the tables of cafés in foreign cities, it would dawn on me that everything had a hazy, dreamy air about it. Sometimes I even wondered if I weren’t still seated at the table of our old house, staring into space and dazed by dreams! I can’t be sure that this isn’t actually the case, that I’m not still there, that all of this – including this conversation with you – isn’t a pure sham. Who are you anyway? The equally absurd fact is that you can’t explain…

To sail without ever landing doesn’t have a landing-place. To never arrive implies never arriving ever.

As explained in the Introduction, Vicente Guedes was for many years the fictional author of
The Book of Disquiet,
until he was replaced by (and absorbed into) Bernardo Soares. Perhaps to avoid confusion, Pessoa excluded the following three passages from the large envelope where he left material for
Disquiet.

It was entirely by chance that I got to know Vicente Guedes. We often ate at the same quiet, inexpensive restaurant. Since we knew each other by sight, we naturally began to exchange silent greetings. One day we happened to be seated at the same table and we traded several remarks. A conversation ensued. We began to meet there every day, both for lunch and dinner. Sometimes we would leave together after dinner and stroll around for a while, talking.

Vicente Guedes endured his utterly grey life with the indifference of a master. A stoicism for the weak formed the basis of his entire mental outlook.

His natural temperament had condemned him to have every conceivable yearning; his destiny had led him to give them all up. I’ve never known another soul that startled me more. Without any kind of asceticism to spur him on, this man had renounced all the goals to which his nature had predisposed him. Born to be ambitious, he took languid pleasure in having no ambition at all.

… this gentle book.

This is all that remains and will remain of one of the most subtly passive souls and one of the purest, most profligate dreamers that the world has ever known. I doubt that any outwardly human creature has lived their consciousness of self in a more complex fashion. A dandy in spirit, he promenaded the art of dreaming through the randomness of existing.

This book is the autobiography of a man who never existed.*

No one knows who Vicente Guedes was or what he did or.....

This book is not by him: it is him. But let us always remember that, behind whatever these pages tell us, mystery slithers in the shadows.

For Vicente Guedes, to be conscious of himself was an art and a morality; to dream was a religion.

He was the definitive creator of inner aristocracy – that posture of soul which most resembles the bodily posture of a full-fledged aristocrat.

The anguish of a man afflicted by life’s tedium on the terrace of his opulent villa is one thing; quite another is the anguish of someone like me, who must contemplate the scenery from my fourth-floor rented room in downtown Lisbon, unable to forget that I’m an assistant bookkeeper.

‘Tout notaire a rêvé des sultanes’*…

Every time I’m obliged by some official act to state my profession, I smile to myself at the irony of the undeserved ridicule when I declare ‘Office clerk’ and no one finds it all strange. I don’t know how it got there, but that’s how my name appears in the
Professional Register
.