Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935)

It's near impossible to review a book that has sat by the bedside for a decade and read in short bursts - yet it comes with big doses of ideas. When I would read a paragraph (aphorism, insight, what are these?) they console the mind that has to live (at times reluctantly) inside a body within the physical world. If only all things were mind I think while reading Pessoa. He is a writer who almost exists outside human form in a state of thought himself; perhaps he continues to exist as a set show more of ideas, the way he existed as a set of heteronyms, or personas attempting to escape the constraints of body. Expressing what I think of this book is pointless, reading it - even piecemeal - is essential.

Addit 18-1-2021

A few thoughts more about Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet

Words carry our thoughts. Some thoughts defy understanding. They are so ambiguous, so disharmonious, so disquieting that they need their own interpreter to the world beyond. So we need Fernando Pessoa, who gave us the most thorough examination of particular thoughts that rarely find expression, who found the words regardless, and placed them in the Book of Disquiet. And we almost didn’t have his works, mostly found in a trunk after his death and reassembled by readers who understood his poetics and his thoughts. Less 'book'; more collection of estray documents and thoughts. [the word 'estray' comes from the world of archiving. A document out of place, misplaced, not fitting the location which created it. It troubles and challenges the archivist to find a home, or examine it more closely. Pessoa often comes across as the epitome of the not quite belonging in this world.]

He himself wondered if these words in a trunk might ever happen. Possibility and impossibility are opposites, yet to Pessoa they breathe in a new place in the world of ideas:

It sometimes occurs to me with sad delight, that if one day (in a future to which I won't belong) the sentences I write are read and admired, then at last I’ll have my own kin, people who ‘understand’ me, my true family in which to be born and loved. But far from being born to it, I’ll have already died long ago.

A Pessoa idea captures both hope, and the despair of not hoping. He calls it sad delight: opposites. That is one Pessoa idea that exists because he gave it hope. Here is another one of his between places:

Before summer ends and autumn arrives, in the warm interim when the air weighs heavy and the colours dim, the late afternoons wear an almost tangible robe of imitation glory.

‘Imitation glory’?.

What is that but an imagined place, somewhere in the ‘warm interim’. Perhaps it’s just the weather in Portugal, the Mediterranean, perhaps it’s only of place. But in this place:

"going and stopping are the same impossible thing”

“Hope and doubt are equally cold and grey”

“I’m a shelf of empty jars”

“And yet what nostalgia for the future”*

How can the future be a place of nostalgia, hope and doubt equal, except in a poetic universe where the study of a single incomprehensible emotional location is possible? Like the quest for the sensation of death:

the physical sensation of ceasing to live**

I think of Emily Dickinson, who also sought indefinable states of being, some in-betweens of human understanding:

I heard a fly buzz - when I died -
The stillness in the room
was like the stillness in the air -
Between the heaves of storm

Or

After great pain, a formal feeling comes

These are the locations poets and writers pursue, that most of us give only passing consideration to and move on. Poets, though, are in for the long haul to come up with lines like:

I’m dazed by a sarcastic terror of life, a despondency that exceeds the limits of my conscious being. I realise that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only insomuch as I filled time with consciousness and thought

This is what we need poets and writers for, to tease out what we ignore - or stopped thinking about - as adults. And perhaps what preoccupied many of us as children, too. I can’t help thinking of a child bored in their thought on a rain sodden day with nothing to do. That boredom turns to thoughts unbound by time and physical necessity. Pessoa at times is that little child that sees the limitless possibility of ideas before the world engulfs him in the practice and routine of programmed life.

Writing, too, is the imagined pastime – if you can imagine writing, you can imagine more than just the imposition of other people’s structures – and worry as you walk down the street that all these people around you might lose those imagined thoughts – so where are all their lost thoughts? Pessoa attempted to gather some of them for us.

That is all writing is, the relentless pursuit of an idea. But an idea in writing can only be a kind of imitation, a copy of an idea. Imperfect:

Everything we do in art or in life is the imperfect copy of what we thought of doing

________________________________

*Much later than Pessoa, I came across this idea of the nostalgia for the future in the ideas of Slavo Zizek the Slovenian philosopher and critic. He wondered what it was about writing about an immediate future dystopia, he was referring to the Handmaid's Tale, but there are others, it seems a bit of a popular genre. He said of such books that the have "A nostalgia for the immediate future". I found that a compelling way to understand a fantasy for proving that you can imagine a dystopian world and expect it to come true.

** compare this to
Death is nothing to us; for the body, when it has been resolved into its elements, has no feeling, and that which has no feeling is nothing to us.
Diogenes Laërtius, Epicurean Principal Doctrines

SEE ALSO:
Saramago’s Life in Death of Ricardo Reis https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2536.The_Year_of_the_Death_of_Ricardo_Reis?f...

Tabucchi’s

Pereira Declares https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/118434.Pereira_Declaresand
and
Requiem https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/118436.Requiem show less

Cartas a Ophélia collects Pessoa's love letters to his hapless once or twice a fiancée. It's really hard--nay, it's impossible--to believe Fernando was in earnest and no wonder the poor girl obviously doubted him (his letters are basically just repetitive protestations that he DOES love her). There's very little evidence that Pessoa was even heterosexual, or sexual at all, so what he needed this tortured and unreal liaison for is anyone's guess. Maybe he fancied having a Dulcinea or show more Beatrice of his own. Maybe it helped with establishing a rep with the machos in Lisbon. Maybe anything. What's clear is that nothing came out of it, that the girl was bewildered by him more than enamoured with him (and who can blame her--he insisted on introducing her to some of his "heteronyms", some of whom didn't even like her!) and that she was well shot of him when the year of their "engagement" ran out.

There's an odd coda when the correspondence takes up again for a while almost ten years later. But nothing happens this time too. show less

The book has got an interesting origin story. Pessoa wrote it in bits and pieces, on scraps of paper, over years. It is the diary of sorts of one of his alter egos, Bernardo Soares, who lives and works in places very similar to Pessoa. The book wasn't published in his lifetime, but instead after his death people collected the scraps, assembled them in the order they felt made sense, and published them. Later, some Pessoa scholars came through, rearranged them and published them again in a show more new order.

No section in the book is more than a few pages long. Some are only a sentence. Soares is an isolated, depressed, contemplative man who is convinced he'll never amount to much. The book is best read as a sort of devotional, I think (or anti-devotional, maybe) - a few pages a day, or opening to a random page and reading the part you're faced with. Under the circumstances of its existence, it can hardly matter if you don't read it in order.

The Portuguese have a word, saudade, which is roughly nostalgia, but really deeper and more profound than that. It implies a sense of loss that goes beyond simple nostalgia - it's possible to feel it for things that aren't gone yet, simply because you know that they will be. Pessoa's writing is full of saudade. He is nostalgic for the world of his dreams, which has never existed and never will. He is nostalgic for the sunset he is watching, because although there will be others, there will never be this one again. He is nostalgic for the childhood he didn't have.

Beautiful, but not to be rushed through. This mind is not one to spend too much time inside.

Recommended for: romantics, city-dwellers, lovers of Lisbon

Quote: "Dawn in the countryside just exists; dawn in the city overflows with promise. One makes you live, the other makes you think. And, along with all the other great unfortunates, I've always believed it better to think than to live." show less

One of those enjoyable, despite (or being more frank, because of) the often melancholic tone of the content, books. Also compulsive, despite the almost complete absence of anything like a plot. I suppose it isn’t for everyone, but those who like Cioran, Leopardi, Ligotti, Eugene Thacker, Osamu Dazai etc will likely enjoy this too. The internal focus and broken stream-of-consciousness seems modernist, although I’m not well read enough in that area to make a good comparison there.

The show more writing is so good (for which some credit must go to the translation) that it's tempting to continually jump to the next entry/fragment, but I made a conscious effort to slow down as so many entries contain so much in so few words that mulling them over is equally rewarding. Almost every one contains the sort of deep insight into this character's internality that would typically be scattered throughout other novels. The kind of thing that is built up to as some great revelation of character or profundity in other works is the basic stuff of the Book of Disquiet. It is fantastically dense with feeling. Spreading out the reading allows a revisiting of Soares over a lengthier period of time, which feels more aligned with the way Pessoa presents him - there are several entries that commence with a lamentation of having been unable to write for weeks or months. There is also much to come back to, one could open the book at a random location and find an interesting passage that stands on its own.

Imagery laden entries are mixed with entries entirely concerned with Soares' internal or dream life. Much of the imagery is seasonal in parts, but it’s debatable whether the book could be seen to track follow the course of a year, given its fragmentary nature.

For me, fragments concerning the perils of overthinking felt particularly relatable. These are juxtaposed with many passages on the futility and imperfection of any action (there’s that Cioran comparison again). A slightly contradictory positive view of procrastination is offered. This kind of occasional use of juxtaposition and oxymoron is achieved well throughout.

I did find that Soares the theistic apologist is far less interesting than Soares the dreamer, or bookkeeper. Another area of weakness for him is love. That said, in all of these areas, I think Pessoa is inviting a deeper reading than simply what Soares writes. show less