The Book of Disquiet

Há semanas que adio escrever sobre este livro. Que livro é este? Livro do Desassossego, inacabado, não publicado, amontoado de papéis que fazem o sentido que fazem, mesmo quando não fazem sentido. No desassossego de ler o desassossego de Pessoa, são tantas as impressões, tantas as contradições, tantos os princípios, esboços, retalhos que, no final, sobra o quê? Desassossego.

Lido uma vez, ao fechar a última página (qualquer que seja), descobre-se que o livro uma vez aberto jamais pode ser fechado. Do desassossego de ler, o desassossego de ali ter de retornar.

Há semanas que adio escrever sobre este livro. Mais semanas adiarei, até quando tiver novamente lido—se bem lido algum dia ficar. Agora sou também eu desassossego.

The book of the crossroads, of the synapse. Here are revealed the sacred mysteries of tedium. Within I have found my black mirror, the echoed song I drown in. Balm of nepenthe in cheap binding! - the gospel to be mumbled at my baptismal or requiem Mass. And last, but not least, the cenotaph of the voice I never found, of dreams strangled as they slid from the womb.

The Book of Disquiet should be read slowly and thoughtfully, savored and sipped like fine wine. It’s a groundbreaking work of Modernist experimentation that consists of a collection of writings found on disorganized scraps of paper in a chest found in the author’s home after his death. These scraps were assembled into a book for the first time in the 1960s. Pessoa, who was Portuguese, wrote the segments over the course of the last twenty years of his life, which ended in 1935.

Pessoa invented multiple personas for himself that he called heteronyms, and each of his novels or collections of poetry was written from the perspective of an alter ego. He essentially invented multiple authors and wrote from their perspective. It’s a show more distinct approach from having a character narrate a novel, especially when it comes to writing a collection of poetry, but even in this “novel” because there is no plot to speak of, only an internal landscape. Pessoa makes no effort to distinguish his own critique of the “author’s opinions,” he merely embodies them. In other words, there is no authorial distance, no “unreliable narrator” theme, there is only the narrator. It is as if Pessoa had a multiple personality disorder in artistic form. The collection of writings in this book are measures of the interior life of one Bernardo Soares, which Pessoa described as being a “mutilated version” of himself, but perhaps the closest to his own beliefs of all his heteronyms. He describes Soares as rather like “himself minus the affection.”

Indeed, Soares comes across as so purely intellectual (although he does have the occasional overwhelming emotional response to small occurrences) that he is rather distant and cold—completely self-absorbed and narcissistic, in fact. Soares lives a life that is almost entirely metaphysical. In one of the 276 segments in the book, he refers to this collection as a “book of disconnected impressions.” Some might say that this isn’t a novel! But in the case of what is important to Soares (or to Pessoa), intellectual thought is apparently the only process that sustains his life. It is the story of his life, which was very little but intellectual.

We get glimpses of this persona at work, as an accountant poring over ledgers (which is what Pessoa did as well), and walking the streets of Lisbon, but for the most part, nothing ever happens. Soares lives a life only in his mind and in his daydreams. He is scared and reluctant to say hello or even shake hands with others. It is too shocking, too much for him. Much like Proust who wrote an entire series of book triggered by the taste of a single Madeleine cookie, Soares believes that an artist must be able to wring the greatest emotional effect out of the smallest incidents. So why write of large incidents when small ones suffice?

What subjects does Soares ponder as we make our way through this book? What is the book about? Walking and weather. Fame and ambition, rain and dreams. Banality, the banality of existence. Change or the lack there of. Dreams, especially dreams. Work. God. Writing and art. Identity and being.

At times he can seem quite humble, or more precisely, assured of his own inadequacy and contemptuous of himself, believing that everything he writes is worthless and a failure, railing at his own—and by proxy, every writers’—inability to truly represent ideas or thoughts in words (this being quite reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s view that language mediates our understanding of reality). Yet other times he can seem utterly arrogant in his narcissism. Other people are merely props for his internal dreams and thinking, and in fact he boldly declares at one point, “… of what importance is to me what life is to other people?” Because, he would say, we can only live life from our own perspective and to attempt “empathy” is a delusion. Other people aren’t even real to any of us—except as dreams.* Sometimes this seems almost Buddhist—we are dreaming life and because all is change, nothing is real and all there is is nothing. “The self is nothing more than all it is thinking in the moment.” Other times, it comes across as clearly Nietzschean, which would seem close to Pessoa's own ideology because he was a royalist of sorts. Soares believes that humans want to be enslaved not free. He has certain fascist tendencies that peek through his primarily apolitical musings. For example, he declares himself both anti-revolutionary and anti-reformist. Much like Nietzsche who sought to create amoral übermen, he is anti-social and believes that pursuing matters of social justice are not only a waste of time, but also a false presumption of pride and ambition in the self, to shape society. Furthermore, such actions support the premise that other people are “real” when in fact they are only dreams.** And then on the flipside of this, humans are unimportant and vulgar animals anyway: "Life disgusts me."

When he talks about work, he seems to say that work (not artist work, but paid commercial work) is an opportunity to become nothing—a mere tool, a non-thing—and to Soares, this is good, this is the enslavement that people want. The more the self can vanish as meaningless, the better. He criticizes ambition to “do something better” as pure vanity.

How can I give this book four stars when there are such disagreeable elements? Well, firstly, one doesn’t have to agree with everything in a book philosophically to find it a great book. Sometimes, finding a point of view that one can disagree with is just as valuable. And secondarily, he spends most of the book pondering apolitical questions of the nature of perception, emotion, and identity revealing brilliant bon mots that remind me of Montaigne such as, “There is nothing that shows poverty of mind more quickly than not knowing how to be witty except at the expense of others.” Admittedly, I did feel at times as though I were slogging through an ambiguous fog that didn’t quite make sense, but then I would come to a burst of insight like a spotlight that illuminates the way. In the end, these insights (whether they be about life in general, or whether they gave me insights into certain types of people with tendencies like the narrator), were often profound enough to elevate this book to quite a high status.

All in all, this book will only appeal to those readers comfortable with deep thoughts lacking a plot, and willing to persevere, but the rewards can be great.

*I counter this by noting that if everything is a dream and everyone is a dream then all that matters is dreams and empathy for dreams is just as valid as non-empathy for dreams.

**It’s important to recognize that someone is always shaping society—those who are already in power. Therefore, in fact, passively supporting the status quo is just as much a political action as resisting the status quo. It’s merely the path of least resistance…that is, until your freedom or means of self-survival are stake. show less

You'll admit I'm sure that many do indeed adopt nihilism/inner 'emptiness'/void gazing/ennui -- Motorcycle Emptiness for short -- as a social pose, as a way of attracting chums, sexual and otherwise. And this will of course continue no matter how many read Wallace or Lee Rourke or this here little chat.

So what I'm really driving at is this: what's the point -- literally; I'd really like to know -- of fiction (or art of any kind) that gazes into the void *and then keeps gazing*? Of what use is void-gazing writing to some impressionable victims? Let's not forget that Nietzsche is *not* recommending an overlong gaze into the abyss ('lest it also gaze into you'). And let's never forget that although Hamlet may peak with 'To be or not to show more be...' it does not *end* there.

Pessoa had a grand old time. Got through a bottle of wine most evenings, had a cushy civil service job where he was allowed to spend most of the time working on his private projects. He was friends with Aleister Crowley and I can only speculate about what they must have got up to. Honestly, we're talking about one of the world's great artists here! Too few know him outside of the Lusophone world. Surely after 100 years or so we can ready him safely enough.

It is not the glamour of ennui/emptiness that interests me; so the tears I find beautiful are those tears that Pessoa wrote onto the page - and those that were left behind in his trunk - and those he chose to ignore. I am interested in the beauty he saw in his mundane life. I am interested Pessoa's own intellectual sadness, yes. Not the actuality of it. How could anyone find despair beautiful?

Now, the 'meaninglessness' in Literature that interests me is something special: those voids, facades, created by the author. The fact that everything is lost; Blanchot hammering home the truism that once a writer has put pen to paper s/he has failed. Pessoa seemed, to me at least, fully aware that the very act of writing (not what is written) is meaningless, an illusion - hence his multitudinous personalities. For me the beauty I find in writing isn't necessarily what I read on the page, it's everything that is left, consciously or unconsciously, behind. For me the truth is never written. Nor can it ever be. Isn't that the epitome of all that is beautiful in Literature, yes?

I really don't think Pessoa is deconstructing Literature, although I feel he's revealing its translucency via playing with it's assumed rules, but it's a thorny one; on one level I'd argue that a writer is responsible only to themselves; however, I'd also argue that that self is the whole person, an adult with a full range of responsibility in the world. As such, the artist (writer) is responsible for looking squarely at the world and at their own responses to that world and for then making art that is true to what they see and that interrogates their responses. Not art that is hip, or art that will please an imagined readership, but art that is, on some fundamental level, true. The big problem is when a specific "stance" towards the world comes to be seen as the sole valid "artistic" position; when the would-be writer insists on being true to their idea of what art "should" be rather than accepting the responsibility. Worse still, they may decide that the stance they have adopted (which is, in effect, how they have chosen to respond to the world) is beyond question *because* it is "artistic".

So, the artist (writer) is responsible to her/him self only, but the whole self, the person who has friends and family who the would like to be happy, who requires clean air and wholesome food and a roof over their head, who has responsibilities to themselves and others, and who is always open to the notion that they could be wrong. Art (writing) that lives up to this responsibility (as opposed to looking for an audience or trying to be hip, for instance) is what I believe in.

Bottom-line: Pessoa wrote for himself, and, yes, heteronyms are irresponsible and lead to madness. Where's Ovid and Yeats by the way? show less

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 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 show more 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

Finalmente, terminei o livro que comecei quando comecei a longa jornada de imigração, depois de longos dois meses digerindo o tijolo intrincado de poemas e pensamentos de Fernando Pessoa. Foi a melhor escolha possível para ler num período de tanta mudança? Em certo sentido, com certeza não, mas dada a natureza não linear ou estruturada do texto, talvez fosse exatamente o que eu precisava. De fato, eu confirmei enquanto escrevia isso que ninguém sabe muito bem como diabos era pra ser o livro e sua organização, e esse debate rola até hoje dentro dos estudiosos pessoanos. Colocando em miúdos, isso é quase que um diário com mais estrutura, e dá pra sentir que mesmo encarnando seus heterônimos, é tudo muito real, muito do show more coração. O livro é confuso, e alguns trechos expressam sentimentos confusos e contraditórios entre si mas ainda assim eu não duvido que é a mesma pessoa sentindo ambas as coisas, em momentos diferentes. Como ele mesmo coloca, no 53: “Tenho as opiniões mais desencontradas, as crenças mais diversas. É que nunca penso, nem fallo, nem ajo… Pensa, age, falla por mim sempre um sonho qualquér meu [...] De meu, só sinto uma incapacidade enorme [...] Nunca aprendi a existir.”
Um tema muito comum nos fragmentos é a ideia de que agir, viver em si, não vale a pena, e que sonhar, imaginar, é muito mais rico e é o que efetivamente o autor tenta fazer… Ele enfatiza que basicamente até tem amigos, mas não sente muito por eles, não quer sentir, etc. Em certo sentido, a postura dele é quase solipsista: os outros até existem, mas só deles partilharem duma sensação que ele teve, ele sente inveja, e para ele basta ele mesmo, pois como ele coloca no trecho 65: “Porisso, conheço-me inteiramente, e, atravez de conhecer-me inteiramente, conheço inteiramente a humanidade toda.” Só que ao mesmo tempo, em alguns trechos, ele chega a admitir que isso na verdade é só ele racionalizando o fato de que ele é tímido e esquisito. Que bagulho bom, sério. No fim, é um diário de um gênio deprimido e torturado.
Se liga nesse homem isolado, trecho 56 (Maximas): “[...] Todo o interesse alheio por nós é uma indelicadeza grave. O que livra a vulgar saudação – como está? – de ser uma indesculpável grosseria é o ser ella em geral absolutamente ôca e insincera. - Amar é cansar-se de estar só: é uma cobardia, portanto, e uma traição a nós-próprios. (Importa soberanamente que não amemos). - Dar bons conselhos é não respeitar a faculdade de errar que Deus deu aos outros.”
E aqui ele sendo 100% protagonista de anime que não tem amigos, em 76: “Passo por uma rua e estou vendo na face dos transeuntes não a expressão que elles realmente teem, mas a expressão que teriam para comigo se soubessem a minha vida, [..] a ridicula e timida anormalidade da minha alma. [...] Caminho entre fantasmas inimigos que a minha imaginação doente imaginou e localizou em pessoas reaes. Tudo me esbofeteia e escarnece.”
Outro sentimento muito interessante que ele levanta e com qual simpatizei muito, em 95: “É sempre com uma commoção exaggerada que abandono qualquér cousa. O pobre quarto-alugado onde passei uns mezes, a mesa do hotel de provincia onde passei seis dias [...] as cousas pequenas da vida, quando as abandono e penso, com toda a sensibilidade dos meus nervos, que nunca mais as verei e as terei, pelo menos n’aquelle preciso e exacto momento, doem-me metaphysicamente.”
Um dia desse, durante o longo parto que foi a leitura desse livro, eu acabei lendo algo bem doido do Adorno que falava sobre como a raiva na verdade é uma espécie de subproduto da esperança, e meio que você fica puto quando você espera que as coisas sejam de uma maneira e isso não se concretiza. E isso se relaciona com a visão dele que o Walt Disney era o cara mais perigoso dos EUA, por que vendia algo que te consolava e anestesiava dessa raiva, dessa esperança. E isso se relaciona pra caralho com 172: “Tenho mais pena dos que sonham o provavel, o legitimo e o proximo, do que dos que devaneiam sobre o longinquo e o estranho. Os que sonham grandemente, ou são doidos e acreditam no que sonham e são felizes, ou são devaneadores simples, para quem o devaneio é uma musica da alma, que os embala sem lhes dizer nada. Mas o que sonha o possivel tem a possibilidade real da verdadeira desilusao. Não me pode pesar muito o não ter conseguido ser imperador romano, mas pode doer-me o nunca ter sequer fallado á costureira que [...] volta sempre a esquina da direita.”
É impressionante que basicamente a minha vida virou a esquina sob o olhar atento de Pessoa, parando para pensar agora. Eu comecei esse livro desempregado e incerto, em Lisboa, mudei de país, passei por um sem número de crises e reflexões e o terminei mais velho, sábio e com um emprego, tocando minha vida.
Voltando aos trilhos, se liga no 205 e como ele claramente mascara o desprezo pela própria vida com desprezo pelos outros: “Irrita-me a felicidade de todos estes homens que não sabem que são infelizes. A sua vida humana é cheia de tudo quanto constituiria uma serie de angustias para uma sensibilidade verdadeira. Mas, como a sua verdadeira vida é vegetativa, o que sofrem passa por elles sem lhes tocar na alma [...] Por isto, comtudo, os amo a todos. Meus queridos vegetaes!”
Outro trecho, esse não sei onde fica, que lida muito com o estranho fenômeno que é dar-se conta de que existimos num mar de seres igualmente conscientes e que portanto nos notam:
“Perco-me, [...], numa imaginação futil de que especie de gente serei para os que me vêem, como é a minha voz, que typo de figura deixo escripta na memoria involuntaria dos outro [...] Não consegui nunca ver-me de fora. Não ha espelho que nos dê a nós como fóras, porque não ha espelho que nos tire de nós mesmos. Era precisa outra alma [...] Se eu fosse actor prolongado de cinema, ou gravasse em discos audiveis a minha voz alta, estou certo que do mesmo modo ficaria longe de saber o que sou do lado de lá, pois [...] estou sempre aqui dentro, na quinta de muros altos da minha consciencia de mim.”
Esse aqui também é brabo:
“Uma das minhas preoccupações constantes é o compreender como é que outra gente existe, como é que ha almas que não sejam a minha, consciencias extranhas à minha consciencia o que, por ser consciencia, me parece ser a unica. Comprehendo bem que o homem que está deante de mim, e me falla com palavras eguais às minhas, e me fez gestos que são como eu faço ou poderia fazer, seja de algum modo meu similhante. [...] Ninguem, supponho, admitte verdadeiramente a existencia real de outra pessoa. Pode conceder que essa pessoa seja viva, que sinta e pense como elle; mas haverá sempre um elemento anonymo de differença, uma desvantagem materializada.”
E similarmente, mas agora sob o foco de dar-se conta de si próprio em 226:
“De repente [...] ergo a cabeça, da minha vida anonyma, para o conhecimento claro de como existo. E vejo que tudo quanto tenho feito, tudo quanto tenho pensado, tudo quanto tenho sido, é uma especie de engano e de loucura. Maravilho-me do que consegui não ver. Extranho quanto fui do que vejo que afinal não sou. [...] noto, com um pasmo metaphysico, como todos os meus gestos mais certos, as minhas ideias mais claras, e os meus propositos mais logicos, não foram, afinal, mais que bebedeira nata, loucura natural, grande desconhecimento. Nem sequer representei. Representaram-me. Fui, não o actor, mas os gestos d’elle.”
E também:
“Vem-me, então, um terror sarcastico da vida, um desalento que passa os limites da minha individualidade consciente. Sei que fui erro e descaminho, que nunca vivi, que existi sòmente porque enchi tempo com consciencia e pensamento. [...] É tam difficil descrever o que se sente quando se sente que realmente se existe, e que a alma é uma entidade real, que não sei quaes são as palavras humanas com que possa defini-lo.”
Ou por fim:
“Tudo se me evapora. A minha vida inteira, as minhas recordações, a minha imaginação e o que contém, a minha personali dade, tudo se me evapora. Continuamente sinto que fui outro. que senti outro, que pensei outro. Aquillo a que assisto é um espectaculo com outro scenario. E aquillo a que assisto sou eu.”
E como não me identificaria com o mote da minha vida, que é dormir pouco, estar sempre se arrastando:
“Depois de uma noite mal dormida, toda a gente não gosta de nós. O somno ido levou consigo qualquer coisa que nos tornava humanos. Ha uma irritação latente connosco, parece, no mesmo ar inorganico que nos cerca.”
Sobre a insonia:
“Quem quizesse fazer um catalogo de monstros, não teria mais que photographar em palavras aquellas coisas que a noite traz ás almas somnolentas que não conseguem dormir. Essas coisas teem toda a incoherencia do sonho sem a desculpa incognita de se estar dormindo. Pairam como morcegos sobre a passividade da alma, ou vampiros que suguem o sangue da submissão.”
Sobre arte, e, claro, a sensação de ser incompreendido por mais que se tente:
“A arte consiste em fazer os outros sentir o que nós sentimos, em os libertar d'elles mesmos, propondo-lhes a nossa perso nalidade para especial libertação. O que sinto, na verdadeira substancia em que o sinto, é absolutamente incommunicavel; e quanto mais profundamente o sinto, tanto mais incommunicavel é. Para que eu, pois, possa transmittir a outrem o que sinto, tenho isto é, que que traduzir os meus sentimentos na linguagem d'elle, dizer taes coisas como sendo as que eu sinto, que elle, lendo-as, sinta exactamente o que eu senti. E como este outrem é, por hypothese de arte, não esta ou aquella pessoa, mas toda a gente, isto é, aquella pessoa que é commum a todas as pessoas, o que, afinal, tenho que fazer é converter os meus sentimentos num sentimento humano typico, ainda que pervertendo a ver dadeira natureza d'aquillo que senti.”
Algo que me tocou muito (ok, tudo me tocou bastante a julgar pelo número de frases que pesquei da obra) foi sobre esse apego que criamos com os objetos e situações que estão em nossa vida mesmo que por um breve átimo.
“Cada coisa que foi nossa, ainda que só pelos accidentes do convivio ou da visão, porque foi nossa se torna nós. O que se par tiu hoje, pois, para uma terra gallega que ignoro, não foi, para mim, o moço do escriptorio: foi uma parte vital, porque visual e humana, da substancia da minha vida. Fui hoje diminuido. Já não sou bem o mesmo. O moço do escriptorio foi-se embora.”
E em meus piores momentos, nunca pude descrever com tamanha exatidão o que é a estafa que me acomete: “Acontece-me ás vezes, e sempre que acontece e quasi de repente, surgir-me no meio das sensações um cansaço tam terrivel da vida que não ha sequer hypothese de acto com que dominal-o. Para o remediar o suicidio parece incerto, a morte, mesmo supposta a inconsciencia, ainda pouco. É um cansaço que ambiciona, não o deixar de existir o que pode ser ou pode não ser possivel -, mas uma coisa muito mais horrorosa e profunda, o deixar de sequer ter existido, o que não ha maneira de poder ser.”
A dor, a disputa entre a inteligência, o sentimento e o corpo, também o perturbavam: “Os males da intelligencia, infelizmente, doem menos que os do sentimento, e os do sentimento, infelizmente, menos que os do corpo. Digo "infelizmente" porque a dignidade humana exigi ria o avesso. Não ha sensação angustiada do mysterio que possa doer como o amor, o ciume, a saudade, que possa suffocar como o medo physico intenso, que possa transformar como a colera ou a ambição. Mas tambem nenhuma dor das que esfacelam a alma consegue ser tam realmente dor como a dor de dentes, ou a das colicas, ou (supponho) a dor de parto.”

E é isso. Não tem como descrever um livro desse sem necessariamente estar mutilando-o, e isso aqui é definitivamente um livro que poucos vão ler mas quem decidir fazê-lo vai sair levemente mudado, no mínimo. show less

A collection of short prose pieces — a kind of diary — from the thirties, which Pessoa attributes to one of his heteronyms, "Bernardo Soares", supposedly a somewhat antisocial, depressed bookkeeper in an import/export business in Lisbon's Baixa. Soares reflects paradoxically on the benefits of not engaging with real life, social interactions, love, travel, the literary world, and all the rest: he steadfastly maintains that it's far more satisfying to live your life in dreams and imagination; better to have boredom to dream about escaping from than to achieve something that leaves you disappointed. Rather a negative position, but Soares argues it with a great deal of humour and irony, and this is a book with a quotable sentence or show more two on every page. Indeed, its supreme quotability is perhaps what undermines it a bit: it can feel at times as though you are reading a tear-off calendar. The solution seems to be to take it slowly, almost as if it were actually a calendar.

Like much of Pessoa's work, this was published posthumously, so there are a lot of arguments about which parts really belong to the book, which are meant to be by Soares and which by Pessoa, and so on, and various rival English translations based on different editions of the original text. You can have endless fun with that, if you want... show less