The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa E-Book

Fernando Pessoa

• Herausgeber: Lebooks Editora
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa is a deeply introspective and fragmentary work that defies traditional narrative structures, offering instead a mosaic of reflections on identity, solitude, dreams, and the elusive nature of reality. Written under the heteronym Bernardo Soares, the book presents a semi-fictional diary filled with philosophical musings, emotional detachment, and lyrical prose. Pessoa delves into the inner life of his narrator, revealing a world shaped more by thought than by action, where introspection becomes both a refuge and a burden. Since its posthumous publication, The Book of Disquiet has been celebrated for its existential depth and literary innovation. The work challenges readers with its lack of linear plot and its persistent questioning of selfhood and meaning. Pessoa's mastery of paradox and his ability to capture the subtle dissonances of human experience have made this book a cornerstone of modernist literature. Its lasting significance lies in its honest portrayal of inner turmoil and its exploration of consciousness as a fragmented and ever-shifting reality. The Book of Disquiet remains a haunting meditation on the complexities of being, offering readers a mirror to their own uncertainties and inner contradictions.

Leseprobe

Fernando Pessoa

THE BOOK DISQUIET

Original Title:

“Livro do Desassossego”

Contents

INTRODUCTION

THE BOOK DISQUIET

INTRODUCTION

Fernando Pessoa

1888–1935

Fernando Pessoa was a Portuguese poet, writer, and literary critic, regarded as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and a central figure in modernist literature. Born in Lisbon, Portugal, Pessoa is especially known for his use of heteronyms—distinct literary personas with their own biographies, philosophies, and writing styles. His innovative approach to authorship and language has earned him recognition as a visionary whose influence extends far beyond the borders of Portuguese literature.

Early Life and Education

Fernando Pessoa was born into a middle-class family in Lisbon. After the death of his father, his mother remarried a Portuguese consul, and the family moved to Durban, South Africa. There, Pessoa received an English education and became fluent in the language, which profoundly shaped his literary development. He returned to Portugal in 1905 and enrolled at the University of Lisbon, but he soon abandoned formal studies to pursue writing and translation work. Throughout his life, Pessoa supported himself as a freelance translator while dedicating himself to literature.

Career and Contributions

Pessoa’s literary career is defined by the invention of numerous heteronyms, the most famous being Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. Each heteronym had a distinct worldview: Caeiro, a pastoral poet; Reis, a classical stoic; and Campos, a modernist full of energy and angst. Through these personas, Pessoa explored various philosophical and poetic styles, creating a multifaceted body of work that challenges conventional notions of identity and authorship.

Among his most acclaimed works is The Book of Disquiet, written under the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares. This introspective, fragmented narrative blends existential reflection with lyrical prose, offering an intimate portrait of the inner world of a disillusioned Lisbon clerk. Although most of Pessoa's work remained unpublished during his lifetime, he left behind a literary trunk filled with thousands of manuscripts, which scholars and editors have studied and compiled over decades.

Impact and Legacy

Pessoa’s literary contributions revolutionized Portuguese literature and positioned him as a key figure in European modernism. His work embodies the modern individual's fragmented consciousness and explores themes such as identity, solitude, and the search for meaning. Through his heteronyms, Pessoa introduced a new literary dimension, blurring the boundaries between author and character, self and other.

He is often compared to literary giants like James Joyce and T. S. Eliot for his experimental style and philosophical depth. Pessoa's influence can be seen in literature, philosophy, and the arts, and his concept of the divided self has resonated with thinkers and creators around the world.

Fernando Pessoa died in 1935 at the age of 47 from liver complications. At the time of his death, he was not widely recognized outside literary circles in Portugal. However, his posthumous fame grew rapidly as his vast archive was gradually explored and published. Today, Pessoa is celebrated as a foundational figure in modernist literature and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language.

His legacy is preserved in museums, literary festivals, and academic studies worldwide. The richness of his inner universe, his philosophical curiosity, and his pioneering literary techniques continue to captivate readers, securing his place as a timeless voice in world literature.

About the work

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa is a deeply introspective and fragmentary work that defies traditional narrative structures, offering instead a mosaic of reflections on identity, solitude, dreams, and the elusive nature of reality. Written under the heteronym Bernardo Soares, the book presents a semi-fictional diary filled with philosophical musings, emotional detachment, and lyrical prose. Pessoa delves into the inner life of his narrator, revealing a world shaped more by thought than by action, where introspection becomes both a refuge and a burden.

Since its posthumous publication, The Book of Disquiet has been celebrated for its existential depth and literary innovation. The work challenges readers with its lack of linear plot and its persistent questioning of selfhood and meaning. Pessoa’s mastery of paradox and his ability to capture the subtle dissonances of human experience have made this book a cornerstone of modernist literature.

Its lasting significance lies in its honest portrayal of inner turmoil and its exploration of consciousness as a fragmented and ever-shifting reality. The Book of Disquiet remains a haunting meditation on the complexities of being, offering readers a mirror to their own uncertainties and inner contradictions.

THE BOOK DISQUIET

1 [90|

Sometimes I think I will never leave Rua dos Douradorcs. Once written down, that seems to me like eternity.

2[124]

The journey in my head

In the plausible intimacy of approaching evening, as I stand waiting for the stars to begin at the window of this fourth floor room that looks out on the infinite, my dreams move to the rhythm required by long journeys to countries as yet unknown, or to countries that are simply hypothetical or impossible.

3 [81]

Today, during one of those periods of daydreaming which, though devoid of either purpose or dignity, still constitute the greater part of the spiritual substance of my life, I imagined my self free forever of Rua dos Douradores, of my boss Vasques, of Moreira the book-keeper, of all the other employees, the errand boy, the post boy, even the cat. In dreams, that freedom felt to me as if the South Seas had proffered up a gift of marvellous islands as yet undiscovered. Freedom would mean rest, artistic achievement, the intellectual fulfilment of my being.

But suddenly, even as I imagined this (during the brief holiday afforded by my lunch break), a feeling of displeasure erupted into the dream: I would be sad. Yes, I say it quite seriously: I would be sad. For my boss Vasques, Moreira the book-keeper, Borges the cashier, all the lads, the cheery boy who takes the letters to the post office, the errand boy, the friendly cat - they have all become part of my life. I could never leave all that behind without weeping, without realizing, however displeasing the thought, that part of me would remain with them and that losing them would be akin to death.

Moreover, if I left them all tomorrow and discarded this Rua dos Douradores suit of clothes I wear, what else would I do? Because I would have to do something. And what suit would I wear? Because I would have to wear another suit.

We all have a Senhor Vasques; sometimes he’s a tangible human being, sometimes not. In my case he really is called Vasques and he’s a pleasant, healthy chap, a bit brusque at times but he’s no doubledealer. He’s selfish but basically fair, much fairer than many of the great geniuses and many of the human marvels of civilization on both left and right. For many people Vasques takes the form of vanity, a desire for greater wealth, for glory or immortality . . . Personally I prefer to have Vasques as my real life boss since, in times of difficulty, he’s easier to deal with than any abstraction the world has to offer.

The other day a friend, who’s a partner in a prosperous company that does business throughout the country and who considers my salary to be distinctly on the low side, said to me: ‘You’re being exploited, Soares.’ This made me realize that indeed I am; but since it’s the fate of everyone in this life to be exploited, my question would be: is it any worse being exploited by Senhor Vasques and his textile company than by vanity, glory, resentment, envy or the impossible?

Some, the prophets and saints who walk this vacuous world, are exploited by God himself.

And I return to an other’s house, to the spacious office in the Rua dos Douradores, the way some return to their homes. I approach my desk as if it were a bulwark against life. I feel such an overwhelming sense of tenderness that my eyes fill with tears for my books that are in reality the books of other people whose accounts I keep, for the inkwell I use, for Sergio’s stooped shoulders as, not far from me, he sits writing out bills of lading. I feel love for all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love or perhaps too, because even though nothing truly merits the love of any soul, if, out of sentiment, we must give it, I might just as well lavish it on the smallness of an inkwell as on the grand indifference of the stars.

4[114]

With the soul’s equivalent of a wry smile, I calmly confront the prospect that my life will consist of nothing more than being shut up for ever in Rua dos Douradores, in this office, surrounded by these people, I have enough money to buy food and drink, I have somewhere to live and enough free time in which to dream, write -and sleep - what more can I ask of the gods or hope for from Fate?

I had great ambitions and extravagant dreams, but so did the errand boy and the seamstress, for everyone has dreams; the only difference is whether or not we have the strength to fulfil them or a destiny that will fulfil them through us.

When it comes to dreams, I’m no different from the errand boy and the seamstress. The only thing that distinguishes me from them is that I can write. Yes, that’s an activity, a real fact about myself that distinguishes me from them. But in my soul I’m just the same.

I know that there arc islands in the South and grand cosmopolitan passions and [,..]. I’m su re that even if I held the world in my hand, I’d exchange it all for a tram ticket back to Rua dos Douradores.

Perhaps it’s my destiny to remain a book-keeper for ever and for poetry and literature to remain simply butterflies that alight on my head and merely underline my own ridiculousness by their very beauty.

I’ll miss Moreira, but what does missing someone matter compared with a chance for real promotion?

I know that the day I’m made chief book-keeper to Vasques & Co. will be one of the greatest days of my life. I know it with a prescient bitterness and irony but I know it with all the finality that certainty can bring.

5 [91]

Senhor Vasques. I often find myself mesmerized by Senhor Vasques. What does this man represent to me beyond the chance inconvenience of his being master of my time, of the daylight hours of my life? He treats me well, he always talks to me in a friendly enough manner except on the odd occasion when he’s been offhand because of some private worry, but then he was offhand with everyone. So why do I think about him so much? Is he a symbol? A motive force? What is he to me?

Senhor Vasques. I remember him now as I will in the future with the nostalgia I knowl will feel for him then. I’ll be livingquietly in a little house somewhere in the suburbs, enjoying a peaceful existence not writing the book I’m not writing now and, so as to continue not doing so, I will come up with different excuses from the ones I use now to avoid actually confronting myself. Or else I’ll be interned in a poorhouse, content with my utter failure, mingling with the riffraff who believed they were geniuses when in fact they were just beggars with dreams, mixing with the anonymous mass of people who had neither the strength to triumph nor the power to turn their defeats into victories. Wherever I am, I will think nostalgically of my boss Senhor Vasques and the office in Rua dos Douradores, and for me the monotony of my daily life will be like the memory of loves that never came my way and of triumphs that were never to be mine.

Senhor Vasques. I see him from that future perspective as clearly as I see him here today: medium height, thickset, coarse, with his particular limitations and affections, frank and astute, brusque and affable. It isn’t only money that marks him out as a boss, you can see it in his slow, hairy hands marked by plump veins like coloured muscles, his neck, strong but not too thick, and his firm, rosy cheeks above the dark, neatly trimmed beard. I see him, sec the deliberate but energetic gestures, his eyes reflecting from within his thoughts about the world without. I’m troubled if I displease him and my soul is gladdened by his smile, a broad, human smile, warm as the applause of a large crowd.

Perhaps the reason the ordinary, almost vulgar figure of Senhor Vasques so often tangles with my intelligence and distracts me from myself is simply because there’s no one else in my life of greater stature. I think there’s some symbolism in all this. I believe, or almost believe, that somewhere in a distant life this man was something more to me than he is today.

6[155]

Ah, now I understand! Senhor Vasques is Life; Life, monotonous and necessary, commanding and unknowable. This banal man represents the banality of life. On the surface he is everything to me, just as, on the surface, Life is everything to me.

And if the office in the Rua dos Douradores represents Life for me, the second floor room I live in on that same street represents Art. Yes, Art, living on the same street as Life but in a different room; Art, which offers relief from life without actually relieving one of living, and which is as monotonous as life itself but in a different way. Yes, for me Rua dos Douradores embraces the meaning of all things, the resolution of all mysteries, except the existence of mysteries themselves which is something beyond resolution.

7 [63]

I went into the barber’s as I usually do, experiencing the pleasure I always get from being able to enter places known to me without suffering the least distress. My sensitivity to all things new is a constant affliction to me; I only feel safe in places I have been in before.

When I sat down in the chair and the young barber placed a clean, cold linen towel around my neck, it occurred to me to ask after his colleague, a vigorous, older man, who had been ill but who usually worked at the chair to my right. The question arose spontaneously, simply because the place reminded me of him. As fingers busied themselves tucking in the last bit of towel between my neck and my collar, the voice behind the towel and me answered flatly: ‘He died yesterday.’ My irrational good humour died as suddenly as the now eternally absent barber from the chair beside me. My every thought froze. I said nothing.

Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.

The dull old man with dirty gaiters I often used to pass at half past nine in the morning. The lame lottery salesman who pestered me without success. The plump, rosy old gentleman with the cigar, who used to stand at the door of the tobacconist’s. The palecheeked tobacconist himself. What has become of those people who, just because I saw them day after day, became part of my life? Tomorrow I too will disappear from Rua da Prata, Rua dos Douradores, Rua dos Fanqueiros. Tomorrow I too - this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself - yes, tomorrow I too will be someone who no longer walks these streets, someone others will evoke with a vague: ‘I wonder what’s become of him?’ And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other.

8 [153] 25.4.1930

The sleeping partner of the company, a man much troubled by obscure ailments, was suddenly taken with the notion (a caprice that came on him, it seems, between afflictions) that he wanted to have a group photograph taken of the office staff. So, the day before yesterday, following the instructions of the jolly photographer, we all lined up against the grubby white partition that serves as a rickety wooden division between the general office and Senhor Vasques’s office. In the centre stood Vasques himself; on either side of him, according to a hierarchy that began logically enough but rapidly broke down, stood the other men who gather here each day, in body, to perform the small tasks, the ultimate aim of which is a secret known only to the gods.

Today, when I arrived at the office, a little late and having in fact completely forgotten about the frozen moment captured twice by the photographer, I found Moreira, an unexpectedly early bird, and one of the clerks poring over some blackish objects that I recognized with a start as being the first prints of the photographs. They were, in fact, two copies of the same photograph, the one that had come out best.

I experienced the pain of truth when I saw myself there, because, inevitably, it was my face I looked for first. I have never had a very high opinion of my physical appearance but never before have I felt such a nonentity as I did then, comparing myself with the other faces, so familiar to me, in that line-up of my daily companions. I look like a rather dull Jesuit. My thin, inexpressive face betrays no intelligence, no intensity, nothing whatever to make it stand out from the stagnant tide of the other faces. But they’re not a stagnant tide. There are some really expressive faces there. Senhor Vasques is exactly as he is in real life - the firm, likable face, the steady gaze, ail set off by the stiff moustache. The energy and intelligence of the man - qualities which are after all utterly banal and to be found in thousands of other men all over the world - are stamped on that photograph as if it were a psychological passport. The two travelling salesmen look superb; the clerk has come out well but he’s half hidden behind Moreira. And Moreira! My immediate superior Moreira, the embodiment of monotony and routine, looks much more human than I do! Even the errand boy — I detect in myself, without being able to suppress it, a feeling that I hope is not envy — has a directness in his smile that far outshines the insignificant dullness of my face, of me, the sphinx of the stationery cupboard.

What does all this mean? Is it true that the camera never lies? What is this truth documented by a cold lens? Who am I that I possess such a face? Honestly... And then to add insult to injury... Moreira suddenly said to me: ‘It’s a really good one of you.’ And then, turning to the clerk, ‘It’s the absolute image of him, isn’t it?’ The clerk’s happy and companionable agreement signalled my final relegation to the rubbish heap.

9 [27]

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tambours I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.

10 [28] 1.12.1931

Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized that I’m nobody, absolutely nobody. When the lightning flashed, I saw that what I had thought to be a city was in fact a deserted plain and, in the same sinister light that revealed me to myself, there seemed to be no sky above it. I was robbed of any possibility of having existed before the world. If I was ever reincarnated, I must have done so without myself, without a self to reincarnate.

I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I’m nobody, nobody. I don’t know how to feel or think or love. I’m a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I’ve even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me.

I’m always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack als reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trapdoor, through infinite, infinitous space, in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool.

And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre that exists only because every circle has one. I, I myself, am the well in which the walls have fallen away to leave only viscous slime. I am the centre of everything surrounded by the great nothing.

And it is as if hell itself were laughing within me but, instead of the human touch of diabolical laughter, there’s the mad croak of the dead universe, the circling cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds drifting blackly in the wind, misshapen, anachronistic, without the God who created it, without God himself who spins in the dark of darks, impossible, unique, everything.

If only I could think! If only I could feel!

My mother died very young; I never knew her...

11 [29]

Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul.

12 [67] 20.6.1931

Today is one of those days when the monotony of everything closes about me as if I had just entered a prison. That monotony, however, is just the monotony of being me. Each face, even if it belongs to someone we saw only yesterday, is different today simply because today is not yesterday. Each day is the day it is, and there will never be another tike it in the world. Only in the soul is there the absolute identity (albeit a false identity) in which everything resembles everything else and everything is simplified. The world is made up of promontories and peaks but all our myopic vision allows us to see is a thin all-pervading mist.

I’d like to run away, to flee from what I know, from what is mine, from what I love. I want to set off, not for some impossible Indies or for the great islands that lie far to the south of all other lands, but for anywhere, be it village or desert, that has the virtue of not being here. What I want is not to see these faces, this daily round of days. I want a rest from, to be other than, my habitual pretending. I want to feel the approach of sleep as if it were a promise of life, not rest. A hut by the sea, even a cave on a rugged mountain ledge, would be enough. Unfortunately, my will alone cannot give me that.

Slavery is the only law of life, there is no other, because this law must be obeyed; there is no possible rebellion against it or refuge from it. Some are born slaves, some become slaves, some have slavery thrust upon them. The cowardly love we all have of freedom - which if it were given to us we would all repudiate as being too new and strange — is the irrefutable proof of how our slavery weighs upon us. Even I, who have just expressed my desire to have a hut or a cave where I could be free from the monotony of everything, that is to say from the monotony of being myself, would I really dare to go off to this hut or cave, knowing and understanding that, since the monotony exists in me alone, I would never be free of it? Suffocating where I am and because I am where I am, would I breathe any better there when it is my lungs that are diseased and not the air about me? Who is to say that I, longing out loud for the pure sun and the open fields, for the bright sea and the wide horizon, would not miss my bed, or my meals, or having to go down eight flights of stairs to the street, or dropping in at the tobacconist’s on the corner, or saying good morning to the barber standing idly by?

Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us, it seeps into us with every experience of the flesh and of life and, like the web of the great Spider, binds us subtly to what is near, ensnares us in a fragile cradle of slow death, where we lie rocking in the wind. Everything is us and we are everything, but what is the point if everything is nothing? A ray of sun, a cloud whose own sudden shadow warns of its coming, a breeze getting up, the silence that follows when it drops, certain faces, some voices, the easy smiles as they talk, and then the night into which emerge, meaningless, the broken hieroglyphs of the stars.

13[133]

I often wonder what kind of person I would be if I had been protected from the cold wind of fate by the screen of wealth, and my uncle’s moral hand had never led me to an office in Lisbon, and I had never moved on from there to other offices to reach the tawdry heights of being a good assistant book-keeper in a job that is about as demanding as an afternoon nap and offers a salary that gives me just enough to live on.

I know that had that non-existent past existed, I would not now be capable of writing these pages, which, though few, are at least better than all the pages I would undoubtedly have only daydreamed about given more comfortable circumstances. For banality is a form of intelligence, and reality, especially if it is brutish and rough, forms a natural complement to the soul.

Much of what I feel and think I owe to my work as a book-keeper since the former exists as a negation of and flight from the latter.

If I had to fill in the space provided on a questionnaire to list one’s formative literary influences, on the first dotted line I would write the name of Cesario Verde, but the list would be incomplete without the names of Senhor Vasques, Moreira the book-keeper, Vieira the cashier and Antonio the office boy. And after each of them I would write in capital letters the key word: LISBON.

In fact, they were all as important as Cesario Verde in providing corrective coefficients for my vision of the world. I think ‘corrective coefficients’ is the term (though, of course, I’m unsure of its exact meaning) that engineers use of a methodology that applies mathematics to life. If it is the term, that’s what they were to me. If it isn’t, let it stand for what might have been, and my intention serve in place of a failed metaphor.

When I consider, with all the clarity I can muster, what my life has apparently been, I imagine it as some brightly coloured scrap of litter - a chocolate wrapper or a cigar ring - that the eavesdropping waitress brushes lightly from the soiled tablecloth into the dustpan, amongst the crumbs and crusts of reality itself. It stands out from those things whose fate it shares by virtue of a privilege that is also destined for the dustpan. The gods continue their conversations above the sweeping, indifferent to these incidents in the world below.

Yes, if I had been rich, cosseted, carefully groomed and ornamental, I would never have known that brief moment as a pretty piece of paper amongst the breadcrumbs; I would have been left on one of fortune’s trays - ‘Not for me, thank you’ - and returned to the sideboard to grow old and stale. Discarded once I have served my purpose, I am thus relegated to the rubbish bin, along with the crumbs of what remains of Christ’s body, unable even to imagine what will come after, under what stars; but I know there will be an ‘after’.

14 [118]

I’ve come to the realization that I’m always thinking and listening to two things at once. I expect everyone does that a little. Some impressions are so vague that only when we remember them afterwards are we aware of them at all. I think these impressions form a part (the internal part, perhaps) of this double attention we all pay to things. In my case the two realities I attend to have equal weight. In that lies my originality. In that, perhaps, lie both my tragedy and the comedy of my tragedy.

I write carefully, bent over the book in which I measure out in balance sheets the futile history of an obscure company and, at the same time and with equal attention, my thoughts follow the route of an imaginary ship through oriental landscapes that have never existed. The two things are equally clear, equally visible to me: the ruled page on which I meticulously write the lines of the epic commercial poem that is Vasques 8c Co. and the deck where, a little to one side of the lines made by the tarred spaces between the planks, I watch intently the rows of deckchairs and the stretched-out legs of people relaxing on the voyage.

(If I were knocked down by a child’s bicycle, that bicycle would become part of my story.)

The smoking room protrudes on to the deck, preventing me from seeing anything more than their legs.

I reach for the inkwell with my pen and from the door of the smoking room -[...] right where I feel myself to be standing -emerges the figure of the stranger. He turns his back on me and goes over to the others. He walks slowly and I can deduce nothing from his back [...].! begin another entry in the accounts book. I try to see where I went wrong. Marques’s accounts should be debited not credited (I imagine him: plump, amiable, full of jokes and, in an instant, the ship has vanished).

15 [20] 30.12.1932

After the last of the rain had fallen from the sky and come to earth -leaving the sky clear and the earth damp and gleaming - the world below grew joyful in the cool left by the rain, and the greater ciarity of life that returned with the blue of the heavens furnished each soul with its own sky, each heart with a new freshness.

Whether we like it or not, we are slaves to the hour in all its forms and colours, we are the subjects of heaven and earth. The part of us that despises its surroundings and plunges deepest into the forests within us does not take the same paths when it rains as when the sky is clear. Simply because it’s raining or has stopped raining, obscure transmutations take place, felt only perhaps in the very heart of our most abstract feelings; we feel these transmutations without knowing it because we feel the weather even when we are unaware that we do.

Each of us is more than one person, many people, a proliferation of our one self. That’s why the same person who scorns his surroundings is different from the person who is gladdened or made to suffer by them. In the vast colony of our being there are many different kinds of people, all thinking and feeling differently. Today, as I note down these few impressions in a legitimate break brought about by a shortage of work, I am the person carefully transcribing them, the person who is pleased not to have to work just now, the person who looks at the sky even though he can’t actually see it from here, the person who is thinking all this, and the person feeling physically at ease and noticing that his hands are still slightly cold. And, like a diverse but compact multitude, this whole world of mine, composed as it is of different people, projects but a single shadow, that of this calm figure who writes, leaning against Borges’s high desk where I have come to find the blotter he borrowed from me.

16 [74]

[...] ships that pass in the night and neither acknowledge nor recognize one another [...]

17 [96]

As with all tragedies, the real tragedy of my life is just an irony of Fate. I reject life because it is a prison sentence, I reject dreams as being a vulgar form of escape. Yet I live the most sordid and ordinary of real lives and the most intense and constant of dream lives. I’m like a slave who gets drunk during his rest hour - two miseries inhabiting one body.

With the clarity afforded by the lightning dashes of reason that pick out from the thick blackness of life the immediate objects it is composed of, I see with utter lucidity all that is base, flaccid, neglected and factitious in this Rua dos Douradores that makes up my entire life: the squalid office whose squalor seeps into the very marrow of its inhabitants’ bones, the room, rented by the month, in which nothing happens except the living death of its occupant, the grocer’s shop on the corner whose owner I know only in the casual way people do know each other, the boys standing at the door of the old tavern, the laborious futility of each identical day, the same characters constantly rehearsing their roles, like a drama consisting only of scenery and in which even that scenery is facing the wrong way ...

But I also see that in order to flee from all this I must either master it or repudiate it. I do not master it because I cannot rise above reality and I do not repudiate it because, whatever I may dream, I always remain exactly where I am.

And what of my dreams? That shameful flight into myself, the cowardice of mistaking for life the rubbish tip of a soul that others only visit in their sleep, in that semblance of death through which they snore, in that calm state in which, more than anything, they look like highly evolved vegetables! Unable to make a single noble gesture other than to myself, or to have one vain desire that was not utterly vain!

Caesar gave the ultimate definition of ambition when he said: ‘Better to be the chief of a village than a subaltern in Rome’. I enjoy no such position either in a village or in Rome. At least the grocer merits some respect on the block between Rua da Assumpgao and Rua da Victoria; he’s the Caesar of the whole block. Am I superior to him? In what respect when nothingness confers no superiority, no inferiority, and permits no comparisons?

The grocer is rhe Caesar of a whole block and the women, quite rightly, adore him.

And so I drag myself along, doing things I don’t want to do and dreaming of what I cannot have [...] as pointless as a public clock that’s stopped...

18 [107]

In the first few days of this sudden autumn, when the darkness seems in some way premature, it feels as if we have lingered too long over our daily tasks and, even in the midst of the daily round, I savour in advance the pleasure of not working that the darkness brings with it, for darkness means night and night means sleep, home, freedom. When the lights go on in the big office, banishing the" darkness, and we move seamlessly from day to evening shift, I am assailed by an absurd sense of comfort, like the memory of another, and I feel as contented with what I write as if I were sitting reading myself to sleep in bed.

We are all of us the slaves of external circumstance: even at a table in some backstreet cafe, a sunny day can open up before us visions of wide fields; a shadow over the countryside can cause us to shrink inside ourselves, seeking uneasy shelter in the doorless house that is our self; and, even in the midst of daytime things, the arrival of darkness can open out, like a slowly spreading fan, a deep awareness of our need for rest.

But we don’t get behind in our work because of this, rather it cheers us on. We’re not working any more; we’re enjoying ourselves performing the task to which we are condemned. And suddenly, there on the vast ruled sheet of my book-keeper’s destiny, stands my old aunts’ house, quite shut off from the world, where the tea is still brought in at the sleepy hour of ten o’clock, and the oil lamp of my lost childhood, its pool of light illuminating only the tablecloth, plunges into darkness my vision of Moreira, infinitely far from me, lit now by a black electricity. Tea is served -by the maid who’s even older than my aunts and who brings it in with the slightly sleepy demeanour and the tetchily patient tenderness of very old servants - and across the whole of my dead past I faultlessly write a number or a sum. I am reabsorbed into myself again, I lose myself in me, I forget myself in those far-off nights, unpolluted by duty and the world, virginally pure of mystery and future.

And so gentle is this feeling distracting me from my debit and credit columns that if someone asks me a question, I reply with equal gentleness, as if my very being were hollow, as if I were nothing but a typewriter that I carry with me, a portable version of my own open self. Such an interruption of my dreams does not jar; so gentle are they that I continue to dream them even while I speak, write, answer, carry on a conversation. At last the lost teatime draws to an end and it’s time for the office to close. I slowly shut the book and raise my eyes, weary with unshed tears, and of all the mingled feelings this arouses, I feel more than anything a sense of sadness that the closing of the office may mean the ending of my dream; that the gesture of my hand closing the book may mean covering up my own irreparable past; that I will go to the bed of life not in the least tired, but companionless and troubled, caught in the ebb and flow of my confused consciousness, twin tides flowing in the black night, at the outer limits of nostalgia and desolation.

19[115]

Today my body felt afflicted by the old anguish that occasionally wells up inside me and at the restaurant or eating house, whose upstairs room provides some basis of continuity to my existence, I neither ate properly nor drank as much as I would normally drink. When I left, the waiter, noticing that the bottle of wine was still half-full, turned to me and said: ‘Goodnight, Senhor Soares. Hope you feel better tomorrow?

Just as if the wind had suddenly dispersed the clouds obscuring the sky, the clarion call of that simple phrase eased my soul. And then I realized something I have never fully recognized before: that I have a spontaneous, natural sympathy with these waiters in cafes and restaurants, with barbers and street corner errand boys, which I cannot honestly say I feel for those with whom I have more intimate relations, if‘intimate’ is the right word...

Fraternity is a very subtle thing.

Some govern the world, others arc the world. Between an American millionaire with property in England and Switzerland and the Socialist boss of a village there is no qualitative difference, only quantitative. Below [...] them come us, the amorphous ones, the unruly dramatist William Shakespeare, the school teacher John Milton, that vagabond Dante Alighieri, the boy who ran an errand for me yesterday, the barber who always tells me stories, and the waiter who, simply because I drank only half my bottle of wine, proffered the fraternal hope that I would feel better tomorrow.

20 [56]

Only one thing surprises me more than the stupidity with which most men live their lives and that is the intelligence inherent in that stupidity.

To all appearances, the monotony of ordinary lives is horrific. I'm having lunch in this ordinary restaurant and I look over at the cook behind the counter and at the old waiter right next to me, serving me as he has served others here for, I believe, the past thirty years. What are these men’s lives like? For forty years the cook has spent nearly all of every day in a kitchen; he has a few breaks; he sleeps relatively little; sometimes he goes back to his village whence he returns unhesitatingly and without regret; he slowly accumulates his slowly earned money, which he does not propose spending; he would fall ill if he had to abandon (for ever) his kitchen for the land he bought in Galicia; he’s lived in Lisbon for forty years and he’s never even been to the Rotunda, or to the theatre, and only once to the Coliscu (whose clowns still inhabit the inner interstices of his life). He got married, how or why I don’t know, has four sons and one daughter and, as he leans out over the counter towards my table, his smile conveys a great, solemn, contented happiness. He isn’t pretending, nor does he have any reason to. If he seems happy it’s because he really is.

And what about the old waiter who serves me and who, for what must be the millionth time in his career, has just placed a coffee on the table before me? His life is the same as the cook’s, the only difference being the four or five yards that separate the kitchen where one works from the restaurant dining room where the other works. Apart from minor differences like having two rather than five children, paying more frequent visits to Galicia, and knowing Lisbon better than the cook (as well as Oporto where he lived for four years), he is equally contented.

I look again, with real terror, at the panorama of those lives and, just as I’m about to feel horror, sorrow and revulsion for them, discover that the people who feel no horror or sorrow or revulsion are the very people who have the most right to, the people living those lives. That is the central error of the literary imagination: the idea that other people are like us and must therefore feel like us. Fortunately for humanity, each man is only himself and only the genius is given the ability to be others as well.

In the end, everything is relative. A tiny incident in the street, which draws the restaurant cook to the door, affords him more entertainment than any I might get from the contemplation of the most original idea, from reading the best book or from the most pleasant of useless dreams. And, if life is essentially monotonous, the truth is that he has escaped from that monotony better and more easily than I. He is no more the possessor of the truth than I am, because the truth doesn’t belong to anyone; but what he does possess is happiness.

The wise man makes his life monotonous, for then even the tiniest incident becomes imbued with great significance. After his third lion the lionhunter loses interest in the adventure of the hunt. For my monotonous cook there is something modestly apocalyptic about every streetfight he witnesses. To someone who has never been out of Lisbon the tram ride to Benfica is like a trip to the infinite and if one day he were to visit Sintra, he would feel as if he had journeyed to Mars, On the other hand, the traveller who has covered the globe can find nothing new for 5,000 miles around, because he’s always seeing new things; there’s novelty and there’s the boredom of the eternally new and the latter brings about the death of the former.

The truly wise man could enjoy the whole spectacle of the world from his armchair; he wouldn’t need to talk to anyone or to know how to read, just how to make use of his five senses and a soul innocent of sadness.

One must monotonize existence in order to rid it of monotony. One must make the everyday so anodyne that the slightest incident proves entertaining. In the midst of my day-to-day work, dull, repetitive and pointless, visions of escape surface in me, vestiges of dreams of far-off islands, parties held in the avenues of gardens in some other age, different landscapes, different feelings, a different me. But, between balance sheets, I realize that if I had all that, none of it would be mine. The truth is that Senhor Vasques is worth more than any Dream King; the office in Rua dos Douradores is worth more than all those broad avenues in impossible gardens. Because I have Senhor Vasques I can enjoy the dreams of the Dream Kings; because I have the office in Rua dos Douradores I can enjoy my inner visions of non-existent landscapes. But if the Dream Kings were mine, what would I have to dream about? If I possessed the impossible landscapes, what would remain of the impossible?

May I always be blessed with the monotony, the dull sameness of identical days, my indistinguishable todays and yesterdays, so that I may enjoy with an open heart the fly that distracts me, drifting randomly past my eyes, the gust of laughter that wafts volubly up from the street somewhere down below, the sense of vast freedom when the office closes for the night, and the infinite rest of my days off.

Because I am nothing, I can imagine myself to be anything. If I were somebody, I wouldn’t be able to. An assistant book-keeper can imagine himself to be a Roman emperor; the King of England can’t do that, because the Ki ng of England has lost the ability in his dreams to be any other king than the one he is. His reality limits what he can feel.

21[119]

The morning unfurls itself upon the city, interleaving light and shade (or rather degrees of intensity of light) amongst the houses. It does not seem to come from the sun but from the city itself, for the light issues forth from the city’s walls and roofs (not from them physically but from the simple fact of their being there).

As I feel that, I feel full of hope, at the same time recognizing that hope is a purely literary feeling. Tomorrow, spring and hope are all words connected poetically with one emotion and in the soul with the memory of that emotion. No, if I observe myself as closely as I observe the city, I realize that all I have to hope for is that today, like every other day, will come to an end. The eyes of reason also look at the dawn and I see that the hope I placed in it, if it ever existed, was not mine. It belonged to those men who live for the passing hour and whose way of thinking I, for a moment, unwittingly embodied.

Hope? What have I got to hope for? The only promise the day holds for me is that it will be just another day with a fixed course to run and a conclusion. The light cheers but does not change me for I will leave here as I came - older by a few hours, gladdened by a new feeling but saddened by thought. Whenever something is being bornonecanaseasilyconcentrateonthefactofitsbirthasimagine its inevitable death. Now, in the strong, generous sunlight, the city landscape looks like a field of houses - broad, natural and orderly. But, even as I see all this, can I really forget my own existence? Deep down my consciousness of the city is my consciousness of myself.

I suddenly remember as a child seeing, as I can no longer see it, day breaking over rhe city. The sun did not rise for me then, it rose for ah of life, because I (still an unconscious being) was life. I saw the morning and I was happy; today I see the morning and I am first happy, then sad. The child in me is still there but has fallen silent. I see as I used to see but from behind my eyes I see myself seeing and that one fact darkens the sun, dulls the green of the trees and withers the flowers before they even appear. Yes, once I belonged here; today, however new a landscape might be to me, I return from my first sight of it a foreigner, a guest and a wanderer, a stranger to all I see and hear, old man that I am.

I’ve seen everything before, even what I have never seen and never will see. Even the least significant of future landscapes flows already in my blood and the anguish of knowing that I will have to see again landscapes seen before fills me in advance with boredom.

Leaning over the balcony, enjoying the day, looking out at the diverse shapes of the whole city, just one thought fills my soul - the deep-seated will to die, to finish, no more to see light falling on a city, not to think or feel, to leave behind me, like discarded wrapping paper, the course of the sun and all its days, and to peel off the involuntary effort of being as one would discard one’s heavy clothing at the foot of the great bed.

22[123]

With an enormous effort I rise from my seat only to find that I still seem to be carrying it around with me, only now it’s even heavier because it’s become the seat of my own subjectivity.

23[65]

In these lingering summer evenings, I love the quiet of this the commercial part of town, all the more because it’s such a contrast with the noisy bustle that fills it during the day. Rua do Arsenal, Rua da Altandega, the sad roads that reach out to the east where the Alfandega ends, and the long, solitary line of quiet quays: they comfort me with sadness on those evenings when I choose to share their solitude. I’m transported back to a time long before the one I actually live in. I like to imagine myself a contemporary of Cesario Verde and feel within myself, not more verses like the ones he wrote, but the substance of his verses.

The life I drag around with me until night falls is not dissimilar to that of the streets themselves. By day they are full of meaningless bustle and by night foil of an equally meaningless lack of bustle. By day I am nothing, by night I am myself. There is no difference between me and the streets around the Alfandega, except that they are streets and I am a human soul, and this, when weighed against the essence of all things, might also count for little. Men and objects share a common abstract destiny: to be of equally insignificant value in the algebra of life’s mystery.

But there is something else... In those slow, empty hours a sense of the sadness of all existence rises from my soul to my mind, the bitter sense that everything is at once both felt by me and external to me, and that I am powerless to change it. How often have I seen my own dreams take physical shape - assailing me from without in the form of a tram turning the corner at the end of the street, or the voice of a streetseller at night (selling who knows what) singing an Arab melody, a sudden gush of sound breaking the monotony of the evening - not in order to provide me with a substitute reality but to declare themselves equal in their independence from my will.

24 [68]

I’m writing late on a Sunday morning, on a day full of soft light in which the blue of the still new sky above the ragged rooftops of the city locks up in oblivion the mysterious existence of the stars.,.

It’s Sunday inside me as well.

And my heart dons a child’s velvet suit to go to a church it does not know; its face, above a wide, white collar, is flushed with the excitement of first impressions, and smiles with not a trace of sadness in its eyes.

25 [12]

I envy - though I’m not sure if envy is the right word - those people about whom one could write a biography, or who could write their autobiography. Through these deliberately unconnected impressions I am the indifferent narrator of my autobiography without events, of my history without a life. These are my Confessions and if I say nothing in them it’s because I have nothing to say.

What could anyone confess that would be worth anything or serve any useful purpose? What has happened to us has either happened to everyone or to us alone; if the former it has no novelty value and if the latter it will be incomprehensible, I write down what I feel in order to lower the fever of feeling. What I confess is of no importance because nothing is of any importance. I make landscapes out of what I feel. I make a holiday of sensation. I understand women who embroider out of grief and those who crochet because life is what it is. My old aunt passed the infinite evenings playing patience. These confessions of my feelings are my game of patience. I don’t interpret them, the way some read cards to know the future. I don’t scrutinize them because in games of patience the cards have no value in themselves. I unwind myself like a length of multicoloured yarn, or make cat’s cradles out of myself, like the ones children weave around stiff fingers and pass from one to the other. Taking care that my thumb doesn’t miss the vital loop I turn it over to reveal a different pattern. Then I start again.

Living is like crocheting patterns to someone else’s design. But while one works, one’s thoughts are free and, as the ivory hook dives in and out amongst the wool, all the enchanted princes that ever existed are free to stroll through their parks. The crochet of things ... A pause ... Nothing...

For the rest, what qualities can I count on in myself? A horribly keen awareness of sensation and an all too deep consciousness of feeling... A sharp self-destructive intelligence and an extraordinary talent for dreams to entertain myself with ... A defunct will and a reflective spirit in which to cradle it like a living child... In short, crochet...

26[24]

At the end of this day there remains what remained yesterday and what will remain tomorrow: the insatiable, unquantifiable longing to be both the same and other.

27[59]

Thunderstorm

A low sky of unmoving clouds. The blue of the sky was sullied with transparent white.

The post boy at the other end of the office pauses for a moment in his eternal tying up of parcels . . . ‘Listen to that [...],’ he remarks appreciatively.

A cold silence. The sounds from the street stop as if cut with a knife. For what seemed an age one sensed a malaise in everything, a cosmic holding of breath. The whole universe stopped. Minutes and minutes passed. The darkness grew black with silence.

Then, suddenly, the flash of bright steel [...].

How human the metallic clanking of the trams seemed!

How joyful the landscape of simple rain falling in streets dragged back from the abyss!

Oh, Lisbon, my home!

28[40]

In the gentlest of voices, he was singing a song from some far-off land. The music made the strange words seem familiar. It sounded like afado composed for the soul, though it was nothing like a fado really.

Through its veiled words and its human melody, the song spoke of things that exist in every soul and yet are unknown to all of us. He was singing as if in a trance, standing in the street wrapped in a sort of ecstasy, not even aware he had an audience.

The people who had gathered there to listen to him did so without a trace of mockery. The song belonged to us all and sometimes the words spoke to us directly of the oriental secret of some lost race. The noise of the city, if we noticed it at all, went unheard and the cars passed so close to us that one brushed my jacket. But I only felt it, I didn’t hear it. There was an intensity in the stranger’s singing that nourished the dreamer in us, or the part that cannot dream. For us, though, it was just something to look at in the street and we all noticed the policeman coming slowly round the corner. He came towards us at the same slow pace then paused for a moment behind the boy selling umbrellas, like someone who has just spotted something. At that point the singer stopped. No one said a word. Then the policeman stepped in.

29 [87]

In the light morning mist of mid spring the Baixa comes sluggishly awake and even the sun seems to rise only slowly. A quiet joy fills the chilly air and, in the gentle breath of a barely existent breeze, life shivers slightly in the cold that is already past, shivers at the memory of the cold rather than at the cold itself, at the contrast with the coming summer rather than at the present weather.