The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
Translated from the Portuguese this remarkable book consists of 476 separate notes written between 1913 and 1934 the year before Pessoa died.
Subtitled A Factless Autobiography, it purports to be the writings of Bernardo Soares,an assistant bookkeeper in a fabrics company in downtown Lisbon. Soares, the alter ego of Pessoa, notes that there are two people in each of us: one that lives in the world of objective reality and the other who lives in the subjective world of the imagination but, whereas most accommodate themselves to a mundane objective existence, Soares rejects it and decides to live a life of the imagination. So while living outwardly as a timid assistant bookkeeper, he lives a parallel existence as a dreamer.
This allows Pessoa to exercise his poetic qualities as through Soares eyes Lisbon is transfigured by a series of surreal and sometimes disturbing scenes into a fantastic personal world that contrasts sharply with the everyday life of his workplace.
Equally notable is the philosophical content of the book in which Soares underscores the pointlessness of our existence that ultimately has no meaning. Certain passages, as here from note 6, strike home by their directness:
'I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me - this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we are mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our overcoat.'
Or this extract from note 149:
'The funny thing is that, while it's difficult to formulate a definition that truly distinguishes man from animals, it's easy to differentiate between the superior man and the common man.
I've never forgotten that phrase from Haeckel, the biologist, whom I read in the childhood of my intelligence , that period when we're attracted to popular science and writings that attack religion. The phrase, is more or less the following: The distance between the superior man ( a Kant or a Goethe, I believe he says ) and the common man is much greater than the distance between the common man and the ape. I've never forgotten the phrase, because it's true, Between me, whose rank is low among thinking men, and a farmer from Loures, there is undoubtedly a greater distance than between the farmer and, I won't say a monkey, but a cat or dog. None of us, from the cat on up to me, is really in charge of the life imposed on us or of the destiny we've been given; we are all equally derived from no one knows what; we're shadows of gestures performed by someone else, embodied effects, consequences that feel. But between me and the farmer there's a difference of quality, due to the presence in me of abstract thought and disinterested emotion; whereas between him and the cat, intellectually and psychologically, there is only a difference of degree.'
There are many such instances of intellectual insight and if the book has faults it's in the repetition of the transmuted scenes of Portuguese life, many of which are seen from the windows of Soares office or rented Lisbon apartment.
'High in the nocturnal solitude an anonymous lamp flourishes behind a window. All else I see in the city is dark, save where feeble reflections of light hazily ascend from the streets and cause a pallid inverse moonlight to hover over here and there.
The buildings' various colours, or shades of colours, are hardly distinguishable in the blackness of the night; only vague seemingly abstract differences break the regularity of the congested ensemble...........'
