To give good advice is to disdain the faculty of erring that God gave to others. Not only that, we should be glad that other people don’t act like us. It makes sense only to ask for advice from others, so that we can be sure - by doing just the opposite - that we are totally ourselves, in complete disagreement with all Otherness.
fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet
Our personalities should be inscrutable, even to ourselves. That’s why we should always dream, making sure that we’re included in our dreams so that we won’t be able to have opinions about ourselves.
And we should especially protect our personality against being invaded by others. All outside interest in us is a flagrant disrespect. What saves the banal greeting ‘How are you?’ from being an inexcusable vulgarity is the fact that it’s usually completely empty and insincere.
fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet
…
Some die as soon as they die, while others live on for a time in the memory of those who knew and loved them; others survive in the memory of the nation that bore them; still others enter into the memory of the civilization they were part of; and some very few are able to span the contrary tendencies of differing civilization. But all of us are surrounded by the abyss of time, in which we will ultimately vanish; the hunger of the abyss will swallow us all….
Durability is just a wish, and eternity an illusion.
Death is what we are and what we live. We are born dead, we deadly exist, and we are already dead when we enter Death.
Whatever lives, lives because it changes; it changes because it passes; and, because it passes, it dies. Whatever lives is constantly transforming into something else - it continually denies itself, it perpetually evades life.
Life is thus an interval, a link, a relation, but a relation between what has passed and what will pass, a dead interval between Death and Death.
…
fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet
…
Every thought is debased when expressed in words, which transform the thought into the property of others, making it understandable to anyone who can understand it.
…
fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet
…
The best way to start dreaming is through books. Novels are especially helpful for the beginner. The first step is to learn to give in completely to your reading, to live totally with the characters of a novel. You’ll know you’re making progress when your own family and its troubles seem insipid and loathsome by comparison. It’s best to avoid reading literary novels, which tend to divert our attention to the formal structure.
I’m not ashamed to admit that this is how I started. Strangely enough, detective novels are what I instinctively read. I was never able to read romantic novels in any sustained way, but this is for personal reasons, I being romantically disinclined even in my dreams. Let each man cultivate his particular inclination. Let us never forget that to dream is to explore ourselves. Sensual souls, for their reading matter, should choose the opposite of what I read.
When the dreamer experiences physical sensation - when a novel about combat, flights and battles leaves his body really exhausted and his legs worn out - then he has passed beyond the first stage of dreaming. In the case of the sensual soul, he should be able - without any masturbation except in his mind - to experience an ejaculation at the appropriate moment during the novel.
Next, the dreamer should try to transfer all of this to the mental plane. The dreamed ejaculation (which I choose as the most violent and striking example) should be felt without actually happening. The fatigue will be greater, but the pleasure will be incomparably more intense.
…
The second stage is to construct novels for your own enjoyment. This should be attempted only once dreaming has become perfectly mentalized, as described above. Otherwise, the effort to set a novel in motion will hinder the smooth mentalization of pleasure.
Third stage: Once our imagination has been trained, it will fashion dreams all by itself whenever we want.
At this point there’s hardly even any mental fatigue. The dissolution of personality is total. We are mere ashes endowed with a soul but no form - not even that of water, which adopts the shape of the vessel that holds it.
With this thoroughly established, complete and autonomous plays can unfold in us line by line. We may no longer have the energy to write them, but that won’t be necessary. We’ll be able to create secondhand; we can imagine one poet writing in us in one way, while another poet will write in a different way. I, having refined this skill to a considerable dgree, can write in countlessly different ways, all of them original.
The highest stage of dreaming is when, having created a picture with various figures whose lives we live all at the same time, we are jointly and interactively all of those souls. This leads to an incredible degree of depersonalization and the reduction of our spirit to ashes, and it is hard, I admit, not to feel a general weariness throughout one’s entire being. But what triumph!
This is the only final asceticism. It’s an asceticism without faith, and without any god.
God am I.
fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet
My wish for you, my dear disciples, is that by faithfully following my advice you’ll experience vastly multiplied sensual pleasures with, not in the acts of, the male animal to whom Church and state have tied you by your womb and a last name.
It’s by digging its feet in the ground that the bird takes off in flight. May this image, daughters, serve as a perpetual reminder of the only spiritual commandment there is.
The height of sensuality, if you can achieve it, is to be the lewdest slut imaginable and yet never unfaithful to your husband, not even with your eyes.
To be a slut on the inside, to be unfaithful to your husband on the inside, to cheat on him as you hug him, to kiss him with kisses that aren’t for him - that is sensuality, O superior women, O my mysterious and cerebral disciples.
Why don’t I give the same advice to men? Because the man is a different kind of creature. If he’s inferior, I recommend that he seduce as many women as he can, resorting to my contempt when… The superior man doesn’t need women. He can have sensuality without sexual possession. This is something a woman, even a superior own, could never accept. The woman is a fundamentally sexual creature.
fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet
I will now teach you how to cheat on your husbands in your imagination.
Make no mistake: only an ordinary woman really and truly cheats on her husband. Modesty is a sine qua non for sexual pleasure, and to yield to more than one man destroys modesty.
I grant that female inferiority requires the male species, but I think that each woman should limit herself to just one male, making him, if necessary, the centre of an expanding circle of imaginary males.
The best time for doing this is in the days immediately preceding menstruation.
Like so:
Picture your husband with a whiter body. If you’re good at this, you’ll feel his whiteness on top of you.
Refrain from excessively sensual gestures. Kiss the husband on top of your body and replace him in your imagination - remember the man who lies on top of you i n your soul.
The ssence of pleasure is in multiplication. Open your shutters to the Feline in you.
How to upset your husband…
It’s important that your husband gets angry now and then.
Learn to feel attracted to repulsive things without relaxing your outward discipline. The greatest inward unruliness combined with the greatest outward discipline makes for perfect sensuality. Every gesture that realizes a dream or desire unrealizes it in reality.
Substitution is less difficult than you think. By substitution I mean the practice of imagining an orgasm with man A while copulating with man B.
fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet
481
I went into the barbershop as usual, with the pleasant sensation of entering a familiar place, easily and naturally. New things are distressing to my sensibility; I’m at ease only in places where I’ve already been.
After I’d sat down in the chair, I happened to ask the young barber, occupied in fastening a clean, cool cloth around my neck, about his older colleague from the chair to the right, a spry fellow who had been sick. I didn’t ask this because I felt obliged to ask something; it was the p lace and my memory that sparked the question. ‘He passed away yesterday,’ flatly answered the barber’s voice behind me. The whole of my irrational good mood abruptly died, like the eternally missing barber from the adjacent chair. A chill swept over all my thoughts. I said nothing.
Nostalgia! I even feel it for people and things that were nothing to me, because time’s fleeing is for me an anguish, and life’s mystery is a torture. Faces I habitually see on my habitual streets - if I stop seeing them I become sad. And they were nothing to me, except perhaps the symbol of all life.
The nondescript old man with dirty gaiters who often crossed my path at nine-thirty in the morning… The crippled seller of lottery tickets who would pester me in vain… The round and ruddy old man smoking a cigar at the door of the tobacco shop… The pale tobacco shop owner… What has happened to them all, who because I regularly saw them were a part of my life? Tomorrow I too will vanish from the Rua da Prata, the Rus dos Douradores, the Rus dos Fanqueiros. Tomorrow I too - I this soul that feels and thinks, this universe I am for myself - yes, tomorrow I too will be the one who no longer walks these streets, whom others will vaguely evoke with a ‘What’s become of him?’. And everything I’ve done, everything I’ve felt and everything I’ve lived will amount to merely one less passer-by on the everyday streets of some city or other.
480
…
To drag my feet homeward weighs like lead on my senses. The caress of extinction, the flower proferred by futility, my name never pronounced, my disquiet like a river contained between its banks, the privilege of abandoned duties, and - around the last bend in the ancestral park - that other century, like a rose garden…
476
It will seem to many that my diary, written just for me, is too artificial. But it’s only natural for me to be artificial. How else can I amuse myself except by carefully recording these mental notes? Though I’m not very careful about how I record them. In fact I jot them down in no particular order and with no special care. The refined language of my prose is the language in which I naturally think.
For me the outer world is an inner reality. I feel this not in some metaphysical way but with the senses normally used to grasp reality.
Yesterday’s frivolity is a nostalgia that gnaws at my life today.
466
Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face - there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.
Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.
The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.
462
I’ve never seen suicide as a solution, because my hatred of life is due to my love of life. It took me a long time to be convinced of this unfortunate mistake in how I live with myself. Convinced of it, I felt frustrated, which is what I always feel when I convince myself of something, since for me each new conviction means another lost illusion.
I killed my will by analysing it. If only I could return to my childhood before analysis, even if it would have to be before I had a will!
…
Far-away palaces, pensive parks, narrow paths in the distance, the dead charm of stone benches where no one sits anymore - perished splendours, vanished charm, lost glitter, O my forgotten yearning, if I could only recover the grief with which I dreamed you!
458
…
Bells or a large clock strike what, without counting, I know must be eight o’clock. I awaken from myself because of the banality of measured time, that cloister which society imposes on time’s continuity, a border to contain the abstract, a boundary around the unknown. I see that the mist which has completely quit the sky (except for the quasi-blue that still lingers in the blueness) has indeed penetrated into my soul, and has likewise penetrated to the depths of things where they have contact with my soul. I’ve lost the vision of what I was seeing. My eyes see, but I am blind. I’ve begun to perceive things with the banality of knowledge. What I see is no longer Reality, it’s just Life.
… Yes, the life to which I also belong, and which also belongs to me, and no longer Reality, which belongs only to God or to itself, which contains neither mystery nor truth, and which - since it is real or pretends to be real - exists somewhere invariably, free from having to be temporal or eternal, an absolute imge, the external equivalent to the idea of a soul.
I turn and walk slowly, though faster than I think, to the door that will lead me back up to my rented room. But I don’t enter; I hesitate; I keep going. Praca da Figueira, gaping with variously coloured wares and filling up with customers, blocks the horizon from my view. I advance slowly, lifelessly, and my vision is no longer mine, it’s no longer anything; it’s merely the vision of a human animal that inexorably inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality, and all the other illusions that form the civilization in which I feel and perceive.
Where are the living?
fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet
456
…
It often happens that I don’t know myself, which is typical in those who know themselves. I look at myself in the various disguises that make me alive. Of all that changes, I possess whatever remains the same; of all that is accomplished, whatever amounts to nothing.
…
I’ve become so entirely the fiction of myself that any natural feeling I may have is immediately transformed as soon as it’s born, into an imaginary feeling. Memories turn into dreams, dreams into my forgetting what I dreamed, and knowing myself into not thinking of myself.
I’ve so stripped myself of my own being that existence consists of dressing up. I’m only myself when disguised. And all around me expiring, unknown sunsets gild the landscapes I’ll never see.
454
Reading the newspaper is always unpleasant from an aesthetic point of view, and often from a moral point of view as well, even for those who don’t worry much about morality.
Reading about the effects of wars and revolutions - there’s always one or the other in the news - doesn’t make us feel horror but tedium. What really disturbs our soul isn’t the cruel fate of all the dead and wounded, the sacrifice of all who die inaction or who die without seeing action, but the stupidity that sacrifices lives and property to some inevitably futile cause. All ideals and all ambitions are a hysteria of prattling women posing as men. No empire justifies breaking a child’s doll. No ideal is worth the sacrifice of a child’s train. What empire is useful or what ideal profitable? It’s all humanity, and humanity is always the same - variable but unimprovable, with fluctuations but unprogressive. Vis-a-vis the intransigent march of all things, the life that we were given without knowing why and that we’ll lose we don’t know when, the ten thousand chess games that constitute our life in common and in conflict, the tedium of uselessly contemplating what we’ll never accomplish …., - vis-a-vis all that, what can the wise man do but ask to retire, to be excused from having to think about life (since living it is already burdensome enough), to have a little sun and fresh air and at least the dream that there’s peace on the other side of the hills?
452
…
I sometimes think, given the apalling difference between the intelligence of children and the stupidity of adults, that in childhood we’re accompanied by a guardian spirit who lends us his own astral intelligence, and that later, perhaps with regret but compelled by a higher law, he abandons us - like animal mothers after they’ve nursed their young - to our destiny as fattened pigs.
451
Travel? One need only exist to travel. I go from day to day, as from station to station, in the train of my body or my destiny, leaning out over the streets and squares, over people’s faces and gestures, always the same and always different, just like scenery.
If I imagine, I see. What more do I do when I travel? Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to travel to feel.
‘Any road, this simple Entepfuhl road, will lead you to the end of the World.’ But the end of the world, when we go around it full circle, is the same Entepfuhl from which we started out. The end of the world, like the beginning, is in fact our concept of the world. It is in us that the scenery is scenic. If I imagine it, I create it; if I create it, it exists; if it exists, then I see it like any other scenery. So why travel? In Madrid, Berlin, Persia, China, and at the North or South Pole, where would I be but in myself, and in my particular type of sensations?
Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveller. What we see isn’t what we see but what we are.
fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet
433
I was a foreigner in their midst, but no one realized it. I lived among them as a spy and no one, not even I, suspected it. They all took me for a relative; no one knew I’d been swapped at birth. And so I was one of their equals without anything in common, a brother to all without belonging to the family.
I had come from wondrous lands, from landscapes more enchanting than life, but only to myself did I ever mention these lands, and I said nothing about the landscapes which I saw in dreams. My feet stepped like theirs over the floorboards and the flagstones, but my heart was far away, even if it beat close by, false master of an estranged and exiled body.
No one knew me under the mask of similarity, nor ever knew that I had a mask, because no one knew that there are masked people in the world. No one imagined that at my side there was always another, who was in fact I. They always supposed I was identical to myself.
Their houses sheltered me, their hands shook mine, and they saw me walk down the street as if I were there; but the I that I am was never in their living rooms, the I whose life I live has not hands for others to shake, and the I that I know walks down no streets, unless the streets are all streets, nor is seen in them by others, unless he himself is all the others.
We all live far away and anonymous; disguised, we suffer as unknowns. For some, however, this distance between oneself and one’s self is never revealed; for others it is occasionally enlightened, to their horror or grief, by a flash without limits; but for still others this is the painful daily reality of life.
To realize that who we are is not ours to know, that what we think or feel is always a translation, that what we want is not what we wanted, nor perhaps what anyone wanted - to realize all this at every moment, to feel all this in every feeling - isn’t this to be foreign in one’s own soul, exiled in one’s own sensations?
…
fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet
426
…
I’m writing this under the weight of a tedium that doesn’t seem to fit inside me, or that needs more room than is in my soul; a tedium of all people and all things that strangles and deranges me; a physical feeling of being completely misunderstood that unnerves and overwhelms me. But I lift up my head to the blue sky that doesn’t know me, I let my face feel the unconsciously cool breeze, I close my eyelids after having looked, and I forget my face after having felt. This doesn’t make me feel better, but it makes me different. Seeing myself frees me from myself. I almost smile, not because I understand myself but because, having become another, I’ve stopped being able to understand myself. High in the sky, like a visible nothingness, floats a tiny white cloud left behind by the universe.
427
My dreams: In my dreams I create friends, with whom I then keep company. They’re imperfect in a different way.
Remain pure, not in order to be noble or strong but to be yourself. To give your love is to lose love.
Abdicate from life so as not to abdicate from yourself.
Women are a good source of dreams. Don’t ever touch them.
Learn to dissociate the ideas of voluptuousness and pleasure. Learn to delight in everything, not for what it is, but for the ideas and dreams it kindles. (Because nothing is what it is, but dreams are always dreams.) To accomplish this you mustn’t touch anything. As soon as you touch it, your dream will die; the touched object will occupy your capacity for feeling.
Seeing and hearing are the only noble things in life. The other senses are plebeian and carnal. The only aristocracy is never to touch. Avoid getting close - that’s true nobility.
417
I know no pleasure like that of books, and I read very little. Books are introductions to dreams, and no introductions are necessary for one who freely and naturally enters into conversation with them. I’ve never been able to lose myself in a book; as I’m reading, the commentary of my intellect or imagination has always hindered the narrative flow. After a few minutes it’s I who am writing, and what I write is nowhere to be found.
…
fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet
408
He sang, in a soft and gentle voice, a song from a faraway country. The music made the strange words familiar. It sounded like the soul’s fado, though it didn’t in the least resemble fado.
Through its veiled words and human melody, the song told of things that are in the hearts of us all and that no one knows. He sang in a kind of stupor, a kind of ecstacy right there in the street, his gaze oblivious to his listeners.
The crowd that had gathered listened to him without any discernible scoffing. The song belonged to everyone, and the words sometimes spoke to us - an oriental secret of some lost race. We didn’t hear the city’s noises, even if we heard them, and the carts passed by so close that one of them brushed against my coat. But I only felt it; I didn’t hear it. There was a rapt intensity in the stranger’s song that was soothing to what in us dreams or doesn’t succeed. It was a street incident, and we all noticed the policeman slowly turning the corner. He approached with the same slow gait, then stood still for a while behind the boy selling umbrellas, as if something had caught his eye. That’s when the singer stopped. No one said anything. Then the policeman intervened.
fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet
406
I don’t much believe in the happiness of animals, except when i want to use this conceit as a frame for highlighting a particular feeling. To be happy, it’s necessary to know that one’s happy. The only happiness we get from sleeping without dreaming is when we wake up and realize that we’ve slept without dreaming. Happiness is outside of happiness.
There’s no happiness without knowledge. But the knowledge of happiness brings unhappiness, because to know that you’re happy is to realize that you’re experiencing a happy moment and will sooon have to leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything else. Not to know, on the other hand, is not ot exist.
Only the absolute of Hegel managed to be two things at once, but in writing. Being and non-being do not mix and meld in the sensations and laws of life; they exclude one another, by a kind of reverse synthesis.
What to do? Isolate the moment like a thing and be happy now, in the moment we’re feeling happiness, thinking of nothing but what we’re feeling and completely excluding everything else. Trap all thought in our sensation…
That’s what I believe this afternoon. It’s not what I’ll believe tomorrow morning, because tomorrow morning I’ll be someone else. What kind of believer will I be tomorrow? I don’t know; I would already have to be there to know. Not even God eternal, in whom today I believe, could know - today or tomorrow - anything about me tomorrow. Because today I’m I, and tomorrow it’s possible that he’ll have never existed.
401-402
…
If I were a musician, I would compose my own funeral march, and with such good reason!
…
I’m losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless.
389
‘Creator of indifferences’ is the motto I want for my spirit today. I’d like my life’s activity to consist, above all, in educating others to feel more and more for themselves, and less and less according to the dynamic law of collectiveness. To educate people in that spiritual antisepsis which precludes contamination by commonness and vulgarity is the loftiest destiny I can imagine for the pedagogue of inner discipline that I aspire to be. If all who read me would learn - slowly, of course, as the subject matter requires - to be completely insensitive to other people’s opinions and even their glances, that would be enough of a garland to make up for my life’s scholastic stagnation.
My inability to act has always been an ailment with a metaphysical aetiology. I’ve always felt that to perform a gesture implied a disturbance, a repercussion, in the outer universe; I’ve always had the impression that any movement I might make would unsettle the stars and rock the skies. And so the tiniest gesture assumed for me early on a metaphysical significance of astonishing proportions. I developed an attitude of transcendental honesty with respect to all action, and ever since this attitude took firm hold in my consciousness, it has prevented me from having intense relations with the tangible world.