The Book of Disquiet (73 page)

He was the definitive creator of inner aristocracy – that posture of soul which most resembles the bodily posture of a full-fledged aristocrat.

AP- 3

The anguish of a man afflicted by life’s tedium on the terrace of his opulent villa is one thing; quite another is the anguish of someone like me, who must contemplate the scenery from my fourth-floor rented room in downtown Lisbon, unable to forget that I’m an assistant bookkeeper.

‘Tout notaire a rêvé des sultanes’*…

Every time I’m obliged by some official act to state my profession, I smile to myself at the irony of the undeserved ridicule when I declare ‘Office clerk’ and no one finds it all strange. I don’t know how it got there, but that’s how my name appears in the
Professional Register
.

Epigraph to the Diary:

Guedes (Vicente), office clerk, Rua dos Retroseiros,

    17, fourth floor.

Professional Register of Portugal

Appendix II: Two Letters

Pessoa planned to insert phrases and ideas from the following letters in
The Book of Disquiet.
This intention is clearly stated in the second letter, while the first letter – or rather, Pessoa’s typed copy of it – was marked
B. of D.
at the top.

AP- 4

L
ETTER TO HIS
M
OTHER

5 June 1914

My health has been good and my state of mind, oddly enough, has improved. Even so, I’m tortured by a vague anxiety that I don’t know what to call but an intellectual itch, as if my soul had chicken-pox. It’s only in this absurd language that I can describe what I feel. But what I’m feeling isn’t the same as those sad moods I sometimes tell you about, in which the sadness has no cause. My present mood has a definite cause. Everything around me is either departing or crumbling. I don’t use these two verbs with gloomy intent. I simply mean that the people I associate with are or will be going through changes, marking an end to particular phases of their lives, and all of this suggests to me – as when an old man, because he sees his childhood companions dying all around him, feels his time must be near – that in some mysterious way my life likewise should and will change. Not that I think this change will be for the worse. On the contrary. But it’s a change, and for me a change – to pass from one state to another – is a partial death; something in us dies, and the sadness of its dying and its passing on cannot help but touch our soul.

Tomorrow my best and closest friend* is leaving for Paris – not for a visit but to live there. And Aunt Anica (see her letter) will probably leave soon for Switzerland with her daughter, who will be married by then. Another good friend is going off to Galicia for a long while. Still another fellow, my next best friend after the first one I mentioned, is going to Oporto to live. Thus everything in my human circle is coming together (or apart) to force me either into isolation or else on to a new, uncertain path. Even the circumstance of publishing my first book will alter my life.
I’ll lose something: my unpublished status
. To change for the better, because change is bad, is
always
to change for the worse. And to lose something negative – be it a personal defect or deficiency, or the fact of being rejected –
is still a loss
. Imagine, Mother, how someone who feels this way must live, overwhelmed by such painful daily sensations!

What will I be ten years from now, or even five? My friends say I’ll be one of the greatest contemporary poets – they say this based on what I’ve already written, not what I may yet write (otherwise I wouldn’t mention what they say…). But even if this is true, I have no idea what it will mean. I have no idea
how it will taste
. Perhaps glory tastes like death and futility, and triumph smells of rottenness.

AP- 5

L
ETTER TO
M
ÁRIO DE
S
Á
-C
ARNEIRO*

14 March 1916

I’m writing to you today out of an emotional necessity – an anguished longing to talk to you. I have, in other words, nothing special to say. Except this: that today I’m at the bottom of a bottomless depression. The absurdity of the sentence speaks for me.

This is one of those days
in which I’ve never had a future
. There’s just a static present, surrounded by a wall of anxiety. The other side of the river, as long as it’s the other side, is not this side; that is the root cause of all my suffering. There are many boats destined for many
ports, but no boat for life to stop hurting, nor a landing-place where we can forget everything. All of this occurred a long time ago, but my grief is even older.

On days of the soul like today I feel, in my awareness of every bodily pore, like the sad child who was beaten up by life. I was put in a corner, from where I can hear everyone else playing. In my hands I can feel the shoddy, broken toy I was given out of some shoddy irony. Today, the fourteenth of March, at ten after nine in the evening, this seems to be all my life is worth.

In the park that’s visible from the silent windows of my confinement, all the swings have been wrapped high around the branches from where they hang, so that not even my fantasy of an escaped me can forget this moment by swinging in my imagination.

This, but with no literary style, is more or less my present mood. Like the watching woman of
The Mariner
,* my eyes sting from having thought about crying. Life pains me little by little, by sips, in the cracks. All of this is printed in tiny letters in a book whose binding is falling apart.

If I weren’t writing to you, I would have to swear that this letter is sincere, that its hysterical associations of ideas have flowed spontaneously from what I feel. But you know all too well that this unstageable tragedy is as real as a teacup or a coat hanger – full of the here and now, and passing through my soul like the green in a tree’s leaves.

That’s why the Prince never ruled. This sentence is totally absurd. But right now I feel that absurd sentences make me want to cry.

If I don’t post this letter today, then perhaps tomorrow, on rereading it, I’ll take the time to make a typed copy, so as to include some of its sentences and grimaces in
The Book of Disquiet
. But that won’t take away from all the sincerity I’ve put into writing it, nor from the painful inevitability of the feeling behind it.

There you have the latest news. There is also the state of war with Germany, but pain caused suffering long before that. On the other side of Life, this must be the caption of some political cartoon.

What I’m feeling isn’t true madness, but madness no doubt results in a similar abandon to the very causes of one’s suffering, a shrewd delight in the soul’s lurches and jolts.

What, I wonder, is the colour of feeling?
Thousands of hugs from your very own

Fernando Pessoa

P.S. – I wrote this letter in one go. Rereading it I see that, yes, I’ll definitely make a copy before posting it to you tomorrow. Rarely have I so completely expressed my psychology, with all of its emotional and intellectual attitudes, with all of its fundamentally depressive bent, with all the so characteristic corners and crossroads of its self-awareness…

Don’t you agree?

Appendix III: Reflections on
The Book of Disquiet
from Pessoa’s Writings

A. TWO NOTES

Note concerning the actual editions

(AND WHICH CAN BE USED IN THE PREFACE)

Collect later on, in a separate book, the various poems I had mistakenly thought to include in
The Book of Disquiet
; this book of poems should have a title indicating that it contains something like refuse or marginalia – something suggestive of detachment.

This book, furthermore, could form part of a definitive collection of dregs, the published depository of the unpublishable – allowed to survive as a sad example. It would be somewhat analogous to a book of unfinished poems by a poet who died young, or the letters of a great writer. But the book I have in mind would include material that is not only inferior but also different, and it is this difference that would justify its publication, which obviously couldn’t be justified by the fact it shouldn’t be published.

B. of D.

(NOTE)

The organization of the book should be based on a highly rigorous selection from among the various kinds of texts written, adapting the older ones – which lack the psychology of Bernardo Soares – to that true psychology as it has now emerged. In addition, an overall revision
of the style needs to be made, but without giving up the dreaminess and logical disjointedness of its intimate expression.

It must also be decided whether to include the large texts with grandiose titles, such as the ‘Funeral March for Ludwig II, King of Bavaria’ or ‘Symphony of the Restless Night’. The ‘Funeral March’ could be left as it is, or it could be made part of another book, one that would gather together all the Large Texts.

B. EXCERPTS FROM LETTERS

To João de Lebre e Lima
* –
3 May 1914

The subject of tedium reminds me of something I wanted to ask you… Did you happen to see, in an issue of
Águia
that came out last year, a piece by me titled ‘In the Forest of Estrangement’? If not, let me know. I’ll send it to you. I’d very much like you to read it. It’s my only published text in which I make tedium – and the sterile dream that wearies of itself even before it starts dreaming – a motif and the central theme. I don’t know if you’ll like the style in which it’s written. It’s a style quite my own, which various friends jokingly call ‘the estranged style’, since it made its first appearance in that text. And they talk of ‘estranged writing’, ‘estranged speech’, etc.

That piece belongs to a book of mine for which I’ve written other, still unpublished passages, but I have a long way to go before finishing it. The book is called
The Book of Disquiet
, since restlessness and uncertainty are the dominant note. This is evident in the one published passage. What is apparently the narration of a mere dream, or daydream, is actually – and the reader feels this at the outset and should, if I’ve been successful, feel it throughout his entire reading – a dreamed confession of the painful, sterile rage and utter uselessness of dreaming.

To Armando Cortes-Rodrigues
*
– 2 September 1914

… I haven’t written anything worth sending along. Ricardo Reis and futurist Álvaro have been silent. Caeiro has perpetrated a few lines that will perhaps find refuge in some future book… What I’ve mainly written is sociology and disquiet. The last word, as you’ll have guessed, refers to the ‘book’ of the same name. I have, in fact, written a number of pages for that pathological production, which thus continues to go complexly and tortuously forward.

To Armando Cortes-Rodrigues – 4 October 1914

Nor am I sending you any of the other little things I’ve written in recent days. Some of them aren’t worth sending; others are incomplete; the rest are broken, disconnected pieces of
The Book of Disquiet
.

.....

My present state of mind is of a deep and calm depression. For some days now I’ve been at the level of
The Book of Disquiet
. Just today I wrote almost an entire chapter.

To Armando Cortes-Rodrigues – 19 November 1914

My state of mind compels me to work hard, against my will, on
The Book of Disquiet
. But it’s all fragments, fragments, fragments.

To João Gaspar Simões
*
– 28 July 1932

My original intention was to begin the publication of my works with three books, in the following order: (1)
Portugal
,* a small book of poems (41 in all) whose second part is ‘Portuguese Sea’ (published in
Contemporânea 4
); (2)
The Book of Disquiet
(by Bernardo Soares, but only secondarily, since B.S. is not a heteronym but a literary personality); (3)
Complete Poems of Alberto Caeiro
(with a preface
by Ricardo Reis and, at the end of the volume, Álvaro de Campos’s ‘Notes for the Memory of my Master Caeiro’). A year after the publication of these books, I planned to bring out, either by itself or with another volume,
Songbook
(or some other equally inexpressive title), which would have included (in Books I–III or I–V) a number of my many miscellaneous poems, which are too diverse to be classified except in that inexpressive way.

But there is much to be revised and restructured in
The Book of Disquiet
, and I can’t honestly expect that it will take me less than a year to do the job. And as for Caeiro, I’m undecided…