The Book of Disquiet Read Online Free PDF Page A

flesh, which always tires, but in the imagination.
    To dream, for example, that I’m simultaneously, separately, severally the man and the woman on a stroll that a man and woman are taking along the river. To see myself – at the same time, in the same way, with equal precision and without overlap, being equally but separately integrated into both things – as a conscious ship in a South Sea and a printed page from an old book. How absurd this seems! But everything is absurd, and dreaming least of all. (Text 157)
    To dream one’s life and to live one’s dreams, feeling what’s dreamed and what’s lived with an intensity so extreme it makes the distinction between the two meaningless – this credo echoed in nearly every reachof Pessoa’s universe, but Soares was its most practical example. While the other heteronymic stars talk about dreaming and feeling everything, Bernardo Soares actually has vivid, splendorous dreams and feels each tiny circumstance of his workaday life on the Rua dos Douradores. The post-Symbolist texts with misty forests, lakes, kings and palaces are crucial, for they are the imaginary substance, the very dreams of Soares, put into words. And the various ‘Rainy Landscapes’, with their excruciating descriptions of storms and winds, are illustrations of how to really feel the weather and, by extension, all of nature and the life that surrounds us.
    Pessoa was keenly aware that ‘Nature is parts without a whole’ (from Caeiro’s The Keeper of Sheep , XLVII) and that the notion of unity is always an illusion. Well, not quite. A relative, provisional, fleeting unity, a unity which doesn’t pretend to be smooth and absolute or even unambiguously singular, which is built around an imagination, a fiction, a writing instrument – this was the unity that Fernando Pessoa, in Bernardo Soares, was betting on. And he won his bet. The Book of Disquiet , whose ultimate ambition was to reflect the jagged thoughts and fractured emotions that can inhabit one man, achieved this modest but genuine unity. There was perhaps, in the twentieth century, no other book as honest as this Book , which can hardly claim to be one.
    Honesty. It went unmentioned until now, and it’s what most distinguishes The Book of Disquiet . It is probably fair to call honesty the pre-eminent virtue of great writers, for whom the most personal things become, through the alchemy of truth, universal. Strangely or not, it was precisely in his faking, in his self-othering – a profoundly personal process – that Pessoa was astonishingly true and honest to himself. By being so who he was, and so very Portuguese, he succeeded in being the most foreign and universal of writers. ‘My nation is the Portuguese language,’ he declared through Bernardo Soares (Text 259), but he also said: ‘I don’t write in Portuguese. I write my own self.’ And immediately before these words he exclaims: ‘What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life – me, so calm and peaceful?’ (Text 443).
    In the lucidly felt prose of Bernardo Soares, Pessoa wrote himself, wrote his century, and wrote us – down to the hells and heavens weharbour, even if we’re unbelievers, like Pessoa. Soares called this implausible book his ‘confessions’, but they have nothing to do with the religious or literary variety. In these pages there is no hope or even desire for remission or salvation. There is also no self-pity, and no attempt to aestheticize the narrator’s irremediably human condition. Bernardo Soares doesn’t confess except in the sense of ‘recognize’, and the object of that recognition is of no great consequence. He describes his own self, because it is the landscape that is closest and most real, the one he can describe best. And what was flesh became word. Here is the assistant bookkeeper’s confession:
    I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write… I’ve made myself into