The Book of Disquiet Read Online Free PDF

entropy, Pessoa sought at least a relative unity for his
Book of Disquiet
, ‘without giving up the dreaminess and logical disjointedness of its intimate expression’ (from the cited ‘note’ in Appendix III).
    In Bernardo Soares – a prose writer who poetizes, a dreamer who thinks, a mystic who doesn’t believe, a decadent who doesn’t indulge – Pessoa invented the best author possible (and who was just a mutilated copy of himself) to provide unity to a book which, by nature, couldn’t have one. The semi-fiction called Soares, more than a justification or handy solution for this scattered
Book
, is an implied model for whoever has difficulty adapting to real, normal, everyday life. The only way to survive in this world is by keeping alive our dream, without ever fulfilling it, since the fulfilment never measures up to what we imagine – this was the closest thing to a message that Pessoa left, and he gave us Bernardo Soares to show us how it’s done.
    How is it done? By not doing. By dreaming insistently. By performing our daily duties but
living
, simultaneously, in the imagination. Travelling far and wide, in the geography of our minds. Conquering like Caesar, amid the blaring trumpets of our reverie. Experiencing intense sexual pleasure, in the privacy of our fantasy. Feeling everything in every way, not in the 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,