The Book of Disquiet Read Free

Landscape’, became generic designations, applied to various texts that shared the announced theme or atmosphere but remained autonomous. Other titles, such as ‘Our Lady of Silence’, denoted ambitious works in progress, made up of passages written at different times and varying in length from a few scribbled sentences to several pages crammed with tiny letters. And there are titles for which no texts have been found, perhaps because they were never written. (Pessoa’s archives contain dozens of lists with titles for non-existent poems,stories, treatises and entire books. Had he even halfway realized all his literary projects, the tomes would fill up a respectable library. The Book of Disquiet , a non-book in the non-library, is emblematic of the capricious author’s difficulty.) These early texts attempted to elucidate a psychic state or mood via a deliberately archaic use of gothic and romantic themes. Lush descriptions of court life, of sexless women, of strange weather and unreal landscapes prevail. The underlying psyche belongs to Pessoa but is abstracted. The writing is impersonal and the narrative voice ethereal, with the things and the words that name things all seeming to hover in a yellowish space. The word ‘disquiet’ refers not so much to an existential trouble in man as to the restlessness and uncertainty everywhere present and now distilled in the rhetorical narrator. But other forms of disquiet start to impinge on the work, which takes unexpected turns.
    Not so unexpected, perhaps, was the theoretical and pedagogical dimension that emerged here as it did almost everywhere in Pessoa’s œuvre . It was only natural, even inevitable, that the oneiric texts of Disquiet would lead to expository texts that set forth the why and how of dreams, with the four passages titled ‘The Art of Effective Dreaming’ constituting a veritable manual for dreamers at all levels, from beginner to advanced. ‘Sentimental Education’, in much the same way, serves as a kind of primer to accompany the many ‘Sensationist’ texts.
    It was likewise in this didactic spirit, but with a rather bizarre result, that Pessoa wrote his ‘Advice to Unhappily Married Women’, in which he teaches dissatisfied wives how to cheat on their husbands by ‘imagining an orgasm with man A while copulating with man B’, a practice that yields best results ‘in the days immediately preceding menstruation’.
    Pessoa’s sexual abstinence (it is probable, though not provable, that he died a virgin) was by his own account a conscious choice, which he apparently sought to justify in The Book of Disquiet , with passages insisting on the impossibility of possessing another body, on the superiority of love in two dimensions (enjoyed by couples that inhabit paintings, stained-glass windows and Chinese teacups), and on the virtues of renunciation and asceticism. The Book , indeed, is rife with religious vocabulary, although the mysticism preached by Pessoahallowed no god, except perhaps himself (‘God is me,’ he concludes in ‘The Art of Effective Dreaming for Metaphysical Minds’).
    But more than anything else, it was existential concerns – operating on both a general and personal level – that subverted the initial project of The Book of Disquiet . On a general level, since The Book ’s author belonged ‘to a generation that inherited disbelief in the Christian faith and created in itself a disbelief in all other faiths’. And since ‘we were left, each man to himself, in the desolation of feeling ourselves live’, the generational sense of lostness quickly became a personal struggle for identity and meaning (Text 306). Pessoa’s inner life – registered in ‘Fragments of an Autobiography’, ‘Apocalyptic Feeling’ and similar texts, with and without titles – invaded the pages of what had begun as a very different kind of book. Pessoa realized that the project had slipped out of his hand (if in fact he’d ever firmly