The Book of Disquiet Read Free Page B

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 grasped it), for in yet another letter to Cortes-Rodrigues he wrote that
The Book of Disquiet
, ‘that pathological production’, was going ‘complexly and tortuously forward’, as if of its own accord.
    And so Pessoa let the book go, scribbling
B. of D.
at the head of all sorts of texts, sometimes as an afterthought, or with a question mark indicating doubt.
The Book of Disquiet
– forever tentative, indefinite and in transition – is one of those rare works in which
forme
and
fond
perfectly reflect each other. Always with the intention of revising and assembling the variously handwritten and typed passages, but never with the courage or patience to take up the task, Pessoa kept adding material, and the parameters of the already unwieldy work kept expanding. Besides his post-Symbolist flights and diary-like musings, Pessoa included maxims, sociological observations, aesthetic credos, theological reflections and cultural analyses. He even put the
B. of D.
trademark on the copy of a letter to his mother (in Appendix II).
    Though Pessoa hatched dozens of publication plans for his works, he saw only one real book,
Mensagem
(
Message
), make it into print, the year before he died. (He self-published several chap-books of his English poems.) Pessoa was so addicted to writing and scheming – and the schemes included unlikely business ventures as well as the publication of his
œuvre
– that he had no time or energy left over to get that
œuvre
into publishable shape. Or perhaps it was just tootedious to think about. Nothing better illustrates the problem than
The Book of Disquiet
, a micro-chaos within the larger chaos of Pessoa’s written universe. But that consummate disorder is what gives
The Book
its peculiar greatness. It is like a treasure chest of both polished and uncut gems, which can be arranged and rearranged in infinite combinations, thanks precisely to the lack of a pre-established order.
    No other work of Pessoa interacted so intensely with the rest of his universe. If Bernardo Soares says that his heart ‘drains out… like a broken bucket’ (Text 154) or that his mental life is ‘a bucket that got knocked over’ (Text 442), Álvaro de Campos declares ‘My heart is a poured-out bucket’ (in ‘The Tobacco Shop’) and compares his thinking to ‘an overturned bucket’ (in a poem dated 16 August 1934). If Soares thinks that ‘Nothing is more oppressive than the affection of others’ (Text 348), a Ricardo Reis ode (dated 1 November 1930) maintains that ‘The same love by which we’re loved/Oppresses us with its wanting.’ And when the assistant bookkeeper longs to ‘notice