The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

unknown and external, a swaying of branches in distant rows of trees, a gentle falling of leaves, their sound noted more than their fall, the ocean spray of far-off fountains, and all the uncertainty of parks at night, lost in endless tangles, natural labyrinths of darkness!… To cease, to end at last, but surviving as something else: the page of abook, a tuft of dishevelled hair, the quiver of the creeping plant next to a half-open window, the irrelevant footsteps in the gravel of the bend, the last smoke to rise from the village going to sleep, the wagoner’s whip left on the early morning roadside… Absurdity, confusion, oblivion – everything that isn’t life…
    In my own way I sleep, without slumber or repose, this vegetative life of imagining, and the distant reflection of the silent street lamps, like the quiet foam of a dirty sea, hovers behind my restless eyebrows.
    I sleep and unsleep.
    Behind me, on the other side of where I’m lying down, the silence of the house touches infinity. I hear time fall, drop by drop, and not one drop that falls can be heard. My physical heart is physically oppressed by the almost forgotten memory of all that has been or that I’ve been. I feel my head materially supported by the pillow in which it makes a valley. My skin and the skin of the pillowcase are like two people touching in the shadows. Even the ear on which I’m lying mathematically engraves itself on my brain. I blink with fatigue, and my eyelashes make an infinitesimal, inaudible sound against the felt whiteness of the pillow’s slope. I breathe, sighing, and my breathing happens – it isn’t mine. I suffer without feeling or thinking. The house’s clock, definitely located in the midst of the infinite, strikes the half hour, dry and void. Everything is so full, so deep, so black and so cold!
    I pass times, I pass silences; formless worlds pass by me.
    Like a child of Mystery, a cock suddenly crows, unaware that it’s night-time. I can sleep, for it’s morning in me. And I feel my mouth smile, slightly displacing the soft pleats of the pillowcase pressed against my face. I can surrender to life, I can sleep, I can forget myself… And as incipient slumber wraps me in darkness, either I remember the cock that crowed, or it is the cock itself that crows a second time.

32
S YMPHONY OF A R ESTLESS N IGHT
    Everything was sleeping as if the universe were a mistake. The wind, blowing uncertainly, was a formless flag unfurled over a non-existent army post. High, strong gusts ripped through nothing at all, and the window-frames shook their panes to make the edges rattle. Underlying everything, the hushed night was the tomb of God* (and my soul felt sorry for God).
    Suddenly a new order of universal things acted on the city, the wind whistled in its lulls, and there was a slumbering awareness of countless agitations on high. Then the night closed like a trapdoor, and a vast calm made me wish I’d been sleeping.

33
    During the first days of Autumn when nightfall arrives suddenly, as if prematurely, and it seems we took longer to do our day’s work, I enjoy, while still working, the thought of not working which the darkness brings, for the darkness is night, and night means sleep, home, freedom. When the lights come on, dispelling darkness from the large office, and we continue our day’s work in the beginning of night, I feel a comfort that’s absurd, like a remembrance belonging to someone else, and I’m at peace with the numbers I write, as if I were reading while waiting to fall asleep.
    We’re all slaves of external circumstances. A sunny day transports us from a café on a narrow side street to wide-open fields; an overcast sky in the country makes us close up, taking shelter as best we can in the house without doors of our own self; the onset of night, even in the midst of daytime activities, enlarges – like a slowly opening fan – our awareness that we ought to rest.
    But the work doesn’t slow down;