The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa Page A

it gets livelier. We no longer work; we amuse ourselves with the labour to which we’re condemned. Andall of a sudden, across the huge columned sheet of my numerary destiny, the old house of my elderly aunts, shut off from the world, shelters the drowsy ten o’clock tea, and the kerosene lamp of my lost childhood, glowing only on the linen-covered table, blinds me to the sight of Moreira, illuminated by a black electricity infinities away from me. The maid, who is even older than my aunts, brings in the tea, along with the vestiges of her interrupted nap and the affectionately patient grumpiness of old-time servants, and across all my dead past I enter items and totals without a single mistake. I retreat into myself, get lost in myself, forget myself in far-away nights uncontaminated by duty and the world, undefiled by mystery and the future.
    And so gentle is the sensation that estranges me from debits and credits that if by chance I’m asked a question, I answer in a soft voice, as if my being were hollow, as if it were nothing more than a typewriter I carry around with me – portable, opened and ready. It doesn’t faze me when my dreams are interrupted; they’re so gentle that I keep dreaming them as I speak, write, answer, or even discuss. And through it all the long-lost tea finishes, the office is going to close… From the ledger which I slowly shut I raise my eyes, sore from the tears they didn’t shed, and with confused feelings I accept, because I must, that with the closing of my office my dream also closes; that as my hand shuts the ledger it also pulls a veil over my irretrievable past; that I’m going to life’s bed wide awake, unaccompanied and without peace, in the ebb and flow of my confused consciousness, like two tides in the black night where the destinies of nostalgia and desolation meet.

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    Sometimes I think I’ll never leave the Rua dos Douradores. And having written this, it seems to me eternity.
    Not pleasure, not glory, not power… Freedom, only freedom.
    To go from the phantoms of faith to the ghosts of reason is merely to change cells. Art, if it frees us from the abstract idols of old, shouldalso free us from magnanimous ideas and social concerns, which are likewise idols.
    To find our personality by losing it – faith itself endorses this destiny.

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    … and a deep and weary disdain for all those who work for mankind, for all those who fight for their country and give their lives so that civilization may continue…
    … a disdain full of disgust for those who don’t realize that the only reality is each man’s soul, and that everything else – the exterior world and other people – is but an unaesthetic nightmare, like the result, in dreams, of a mental indigestion.
    My aversion to effort becomes an almost writhing horror before all forms of violent effort. War, energetic and productive labour, helping others – all this strikes me as the product of an impertinence.....
    Everything useful and external tastes frivolous and trivial in the light of my soul’s supreme reality and next to the pure sovereign splendour of my more original and frequent dreams. These, for me, are more real.

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    It’s not the cracked walls of my rented room, nor the shabby desks in the office where I work, nor the poverty of the same old downtown streets in between, which I’ve crossed and recrossed so many times they seem to have assumed the immobility of the irreparable – none of that is responsible for my frequent feeling of nausea over the squalor of daily life. It’s the people who habitually surround me, the souls who know me through conversation and daily contact without knowing me at all – they’re the ones who cause a salivary knot of physical disgust to form in my throat. It’s the sordid monotony of their lives,outwardly parallel to my own, and their keen awareness that I’m their fellow man – that is what dresses me in a convict’s clothes, places me in a jail cell, and makes