The Book of Disquiet

The Book of Disquiet is a journal by Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa. Published by his friends in 1961, it contains Pessoa’s reflections beginning in 1912 at the age of twenty-four as he anticipated World War I. Pessoa wrote the book mainly for himself under the pseudonym Bernardo Soares, and it was not published until nearly half a century after he died in 1935. Though the format of the book is difficult to pin down, it reads like a diary or journal, dealing with the internal life of the seemingly banal “Soares” as he works as a simple assistant to a bookkeeper in Lisbon. The book became known as a great work in the genre of world literature for its simplistic yet poignant characterization of the ordinary life of a lower-class Portuguese person.

The Book of Disquiet is highly segmented and nonlinear, broken into a large number of reflective vignettes that resonate in content and syntax between poetry and prose. The main theme that connects each reflection is the inexpressibility of the qualia of the introspective life, which Pessoa approximates using a simplicity and economy of diction. Yet, at the same time, the work is very complex, often arriving at certain self-insights only after a verbal struggle. While some authors might eliminate the semantic slippages or verbal intermediates that interplay between the moments of feeling and insight, Pessoa leaves them all on the page to be reckoned with, suggesting a unity between them.

Some of Pessoa’s arguments and insights are seemingly illogical, only sensible after we suspend our trained demand for lucid and well-formed argument. For example, he once muses that the human heart would stop if it were able to think. Here, he does more than revisit the classic personification of the organ as the site of human love, suggesting, instead, an emotional life that is plural and intensely cogitative. Pessoa also, occasionally, rejects common narratives about self-inquiry being a happy process: in his view, it leads also to alienation and anguish.

Pessoa’s reflections remain detached from much of their content even as he lingers on them. Frequently, he uses imagery of being interrupted or “bisected,” even comparing himself to a Siamese twin, to point at his emotional estrangement from the objects of his imagination. He states that he suffers from chronic headaches, but equates these symptoms with the fact of existing in, and thus being forced to think about, the universe. Almost any experience draws him to the “headache” of deep, dreamlike reflection, whether the sites of old, unintelligible memory around Lisbon or its contemporary cafes and venues.

Some of Pessoa’s vignettes discuss the authors whom he loves. These include Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, and Dante. Though he exalts these figures, he is equally willing to critique them; in one passage, he calls King Lear  “defective” while expressing his love for its creative spirit. He also discusses his love for the classics of Virgil, Horace, and Homer. Some writers are more obscure and include Stéphane Mallarmé, Heinrich Heine, Paul Verlaine, and François-René de Chateaubriand.

Pessoa never thought of the fragments that would someday become The Book of Disquiet as making up a book; nevertheless, the fact that they were eventually bound into one serves as a testament to its many cohesive properties. Possibly an even greater irony, which speaks to a self-contradiction Pessoa never publicly expressed, is that “Pessoa” translates to “Person” in English. Pessoa, who so often described himself as hardly a being of all, was unable to deny the bonds of personhood that connect him, across time, to his readers and the rest of humanity.