You've got to be fucking kidding me with this shit. I mean I opened this up with no preconceived notions nor sense of what the book actually was about. I'm about 7 of his journal entries in now, all I can think is that this makes the vaguest of fucking sense and I have to re-read sentences so many times over again before I finally feel I get what he's trying to say. You know know why that's what the fuck? Because it's really hard, this book is hard to read. I mean, why do people think this is some of the best writing of all time? I mean, do you think that you're just so much smarter than me that you actually get the meaning of the book and it touched you profoundly on some deep level? I really don't get it and I think his Pessoa's writing is extremely hard to digest.
>>8115336
>t. lower consciousness pleb
>>8115336
<---
you're supposed to read it at 2:30am after years of existential angst turning into bitter cynicism have softened into a numb indifference
if you are a normie you have no chance
>>8115369
in other words, you are trying too hard
this book isn't supposed to be analysed like it was Kant's critique of pure reason; it's supposed to be read in a half-awake delirium, shifting from one thought to another amusedly
>>8115336
Dunno how you manage it, but I don't find it too hard to read, maybe a dictionary is needed max.
It also is very well written, and a little relatable. One of my favorites
>>8115371
Is that a euphemism for /pol/?
it's shitty whining for 400+ pages that appeals to /r9k/ losers like >>8115369
>do you think that you're just so much smarter than me
>>8115385
my jolly good chap I thank you for that quite splendid laugh. I did enjoy reading this post and the picture of the dog with the pained smile accompanying it. It's funny when you put things into perspective sometimes. someone just types lol at what I say and I all of a sudden see what I say in a funny light. Could that really be all that life is about, is finding the perspectives that serve the best mood?
>>8115336
God, now that I've started going on /lit/ more regularly again, I'm astounded by how much bait gets posted every day. I get that you're bored, but can't you find a better hobby? Direct that time and mental energy elsewhere.
>>8115407
I'm being serious.
>>8115396
ello govna! I'm gona be straight, just plain straight wit you today my good chap! I enjoyed very very quite much this post of yours, haha, in which you, haha, were so inventive and so clever as to how do you put it.. "ironize" the irony of this fellow >>8115385 right up here! Very good stuff, my good chap! (I apologize for the good chap bit, it's simply part of my native dialect, haha!) I enjoyed the part where you wondered "could that really be all that life is about, is finding the perspectives that serve the best mood?" because you seemed to me, mind I put it, "ironizing" (What a nifty word, haha) this man quite thoroughly! It's quite ironic (which in itself, is ironic once again, haha) that you yourself, have now "ironized" the "ironer!" Anyways, my good chap, keep up the good posts, and I hope to see you again on the chan!
>>8115408
Alright, if you insist.
>I mean, why do people think this is some of the best writing of all time?
They don't. It's not. Not by a long shot. It's somewhat interesting and emotionally affective, but anyone who thinks it's "some of the best writing" is probably delusional or a pseud.
>I have to re-read sentences so many times over again before I finally feel I get what he's trying to say.
On one hand, I know where you're coming from. It is dense.
On the other hand, if you find this challenging, there's no way you'll be able to trudge through a lot of western philosophy and more difficult literature in general.
>>8115450
>, but anyone who thinks it's "some of the best writing"
I find it far more interesting and valuable than any of the other moderns like Joyce or Eliot.
The abstract intelligence produces a fatigue that’s the worst of all fatigues. It doesn’t weigh on us like bodily fatigue, nor disconcert like the fatigue of emotional experience. It’s the weight of our consciousness of the world, a shortness of breath in our soul.
Then, as if they were wind-blown clouds, all of the ideas in which we’ve felt life and all the ambitions and plans on which we’ve based our hopes for the future tear apart and scatter like ashes of fog, tatters of what wasn’t nor could ever be. And behind this disastrous rout, the black and implacable solitude of the desolate starry sky appears.
The mystery of life distresses and frightens us in many ways. Sometimes it comes upon us like a formless phantom, and the soul trembles with the worst of fears – that of the monstrous incarnation of non-being. At other times it’s behind us, visible only as long as we don’t turn around to look at it, and it’s the truth in its profound horror of our never being able to know it.
But the horror that’s destroying me today is less noble and more corrosive. It’s a longing to be free of wanting to have thoughts, a desire to never have been anything, a conscious despair in every cell of my body and soul. It’s the sudden feeling of being imprisoned in an infinite cell. Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything?
And then I feel an overwhelming, absurd desire for a kind of Satanism before Satan, a desire that one day – a day without time or substance – an escape leading outside of God will be discovered, and our deepest selves will somehow cease participating in being and non-being.
>>8115484
Then you just go for lower-hanging fruit. That's all there is to it.
>>8115545
You mean I go for things that are easier to understand?
The reason I think Pessoa is greater than Eliot and Joyce is because Eliot and Joyce are disappointed romantics, whereas Pessoa is an actual modern with a vision entirely distinct from romanticism.
>>8115560
Could you elaborate?
>>8115336
>I really don't get it
There's not much to get. It's just Soares' pseudo-zennist ramblings that he thinks make him look smart alternating with whining about how depressed he is because his abstract intelligence that's so much greater than everybody else's makes him realize that everything is meaningless.
If Pessoa intended him to be an insufferable faggot this is one of the most accurate books ever written. Otherwise it's Pessoa that's the faggot.
>tfw reading the book of disquiet is literally like reading my own thoughts and diary
i might be the incarnation of pessoa.
>>8115644
Joyce was literally a failed romantic poet in that he idolised Byron and Shelley but couldn't compete. His Dubliners and Portrait are romantic in content. Ulysses is not romantic but it is modernist in the most obnoxious sense, as a mere experiment with form/style.
Eliot's entire corpus is one, long, sustained whine at the decrepitude of modernity with a kind of nostalgia for the good old days.
What separates Pessoa from all the other moderns is that all the other moderns are bogged down in "historical consciousness", in the consciousness of what came before. Ulysses is a pastiche of all Western literature up to that point. Eliot's The Waste Land is also a literary pastiche. Pessoa does not deal with this idea of history. This is why Ricardo Reis' epigram to Alberto Caeiro's works reads:
>O rejoice, all you weeping
>In History, our worst disease!
>Great Pan is reborn!
Pessoa does not so much care about "modernity" as an historical period or literary movement; this is all accidental to him; he just takes man as he is, and if he happens to be modern he accepts it. It's a lot like Kafka in this sense, in the sense that Kafka uses a modern setting to tell an eternal truth about man; whereas the typical modern is always a relativist who is only ever speaking about the "modern condition" as a mere historical period. It's like the battle between Hegel and Kierkegaard; Hegel asserts the inexorable march of the historical dialectic which eats up the individual; Kierkegaard asserts the eternal validity of the individual irrespective of any historical conditions. Most moderns are historicists who see their allegiance as being primarily to their "era", to summing up their "times", to being the "voice of a generation"; Pessoa, like Kierkegaard, does not give a shit about an era, times, or a generation, he is more concerned with eternity than the times, and with the individual than the generation.
There's a part in Joyce's Ulysses where Stephen says that history is just a shout in the street; this insight is ironic and doesn't really belong to Joyce, because his whole work is obsessed with that shout in the street called history. Joyce, Eliot, and other moderns are conscious of themselves as belonging to a literary movement belonging to a historical period; whereas Pessoa is an independent literary man who just happens to borrow some of the popular literary forms in his day in order to express what concerns HIM, rather than what concerns his era or generation.
>>8115793
So you think Pessoa had a better worldview, and his art is therefore greater?
I hope you are reading this in portuguese.
