In this thread I'm going to post quotations from "The Book of Disquiet" by Fernando Pessoa.
The book is written by an anonymous office worker in Lisbon, Portugal. He has no friends, no romantic experience, and experiences a great deal of sadness and nausea at the state of his existence. It is written in brief passages, some in diary form and others as analysis of a certain emotion, memory or aspect of his interior life.The book was discovered after the author's death, and has since become fairly popular.
If you enjoy the thread, please bump. Otherwise I will continue posting until I become too tired to continue.
>>24764611
Someone I trust told me that this book was a masterpiece. Watching this thread intently.
On asking little from life
>"I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunshine, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me - this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we're mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our coat"
p.16
On his writing and potential audience
>"Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self-expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams and their hopeless hopes"
p.16
if it was anonymous why do have his name and picture? I sure hope my 4chan posts aren't discovered, published and credited to me posthumously.
Keep posting, please.
Very interested in hearing about robots in past times.
Portuguese anon here, this book is fantastic but it ends up getting a bit repetitive after a while. Still, Pessoa's writing style is extremely captivating and something that unfortunately doesn't translate as well to English (just like any other foreign work translated).
>>24764611
>being a wagekek
Deserved tbqh
Volta para o ptchan.
Cumps
NOTE: I'm typing these out so that explains the gap between each post.
On impulses and sentiments which do not endure
>"Futile and sensitive, I'm capable of violent and consuming impulses - both good and bad, noble and vile - but never of a sentiment that endures, never of an emotion that continues, entering into the substance of my soul [...] My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me"
p.20
On writing his feelings
>"If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant."
p.21
On being incapable of escaping unhappiness
>"Whenever I've tried to free my life from a set of the circumstances that continuously oppress it, I've been instantly surrounded by other circumstances of the same order, as if the inscrutable web of creation were irrevocably at odds with me"
p.26
>>24764727
I should clarify. Pessoa was a rather strange writer in that he adopted dozens of pseudonyms and invented identities (similar to Kierkegaard) and published under many different names. This book is by Pessoa but the narrator is an anonymous office assistant.
Are you the guy who posted about that hitler biography?
>>24764904
Yes that's me.
Camoes is the best portuguese writer, anon. He was a robot too.
OP was this originally in Spanish?
>On waking up and feeling unprepared to exist
>"I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist. I paced from one side of the room to the other, dreaming out loud incoherent and impossible things - deeds I'd forgotten to do, hopeless ambitions haphazardly realized, fluid and lively conversations which, were they to be, would have already been. And in this reverie without grandeur or calm, in this hopeless and endless dallying, I paced away my free morning, and my words - said out loud in a low voice - multiplied in the echoing cloister of my inglorious isolation"
p.31
On living a vegetative 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 the dirty sea, hovers behind my restless eyebrows"
p.34
This book is in my backlog. It's sad to hear the English translation isn't as good as the original Portuguese, but I'll still read it.
I'm currently reading Murphy by Samuel Beckett. I recommend it, if you're a NEET (like the main character).
>>24764985
Portuguese. This is from the Penguin translation by Richard Zenith.
>>24764611
This is a good book.
Do you have the one about how pain isn't permanent, it just feels that way when we're experiencing it?
>>24765020
>"I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist. I paced from one side of the room to the other, dreaming out loud incoherent and impossible things - deeds I'd forgotten to do, hopeless ambitions haphazardly realized, fluid and lively conversations which, were they to be, would have already been. And in this reverie without grandeur or calm, in this hopeless and endless dallying, I paced away my free morning, and my words - said out loud in a low voice - multiplied in the echoing cloister of my inglorious isolation"
mother of god, I do this too.
>tfw pacing for hours upon hours, night after night
On retreating into one's self
>"I retreat into myself, get lost in myself, forget myself in faraway nights uncontaminated by duty and the world, undefiled by mystery and the future."
p.36
On the external world as a nightmare
>"...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 averstion to effort becomes an almost writhing horror before all forms of violent effort."
p.37
On nausea and being a stranger in the company of others
>"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 down-town 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"
p.37 / 38
On always being sad
>"All the pent-up bitterness of my life removes, before my sensationless eyes, the suit of natural happiness it wears in the random events that fill up each day. I realize that, while often happy and often cheerful, I'm always sad. And the part of me that realizes this is behind me, as if bent over my leaning self at the window, as if looking over my shoulder or even over my head to contemplate, with eyes more intimate than my own, the slow and now wavy rain which filigrees the grey and inclement air"
p.42
On the filthiness of never changing
>"Only as a lack of personal hygiene can I understand my wallowing in this flat, invariable life I lead, this dust or filth stuck on the surface of never changing"
p.42
Thanks OP, you convinced me to read this book.
How long is it?
On dying
>"Whoever lives like me doesn't die: he terminates, wilts, dries up. The place where he was remains without him being there; the street where he walked remains without being being seen on it; the house where he lived is inhabited by not-him. That's all, and we call it nothing: but not even this tragedy of negation can be staged to applause"
p.44
On life's destructive horror
>"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 never to have been anything, a conscious despair in every cell of my soul's body. It's the sudden feeling of being imprisoned in an infinite cell. Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything?"
p.45
>>24765407
My copy is around 450 pages. The format (short passages) makes it pretty easy to read, and the lack of narrative / story means that it can be read over time without fear of forgetting the name of a character and so on.
On one's external appearance disguising one's internal state
>"And I walk, I roam, I keep going. Nothing in my movements (I notice by what others don't notice) transmits my state of stagnation to the observable plane. And this spiritless state, which would be natural and therefore comfortable in someone lying down or reclining, is singularly uncomfortable, even painful, in a man walking down the street"
p.46
On company and solitude
>"Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other's presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define."
p.48
>>24765492
Does Pessoa not write actual stories in his books? Just whatever is in his mind?
I know he was primarily a poet, but in prose, did he ever write an actual narrative?
On isolation
>"Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness. The presence of another person - of any person whatsoever - instantly slows down my thinking, and while for a normal man contact with others is a stimulus to spoken expression and wit, for me its a counterstimulus [...] When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer peak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like in image in a mirror"
p.48 / 49
>>24765576
This is the only thing I've read of him so I can't say. The book is marketed as a "factless autobiography", and in the preface we learn that its contents were handed to the person who published it by a man who ate by himself in the same cafe every night and spent his time writing because he had no friends, no romantic life, and so on.
On daydreams
>"Romanticism is merely the turning inside out of the empire we normally carry around inside us. Nearly all men dream, deep down, of their own mighty imperialism: the subjection of all men, the surrender of all women, the adoration of all peoples and - for the noblest dreamers - of all eras."
p.54
On his appearance in an office photo
>"I've never had a flattering notion of my physical appearance, but I never felt it to be more insignificant than there, next to the familiar faces of my colleagues, in that line-up of daily expressions. [...] My gaunt and inexpressive face has no intelligence or intensity or anything else to raise it out of the lifeless tide of faces. [...] 'You came out really well,' Moreira said suddenly. And then, turning to the sales representative: 'It's his spitting image - don't you think?' And the sales representative agreed with a happy affability that tossed me into the rubbish bin."
p.57
On people in the street
>"I suppose that most of the people I chance to pass in the street also feel - I notice it in their silently moving lips and in their eyes' vague uncertainty, or in the sometimes raised voice of their joint mumbling - like a flagless army fighting a hopeless war. And probably all of them [...] share with me this sense of menial squalor, of definitive defeat amid reeds and scum, with no moonlight over the shores or poetry in the marshes."
p.60
On being ineligible to live
>"My hapless peers with their lofty dreams - how I envy and despise them! I'm with the others, with the even more hapless, who have no one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I'm with these poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature besides their own soul [...], and who are suffocating to death due to the fact they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live."
p.61
On the nobility of failure
>"It's noble to be timid, illustrious to fail to act, sublime to be inept at living."
p.62
On despising happy people
>"Let's not forget to hate those who enjoy, just because they enjoy, and to despise those who are happy, because we don't know how to be happy like them."
p.62
>>24765576
Fernando Pessoa was actually a very peculiar author, he always used different, you can say, personas on his writings, so they all feel different depending on the book.
For example, one of his personas was called Alvaro de Campos, an anti-social nervous guy, and the book was wrote as if some guy named Alvaro de Campos was real and wrote it with his unique style, which is totally different from Fernando Pessoa different personas, which he had a lot, some of them religious, other more atheists, nature-like and so on.
You can read one book of Pessoa and then read another one and feel totally different vibes and see messages that someway contradict or negates others from his other "personalities".
TL;DR: He's an author with diverging personalities in which he writes as if they are different people.
On wanting to poison the lives of happy people
>"How I'd love to infect at least one soul with some kind of poison, worry or disquiet! This would console me a little for my chronic failure to take action. My life's purpose would be to pervert. But do my words ring in anyone else's soul? Does anyone hear them besides me?"
p.66
On being incompatible with others
>"The cause of my profound sense of incompatibility with others is, I believe, that most people think with their feelings, whereas I feel with my thoughts."
p.71
On dreams as a shelter from life
>"My dreams are a stupid shelter, like an umbrella against lightning. I'm so listless, so pathetic, so short on gestures and actions. However deeply I delve into myself, all of my dreams' paths lead to clearings of anxiety."
p.79
On sensitivity and suffering
>"every visible edge cuts the skin of my soul. Every harsh thing I see wounds the part of me that recognizes its harshness. Every object's visible weight weighs heavy inside my soul. It's as if my life amounted to being thrashed by it."
p.79
On one's identity when not performing for others
>"I become so small and innocuous, so alone in a room so large and sad, so profoundly sad! Who am I, finally, when I'm not playing? A poor orphan left out in the cold among sensations, shivering on the street corners of Reality, forced to sleep on the steps of Sadness and to eat the bread offered by Fantasy. [...] When will all of this end - these streets where I drag my misery, these steps where I coldly crouch and feel the night running its hands through my tatters?"
p.85
On embracing the meaningless of life
>"The only attitude worthy of a superior man is to doggedly pursue and activity he recognizes is useless, to observer a discipline he knows is sterile, and to adopt norms of philosophical and metaphysical thought that he considers utterly inconsequential."
p.86
On dreaming and inner life
>"I've never done anything but dream. This, and this lone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life."
p.88
On not asking much of life (2)
>"All I asked of life is that it go on by without my feeling it. All I demanded of life is that it never stop being a distant dream."
p.89
On consciousness as an illness
>"Life's basic malady, that of being conscious, enters my body and makes me uneasy. To have no islands where those of us who are uncomfortable could go, not ancient garden paths reserved for those who've retreated into dreaming!"
p.91
On sensitivity and disdain
>"I endure the sensitivity of my feelings with an attitude of disdain. [...] I find myself partially described in novels as the protagonist of various plots, but the essence of my life and soul is never to be a protagonist."
p.102
On masturbation as a logical expression of love
>"We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept - our own selves - that we love. [...] In sexual love we seek our own pleasure via another body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via our own idea. The masturbator may be abject, but in point of fact he's the perfect logical expression of the lover. He's the only one who doesn't feign and doesn't fool himself."
p.105
On isolation (2)
>"I've sculpted myself in quiet isolation and placed myself in a hothouse, cut off from fresh air and direct light - where the absurd flower of my artificiality can blossom in secluded beauty."
p.107
On being ridiculed
>"I don't care if others laugh at my expense, for I have the advantage of an armoured contempt towards whatever's outside me."
p.110
On refusing to co-operate with society
>"I refuse to submit to the state or to men; I passively resist. The state can only want me for some sort of action. As long as I don't act there's nothing it can get from me. Since capital punishment has been abolished, the most it can do is harass me; were this to occur, I would have to armour my soul even more, and live even deeper inside my dreams."
p.110
On hating novelty
>"Like all men endowed with great mental mobility, I have an irrevocable, organic love of settledness. I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. [...] Life makes me feel a vague nausea, and any kind of movement aggravates it."
p.110 / 111
On feeling
>"The argonauts said that it wasn't necessary to live, only to sail. We, argonauts of morbid sensibility, do well to say that it's not necessaril to love, only to feel."
p.115
On feeling (2)
>"The burden of feeling! The burden of having to feel!"
p.123
OP here. I'm pretty tired now. I hope this thread was interesting.
>>24766541
It was, thanks OP.
Bumpy
Original addition to this image board
