#the book of disquiet

“I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to me to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.”

Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

metamorphesque:

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

[text ID: I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.]

“I failed life even before I had lived it, because even as I dreamed it, I failed to see its appeal. All I felt was the weariness of dreams, and then I was filled with a final, false sensation, as if I had reached the end of an infinite road. I overflowed the bounds of myself although quite where I don’t know, and there I lay stagnant and useless. I am some thing that I once was. I cannot find myself when I feel and if I go looking for myself, I don’t know who it is looking for me. A sense of utter tedium saps my energy. I feel like an exile from my own soul.

I watch myself, I am a witness to myself. My feelings parade past some unrecognizable gaze of mine like things external. Everything about me bores me. Everything, right down to its mysterious roots, has taken on the color of my tedium.

The flowers the Hours gave me were already past their best. All I can do now is slowly pick off the petals, a process grown more complex with the years.

I find the slightest action impossible, as if it were some heroic deed. The mere thought of making the smallest gesture weighs on me as if it were something I was actually considering doing.

I aspire to nothing. Life wounds me. I feel uncomfortable where I am and uncomfortable where I think I could be.

The ideal would be to undertake no more action than the false action of a fountain-rising only to fall in the same place, glittering pointlessly in the sunlight and making a noise in the silence of the night that would set any dreamer dreaming of rivers, an absent smile on his lips.”

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.

I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, 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.

I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it – without knowing why. (The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa)