Read Online The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa - Free Book Online
Authors: Fernando Pessoa
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see. What I got out of it are these pages, the fruit of contradiction and forgetting. I don’t know if this is better or worse than the contrary, nor do I know what the contrary is.
The train slows down, we’re at Cais do Sodré.* I’ve arrived at Lisbon, but not at a conclusion.
17
Perhaps it’s finally time for me to make this one effort: to take a good look at my life. I see myself in the midst of a vast desert. I tell what I literarily was yesterday, and I try to explain to myself how I got here.
18
With merely a kind of smile in my soul, I passively consider the definitive confinement of my life to the Rua dos Douradores, to this office, to the people who surround me. An income sufficient for food and drink, a roof over my head, and a little free time in which to dream and write, to sleep – what more can I ask of the Gods or expect from Destiny?
I’ve had great ambitions and boundless dreams, but so has the delivery boy* or the seamstress, because everyone has dreams. What distinguishes certain of us is our capacity for fulfilling them, or our destiny that they be fulfilled.
In dreams I am equal to the delivery boy and the seamstress. I differ from them only in knowing how to write. Yes, writing is an act, a personal circumstance that distinguishes me from them. But in my soul I’m their equal.
I realize that there are islands to the South and great cosmopolitan attractions and.....
If I had the world in my hand, I’m quite sure I would trade it for a ticket to Rua dos Douradores.
Perhaps my destiny is to remain forever a bookkeeper, with poetry or literature as a butterfly that alights on my head, making me look ridiculous to the extent it looks beautiful.
I’ll miss Moreira, but what’s that next to a glorious promotion?
I know that the day I become head bookkeeper of Vasques & Co. will be one of the great days of my life. I know it with foretasted bitterness and irony, but also with the intellectual advantage of certainty.
19
In the cove on the seashore, among the woods and meadows that fronted the beach, the fickleness of inflamed desire rose out of the uncertainty of the blank abyss. To choose the wheat or to choose the many [ sic ] was all the same, and the distance kept going, through cypress trees.
The magic power of words in isolation, or joined together on the basis of sound, with inner reverberations and divergent meanings even as they converge, the splendour of phrases inserted between the meanings of other phrases, the virulence of vestiges, the hope of the woods, and the absolute peacefulness of the ponds on the farms of my childhood of ruses… And so, within the high walls of absurd audacity, in the rows of trees and in the startled tremors of what withers, someone other than me would hear from sad lips the confession denied to more insistent parties. Never again, not even if the knights were to come back on the road that was visible from the top of the wall, would there be peace in the Castle of the Last Souls, where lances jangled in the unseen courtyard, nor would any other name on this side of the road be remembered but the one which at night would enchant, like the Moorish ladies of folklore,* the child who later died to life and to wonder.
Over the furrows in the grass, like remembrances of what was to come, the treading of the last lost men sounded ever so lightly, their dragging steps opening nothings in the restless greenery. Those who would come were bound to be old, and only the young would never arrive. The drums rumbled on the roadside, and the bugles hung uselessly from exhausted arms that would have dropped them if they still had strength enough to drop something.
But when the illusion was over, the dead clamour sounded yet again, and the dogs could be seen nervously hesitating on the tree-lined paths. It was all absurd, like mourning the dead, and princesses from other people’s dreams strolled about freely and indefinitely.
20
Whenever I’ve tried to free my
The train slows down, we’re at Cais do Sodré.* I’ve arrived at Lisbon, but not at a conclusion.
17
Perhaps it’s finally time for me to make this one effort: to take a good look at my life. I see myself in the midst of a vast desert. I tell what I literarily was yesterday, and I try to explain to myself how I got here.
18
With merely a kind of smile in my soul, I passively consider the definitive confinement of my life to the Rua dos Douradores, to this office, to the people who surround me. An income sufficient for food and drink, a roof over my head, and a little free time in which to dream and write, to sleep – what more can I ask of the Gods or expect from Destiny?
I’ve had great ambitions and boundless dreams, but so has the delivery boy* or the seamstress, because everyone has dreams. What distinguishes certain of us is our capacity for fulfilling them, or our destiny that they be fulfilled.
In dreams I am equal to the delivery boy and the seamstress. I differ from them only in knowing how to write. Yes, writing is an act, a personal circumstance that distinguishes me from them. But in my soul I’m their equal.
I realize that there are islands to the South and great cosmopolitan attractions and.....
If I had the world in my hand, I’m quite sure I would trade it for a ticket to Rua dos Douradores.
Perhaps my destiny is to remain forever a bookkeeper, with poetry or literature as a butterfly that alights on my head, making me look ridiculous to the extent it looks beautiful.
I’ll miss Moreira, but what’s that next to a glorious promotion?
I know that the day I become head bookkeeper of Vasques & Co. will be one of the great days of my life. I know it with foretasted bitterness and irony, but also with the intellectual advantage of certainty.
19
In the cove on the seashore, among the woods and meadows that fronted the beach, the fickleness of inflamed desire rose out of the uncertainty of the blank abyss. To choose the wheat or to choose the many [ sic ] was all the same, and the distance kept going, through cypress trees.
The magic power of words in isolation, or joined together on the basis of sound, with inner reverberations and divergent meanings even as they converge, the splendour of phrases inserted between the meanings of other phrases, the virulence of vestiges, the hope of the woods, and the absolute peacefulness of the ponds on the farms of my childhood of ruses… And so, within the high walls of absurd audacity, in the rows of trees and in the startled tremors of what withers, someone other than me would hear from sad lips the confession denied to more insistent parties. Never again, not even if the knights were to come back on the road that was visible from the top of the wall, would there be peace in the Castle of the Last Souls, where lances jangled in the unseen courtyard, nor would any other name on this side of the road be remembered but the one which at night would enchant, like the Moorish ladies of folklore,* the child who later died to life and to wonder.
Over the furrows in the grass, like remembrances of what was to come, the treading of the last lost men sounded ever so lightly, their dragging steps opening nothings in the restless greenery. Those who would come were bound to be old, and only the young would never arrive. The drums rumbled on the roadside, and the bugles hung uselessly from exhausted arms that would have dropped them if they still had strength enough to drop something.
But when the illusion was over, the dead clamour sounded yet again, and the dogs could be seen nervously hesitating on the tree-lined paths. It was all absurd, like mourning the dead, and princesses from other people’s dreams strolled about freely and indefinitely.
20
Whenever I’ve tried to free my
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