The Book of Disquiet
By Fernando Pessoa
Translated by Alfred Macadam
Pantheon, 278 pages, $25
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), Portugal`s greatest modern poet, spent all but eight of his years in Lisbon-the dumpy, socially conservative capital of an impoverished country with a declining overseas empire and a miniscule middle class. There Pessoa`s distinctly modernist vision must have seemed as bizarre (to himself and others) as James Joyce`s in turn-of-the-century Dublin, while the city`s literary and intellectual life could hardly have offered him much company.
Appropriately, perhaps, ”The Book of Disquiet,” a kind of spiritual autobiography covering the last two decades of the poet`s life, collects the obsessive ruminations of a bachelor bookkeeper, one Bernardo Soares, who yearns to escape his ghostly existence. In fact, yearning-to be someone else, to live another life-is the key to Pessoa`s sensibility.
Pessoa`s desire to ”other” himself was exceptional. In the course of his career he invented as many as 19 pseudonyms. Much more than pen names, these illustrated his view that no one has a unified identity.
The ”disquiet” Pessoa traces in these pages reflects both his anguish at being himself and his doubt of being. How substantial, Pessoa as Soares repeatedly asks, is anything we perceive and experience? Are we not shades wandering amongst shades? And are not the most fatuously ordinary people-those he calls ”vegetative”-more real than those who suffer chronic doubt?
Filled at once with scorn and baffled admiration for the office boss or cafe waiter who putters unperturbed through his days, Soares-Pessoa seems to himself a mere drifting cloud caught between dreams of being Caesar and the conviction that he will leave no trace in the world.
What presumably distinguishes Soares from the blissfully ignorant is this record of ”disquiet.” Yet it too is repeatedly thrown in question. At moments, the diarist seems to share Thoreau`s judgment that ”the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” More characteristic, though, is his revulsion over the animal well-being of his bovine compatriots:
”The happiness of all these men who don`t know they are wretched irritates me. . . . But the greatest gift the gods can bestow is that of being like them-superior in the way they are . . . to happiness and grief. Which is why, despite everything, I love them all.”
But this love is not evident in the book. To live, Soares asserts, is to be radically unlike the ”vegetables” who persist day after day in being themselves. Their very existence mocks his conviction that no day is like another and no one is the same person he was yesterday. History and society, too, conspire to fix our identities in tedious grooves. Hence Soares cries out: ”I go forward slowly, dead, and my vision is no longer mine, it`s . . . only the vision of the human animal who inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality, and all the other illusions that constitute the civilization in which I feel. Where can the living be?”
Mercurial and bilious of temperament, Pessoa`s Soares finally wears on us, pursuing themes familiar from the classic literature of existentialism. It is to Pessoa`s poetry that we must turn for his enduring effect. There he controls more deftly the philosophical dilemmas that sprawl over these pages.
