The Book of Disquiet

Art consists in making others feel what we feel, in freeing them from themselves by offering them our own personality.

From The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa, translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith; numbered section 260

Art frees us, illusorily, from the squalor of being.

from section 270

There are certain books which I know I should write about, whose vast tracts intersect and ferment with the vast but less visible tracts of my own soul. Their content is already important in my list of possessions, my personal effects. Not to write about them, in effect, is to have only a hazy idea as to the extent and detail of my possessions. Even to call them “possessions” is to make a prejudgement of their value, because when we talk intellectually we easily slide into a virtuous jargon wherein we congratulate ourselves for knowing that “what I am” beats “what I have”. But in such talk we take for granted that we know “what I am”, and its moral superiority to “what I own”, and the superiority of “spiritual” to “material”. We take as given that we know what these things are. What am I? What are you, really? Something in me wants to answer this by borrowing the title of a volume of selected poems by Pessoa: “A little larger than the entire universe”. Because thought and selfhood in their fullness can only be perceived mystically. We routinely clip our own mystical wings in order to make sense to ourselves and one another, but either way, certain questions are not easily answered. “What am I?” Bryan M White has touched on this in his latest piece on Nuclear Headache; and who knows how much in his unpublished, or even unwritten thought? Unless we put our thought into words, how can we know what we think? And when we say what we think, do we not always, to some extent, lie?

In any case we can’t progress far in such investigations without refining our use of language. The child can work with whatever comes to hand, but the master craftsman needs quality tools. Do we then need to study philosophy? One sighs with weariness at the effort involved, the wild-goose chases anticipated. Laziness is a kind of Ockham’s Razor in these matters, shaving away what our inner self knows to be the inessentials. My inner, hidden self—this is surely my true self! Laziness rescues us from getting lost in the labyrinths of that which has no personal significance. What is personal? This is the same question as “What am I?”. What is the empire of “me”? It’s an independent state which has somehow allowed itself to be colonised by honey-tongued traders and adventurers, who first bring their gaudy trifles, whizz-bang inventions, Gospels and firewater. Then they kidnap my damsels and young men, the pride of my personal realm, for every kind of slavery. This is the metaphor of my selfhood, my inner possessions, and unless I take stock, tidy them and prune them, those things in the attic, the drawers and cupboards, the computer files, I’ll have but a hazy idea of what treasures I own, what vital things have been mislaid, stolen or lost. It is laziness which stops us taking full possession of our possessions.

Laziness might consign us to wallow in the Sargasso Sea of human effort, the Bermuda Triangle of good intentions, were it not for an almost equal and almost opposite force: obsession (where you just keep on going, unable to let go, even though you could or should). I maintain—that is I’ve known for a long time, without ever expressing it coherently—that it’s far more important to know yourself than to make yourself into anything. I’m wary of any kind of ambition, I mean the kind that extends beyond the short term. Commitment is a deadly two-edged sword, and I’m not referring merely to the act of will, but far more to the underlying assumptions on which that act of will is based. Is it actually worthwhile to derail one’s life in the pursuit of riches? How can one even define what derailing one’s life is? These things are vague in my own head, for I haven’t really spoken about them, but my influence has rubbed off on my four children, each now grown up. A father is just one influence out of many, and his influence may be reflected in “reaction against”, as opposed to “accordance with”. Still, I see that they’re not driven by any “big idea”, and find themselves content to tarry in the doldrums of happy lives, under-performing perhaps by the world’s frenetic standard, till they find the prevailing wind in their latitude, which together with Chance fills their sails and shows them the route to take. (Truth obliges me to acknowledge that they doubtless only reveal to me what they think I want to see.)

So let me be plain on this point. The proper aim in life is not to exert your will upon it, but to study what it is, and adapt harmoniously to what you find. And when I say life, I mean your life, in all its quirky uniqueness, both essential and circumstantial. We are working with words here, words whose drift we may fail to catch, but that doesn’t matter. The principle of laziness knows how to deal with it! We may sometimes grasp a single word, like a loose ball in a football game, and run with it.

I had meant to evaluate Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet from the viewpoint of how it helps me appreciate this knot in the tangled skein that I call me. But at 5 this morning I started to scribble (literally, my pen and its free-flowing ink tracing marks in my trusty notebook, almost faster than I could follow). Lifting those words to this medium, I resist the urge to edit, aided by the principle of laziness, whilst urged headlong by the principle of obsession. In such a bout of Titans, too much editing might be a blot, a deformity on the surface of something which bears the freshness of spring and the flaws of all creation. The Book’s horizons are so vast, I’ll talk about it properly next time, trying to narrow the scope somehow.

What started this piece off as I lay this morning in bed, not ready to get up, was a single word: “illustrious”: a word so powerful and suggestive in its own right, even when devoid of context, that it made me understand the enormous temptations besetting any writer, to use words for effect, and be seduced by them, as Pygmalion was by the beauty of the sculpture he’d made; as copywriters, journalists and politicians are by the honeyed words they can easily concoct; and what Pessoa meant when he wrote the following:

Beset by lucid and free association of ideas, images and words, I say what I imagine I’m feeling as much as what I’m really feeling, and I’m unable to distinguish between the suggestions of my soul and the fruits born of images that fell from my soul to the ground, nor do I know whether the sound of a discordant word or the rhythm of an incidental phrase might not be diverting me from the already hazy point, from the already stowed sensation, thereby absolving me from thinking and saying, like long voyages designed to distract us. And all of this, which even as I’m telling it should stir in me a sense of futility, failure and anguish, gives me only wings of gold.

Section 387

“I write what I imagine I feel”, says the illustrious author of The Book of Disquiet.