The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
Penguin Books
London, 2003
509 pages
The selection for the November 2017 edition of the Baltimore Online Book Club was The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa, a book I had selected. Largely unfamiliar with his works, I was aware, however, that he has the reputation of being not only the foremost poet and writer in Portuguese of the last century, but one of the greatest of all twentieth-century writers as well. I was somewhat skeptical of his exalted status, but not for long.
The Book of Disquiet, which is not a novel at all, or, at least, not like any other novel, contains the reflections on life of a young man named Bernardo Soares, a man who is virtually a nonentity to the outside world, but, though nobody knows it, an exceptionally talented writer whose subject is the meaning and meaninglessness of life. The book is composed of over four hundred numbered passages. Each is a page or two long and independent; the best way to read them is in a desultory fashion, a dozen or so at a time. They were undoubtedly written in a non-systematic fashion, one or two at a time, perhaps. The content is very philosophical and often very poetic as well; they should be read slowly, with much time spent thinking over what one has just read.
The purported author of the book is one of Pessoa's heteronyms, authors whom Pessoa invented and imbued with personalities and writing styles of their own. During his writing career, the prolific Pessoa invented over seventy heteronyms, a remarkable achievement. However, Bernardo Soares is what he called a semi-heteronym, thus indicating that this author and the author who created him shared many similarities.
It has been pointed out that the name of Gregor Samsa, the anti-hero of The Metamorphosis, and the name of its author are quite similar: Samsa and Kafka; each name containing two a's, each name containing two repeated consonants with the second one preceded by a different consonant. This obviously indicates that Samsa is a heteronym of sorts for Kafka, a character very close to his heart. The similarities of the names Bernardo Soares and Fernando Pessoa are equally striking, not only by the fact that the number of letters of their first and last names are the same. In addition, as previously stated, Pessoa referred to Soares as a semi-heteronym, a quite autobiographical creation.
The discovery of this unfinished manuscript, which was found in a trunk after the author's death in 1935, reminds one of the discovery of the scores of unpublished musical scores found in a closet after Schubert's death. The two men who found them were so delighted that they danced for joy. The discovery of Pessoa's masterwork deserved a similar dance, although it probably didn't receive one.
In his brief introduction to The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa wrote the following about Soares/Pessoa:
Nothing had ever obliged him to do anything. He had spent his childhood alone. He never joined any group. He never pursued a course of study. He never belonged to a crowd. The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon--perhaps, in fact, it's true for all lives--of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended toward inertia and withdrawal.
This doesn't fully capture Pessoa's personality, but as a semi-heteronym, it comes close.
The reflections are profound, and also quite introverted; it is not surprising that an author with a rich inner life and a very circumscribed outer life, with no close friends or even acquaintances, would write literature of a somewhat depressing nature. Pessoa states that the parents of his semi-heteronym died young, thus setting the tone for the lonely life that followed.
Thomas Mann said of Nietszche, who was also lonely and isolated, that one could learn a lot from him, but no one should aspire to follow in his footsteps. This, I think, applies to Pessoa/Soares as well.
2.
The Book of Disquiet is sui generis; there is nothing of which I am familiar that is quite like it. An adequate commentary of this work would take volumes; I am not fit for this task, which would far exceed the limits of an online book review, even if I were inclined to attempt it. I will therefore limit myself to commenting on three excerpts, one indicating Pessoa's poetic gifts, the second an example of his commentary on life in general, and the last a reflection on personal responsibility.
The first passage comes from entry 86:
I'll disappear in the fog as a foreigner to all life, as a human island detached from the dream of the sea, as a uselessly existing ship that floats on the surface of everything.
The passage is as beautiful and precise as it is sad. The book if full of indications that Pessoa was not only a great writer of prose, but of poetry as well. The translation by Richard Zenith is very good; I suspect that the original of this passage is even better. The passage has effective imagery and a lovely cadence; that we 'float on the surface of everything' is not only well said, but an undeniable aspect of life. (I hope that the reader's ship, like mine and unlike Soares's, has more than one passenger, which makes the journey into the unknown a good deal more tolerable).
The second excerpt is from entry 66:
We generally colour our ideas of the unknown with our notions of the known. If we call death a sleep, it's because it seems like sleep on the outside; if we call death a new life, it's because it seems like something different from life. With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make believe they're happy.
The poetry cannot be separated from the prose, both blend together here and create a prose poem. This is a rather dark view of life; if enjoyment of relationships and of music provide refreshment in an oasis in an otherwise merciless desert, as I believe they do, pass the fake cake, for it is indeed delicious. I must confess that at other times this passage makes perfect sense to me.
The quote expresses the human predicament beautifully, albeit grimly. We think we are necessary beings, and death, of course, will inevitably demonstrate to our survivors that we are not. Yes, we cultivate roses on quicksand, as it were; the quicksand drags us down slowly in intervals of days and months, even of years, for a while, but those intervals add up; all too soon we sink and disappear forever. Our own non-existence is something part of us imagines, yet which another part of us refuses to accept. The whistler in the graveyard hums a tune about death becoming a new life, but the whistling of the autumn wind soon drowns him out. Euphemisms like "new life" don't always work. One is reminded of the last lines of a poem by Emily Dickinson, the subject of which is the witnessing of the agonizing death of a loved one: And we replaced the hair/And held the head erect/And then an awful leisure was/Belief to regulate--.
Pessoa/Soares was incapable of such regulation. His ability to look at the sun without glasses is very brave and very moving. It has been a profound experience for me to move in that world; after a while, though, I must hold my wife's hand and move on to The Marriage of Figaro.
3.
The third excerpt, from passage 133, is not only important philosophically, but is of great practical importance as well.
The way I see it, plagues, storms and wars are products of the same blind force, sometimes operating through unconscious microbes, sometimes through unconscious waters and thunderbolts, and sometimes through unconscious men. For me, the difference between an earthquake and a massacre is like the difference between murdering with a knife and murdering with a dagger. The monster immanent in things, for his own good or his own evil, which are apparently indifferent to him. is equally served by the shifting of a rock on a hilltop, or by the stirring of greed in a heart. The rock falls and kills a man; greed or envy prompts an arm, and the arm kills a man. Such is the world--a dunghill of instinctive forces that nevertheless shines in the sun with pale flashes of light and dark gold.
This widely unacknowledged truth, once understood, upends the way we judge others, and provides a condign indictment of the U.S. criminal justice system.
It was not known at the time, but "the way I see it," with which the paragraph begins, has proven by science to be the "way that it is." Objectively speaking, there is no such thing as free will. Functional MRIs of the brain, (fMRIs), have proven that the brain has already unconsciously decided what is intended before one consciously decides what to do. There is, objectively speaking, no such thing as free will. It makes no more sense to punish a person for murder as it does to punish a rock for having crushed a neighbor.
Years ago I wrote an essay called "The Folly of Our Times," the premise of which is that each age has one or swveral blind spots, which future generations will resolve, e.g. slavery at the time of the Founding Fathers. The way we judge and punish others is undoubtedly one of the blind spots of the current age.
Free will is a paradox, just as it is a paradox that we are material beings, but are nevertheless convinced that we are more than material beings in order to function in life. Believing that one is more than matter leads to the necessity of making choices. This is a wonderful trick of evolution, but a trick nevertheless: objectively speaking, there is no such thing as free will.
The paradox is that we must take responsibility for our own actions while refusing to judge fellow human beings, no matter how heinous the act. Truth is, we don't even understand our own actions, much less those of another. We judge others for doing something which is morally offensive to us. However, we can never get inside the offender's brain or realize how that brain has been affected by environmental factors. This is beautifully illustrated by Jesus's dictum that we should "judge not lest we be judged." We must judge the person's behavior, however, (but not the person), if society is to function. We have the moral obligation to remove a dangerous person from society, that is, to incarcerate him or her, but not to judge, that is, punish him or her.
The function of the criminal justice system is therefore to protect society and not to punish. (The non-punishment must also fit the non-crime: long sentences for non-violent crimes, common in the U.S., are morally reprehensible).
Our justice system is built upon the assumption that if one is an adult, one must be found guilty of a crime, no matter the circumstances of the so-called criminal. The disquieting truth from The Book of Disquiet is that it makes just as much sense to punish a volcano when it explodes and "murders" those at its base than it is to punish a pyromaniac.
The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world; currently 2.3 million people, 90% if whom are male, languish in jails. How many of these are necessary? Once one understand the quote from the book, the answer is obvious: far too many are not.
Judging others and not merely others' behavior is so ingrained in our culture that I don't expect Pessoa's statement to be understood anytime soon. Many European countries, however, having long since banned capital punishment, having much lower rates of incarceration, and whose jails are more in accord with protecting society rather than in punishing people, are much closer to a non-judgmental system than we are. The quote should be required reading for all judges, professional and non-professional judges alike.
I present my comments here as an illustration of the heuristic nature of the book; we cannot help but put the book down from time to time, and think about what we have just read. This is indeed a winsome aspect of this non-novel novel.
I admire the ending of the passage as well. Once the ego is removed from the picture, reality "shines in the sun with pale flashes of light and dark gold." Awe does the spirit good, no doubt about that.
The Book of Disquiet is replete with beautifully written, thought-provoking passages. The wheat is indeed mixed in with some chaff; the book demands a high degree of aesthetics and discernment on the part of the reader, which invites discussion and makes it even more interesting. It is a masterwork; I know nothing quite like it in all literature.
This is the tenth edition of the Baltimore Online Book Club. You are welcome to read past book reviews of the Baltimore Online Book Club by googling the title of the novel along with my full name, Thomas Dorsett.
1. The New Life by Orhan Pamuk
2..Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. Exit Ghost by Philip Roth
4. A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
5. Life and Death are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan
6. Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. Pierre or the Ambiguities by Herman Melville
8. Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
9. Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed
Our next meeting will take place on December 13, 2017. On that date, the seven members of our group will discuss "Purple Hibiscus: by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; I will post my review shorty thereafter. You are invited to read the book and to post your comments onto the comment section of the review. I wish you pleasurable reading!
Fernando Pessoa
Penguin Books
London, 2003
509 pages
The selection for the November 2017 edition of the Baltimore Online Book Club was The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa, a book I had selected. Largely unfamiliar with his works, I was aware, however, that he has the reputation of being not only the foremost poet and writer in Portuguese of the last century, but one of the greatest of all twentieth-century writers as well. I was somewhat skeptical of his exalted status, but not for long.
The Book of Disquiet, which is not a novel at all, or, at least, not like any other novel, contains the reflections on life of a young man named Bernardo Soares, a man who is virtually a nonentity to the outside world, but, though nobody knows it, an exceptionally talented writer whose subject is the meaning and meaninglessness of life. The book is composed of over four hundred numbered passages. Each is a page or two long and independent; the best way to read them is in a desultory fashion, a dozen or so at a time. They were undoubtedly written in a non-systematic fashion, one or two at a time, perhaps. The content is very philosophical and often very poetic as well; they should be read slowly, with much time spent thinking over what one has just read.
The purported author of the book is one of Pessoa's heteronyms, authors whom Pessoa invented and imbued with personalities and writing styles of their own. During his writing career, the prolific Pessoa invented over seventy heteronyms, a remarkable achievement. However, Bernardo Soares is what he called a semi-heteronym, thus indicating that this author and the author who created him shared many similarities.
It has been pointed out that the name of Gregor Samsa, the anti-hero of The Metamorphosis, and the name of its author are quite similar: Samsa and Kafka; each name containing two a's, each name containing two repeated consonants with the second one preceded by a different consonant. This obviously indicates that Samsa is a heteronym of sorts for Kafka, a character very close to his heart. The similarities of the names Bernardo Soares and Fernando Pessoa are equally striking, not only by the fact that the number of letters of their first and last names are the same. In addition, as previously stated, Pessoa referred to Soares as a semi-heteronym, a quite autobiographical creation.
The discovery of this unfinished manuscript, which was found in a trunk after the author's death in 1935, reminds one of the discovery of the scores of unpublished musical scores found in a closet after Schubert's death. The two men who found them were so delighted that they danced for joy. The discovery of Pessoa's masterwork deserved a similar dance, although it probably didn't receive one.
In his brief introduction to The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa wrote the following about Soares/Pessoa:
Nothing had ever obliged him to do anything. He had spent his childhood alone. He never joined any group. He never pursued a course of study. He never belonged to a crowd. The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon--perhaps, in fact, it's true for all lives--of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended toward inertia and withdrawal.
This doesn't fully capture Pessoa's personality, but as a semi-heteronym, it comes close.
The reflections are profound, and also quite introverted; it is not surprising that an author with a rich inner life and a very circumscribed outer life, with no close friends or even acquaintances, would write literature of a somewhat depressing nature. Pessoa states that the parents of his semi-heteronym died young, thus setting the tone for the lonely life that followed.
Thomas Mann said of Nietszche, who was also lonely and isolated, that one could learn a lot from him, but no one should aspire to follow in his footsteps. This, I think, applies to Pessoa/Soares as well.
2.
The Book of Disquiet is sui generis; there is nothing of which I am familiar that is quite like it. An adequate commentary of this work would take volumes; I am not fit for this task, which would far exceed the limits of an online book review, even if I were inclined to attempt it. I will therefore limit myself to commenting on three excerpts, one indicating Pessoa's poetic gifts, the second an example of his commentary on life in general, and the last a reflection on personal responsibility.
The first passage comes from entry 86:
I'll disappear in the fog as a foreigner to all life, as a human island detached from the dream of the sea, as a uselessly existing ship that floats on the surface of everything.
The passage is as beautiful and precise as it is sad. The book if full of indications that Pessoa was not only a great writer of prose, but of poetry as well. The translation by Richard Zenith is very good; I suspect that the original of this passage is even better. The passage has effective imagery and a lovely cadence; that we 'float on the surface of everything' is not only well said, but an undeniable aspect of life. (I hope that the reader's ship, like mine and unlike Soares's, has more than one passenger, which makes the journey into the unknown a good deal more tolerable).
The second excerpt is from entry 66:
We generally colour our ideas of the unknown with our notions of the known. If we call death a sleep, it's because it seems like sleep on the outside; if we call death a new life, it's because it seems like something different from life. With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make believe they're happy.
The poetry cannot be separated from the prose, both blend together here and create a prose poem. This is a rather dark view of life; if enjoyment of relationships and of music provide refreshment in an oasis in an otherwise merciless desert, as I believe they do, pass the fake cake, for it is indeed delicious. I must confess that at other times this passage makes perfect sense to me.
The quote expresses the human predicament beautifully, albeit grimly. We think we are necessary beings, and death, of course, will inevitably demonstrate to our survivors that we are not. Yes, we cultivate roses on quicksand, as it were; the quicksand drags us down slowly in intervals of days and months, even of years, for a while, but those intervals add up; all too soon we sink and disappear forever. Our own non-existence is something part of us imagines, yet which another part of us refuses to accept. The whistler in the graveyard hums a tune about death becoming a new life, but the whistling of the autumn wind soon drowns him out. Euphemisms like "new life" don't always work. One is reminded of the last lines of a poem by Emily Dickinson, the subject of which is the witnessing of the agonizing death of a loved one: And we replaced the hair/And held the head erect/And then an awful leisure was/Belief to regulate--.
Pessoa/Soares was incapable of such regulation. His ability to look at the sun without glasses is very brave and very moving. It has been a profound experience for me to move in that world; after a while, though, I must hold my wife's hand and move on to The Marriage of Figaro.
3.
The third excerpt, from passage 133, is not only important philosophically, but is of great practical importance as well.
The way I see it, plagues, storms and wars are products of the same blind force, sometimes operating through unconscious microbes, sometimes through unconscious waters and thunderbolts, and sometimes through unconscious men. For me, the difference between an earthquake and a massacre is like the difference between murdering with a knife and murdering with a dagger. The monster immanent in things, for his own good or his own evil, which are apparently indifferent to him. is equally served by the shifting of a rock on a hilltop, or by the stirring of greed in a heart. The rock falls and kills a man; greed or envy prompts an arm, and the arm kills a man. Such is the world--a dunghill of instinctive forces that nevertheless shines in the sun with pale flashes of light and dark gold.
This widely unacknowledged truth, once understood, upends the way we judge others, and provides a condign indictment of the U.S. criminal justice system.
It was not known at the time, but "the way I see it," with which the paragraph begins, has proven by science to be the "way that it is." Objectively speaking, there is no such thing as free will. Functional MRIs of the brain, (fMRIs), have proven that the brain has already unconsciously decided what is intended before one consciously decides what to do. There is, objectively speaking, no such thing as free will. It makes no more sense to punish a person for murder as it does to punish a rock for having crushed a neighbor.
Years ago I wrote an essay called "The Folly of Our Times," the premise of which is that each age has one or swveral blind spots, which future generations will resolve, e.g. slavery at the time of the Founding Fathers. The way we judge and punish others is undoubtedly one of the blind spots of the current age.
Free will is a paradox, just as it is a paradox that we are material beings, but are nevertheless convinced that we are more than material beings in order to function in life. Believing that one is more than matter leads to the necessity of making choices. This is a wonderful trick of evolution, but a trick nevertheless: objectively speaking, there is no such thing as free will.
The paradox is that we must take responsibility for our own actions while refusing to judge fellow human beings, no matter how heinous the act. Truth is, we don't even understand our own actions, much less those of another. We judge others for doing something which is morally offensive to us. However, we can never get inside the offender's brain or realize how that brain has been affected by environmental factors. This is beautifully illustrated by Jesus's dictum that we should "judge not lest we be judged." We must judge the person's behavior, however, (but not the person), if society is to function. We have the moral obligation to remove a dangerous person from society, that is, to incarcerate him or her, but not to judge, that is, punish him or her.
The function of the criminal justice system is therefore to protect society and not to punish. (The non-punishment must also fit the non-crime: long sentences for non-violent crimes, common in the U.S., are morally reprehensible).
Our justice system is built upon the assumption that if one is an adult, one must be found guilty of a crime, no matter the circumstances of the so-called criminal. The disquieting truth from The Book of Disquiet is that it makes just as much sense to punish a volcano when it explodes and "murders" those at its base than it is to punish a pyromaniac.
The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world; currently 2.3 million people, 90% if whom are male, languish in jails. How many of these are necessary? Once one understand the quote from the book, the answer is obvious: far too many are not.
Judging others and not merely others' behavior is so ingrained in our culture that I don't expect Pessoa's statement to be understood anytime soon. Many European countries, however, having long since banned capital punishment, having much lower rates of incarceration, and whose jails are more in accord with protecting society rather than in punishing people, are much closer to a non-judgmental system than we are. The quote should be required reading for all judges, professional and non-professional judges alike.
I present my comments here as an illustration of the heuristic nature of the book; we cannot help but put the book down from time to time, and think about what we have just read. This is indeed a winsome aspect of this non-novel novel.
I admire the ending of the passage as well. Once the ego is removed from the picture, reality "shines in the sun with pale flashes of light and dark gold." Awe does the spirit good, no doubt about that.
The Book of Disquiet is replete with beautifully written, thought-provoking passages. The wheat is indeed mixed in with some chaff; the book demands a high degree of aesthetics and discernment on the part of the reader, which invites discussion and makes it even more interesting. It is a masterwork; I know nothing quite like it in all literature.
This is the tenth edition of the Baltimore Online Book Club. You are welcome to read past book reviews of the Baltimore Online Book Club by googling the title of the novel along with my full name, Thomas Dorsett.
1. The New Life by Orhan Pamuk
2..Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. Exit Ghost by Philip Roth
4. A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
5. Life and Death are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan
6. Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. Pierre or the Ambiguities by Herman Melville
8. Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
9. Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed
Our next meeting will take place on December 13, 2017. On that date, the seven members of our group will discuss "Purple Hibiscus: by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; I will post my review shorty thereafter. You are invited to read the book and to post your comments onto the comment section of the review. I wish you pleasurable reading!
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