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Fernando Pessoa’s literary accomplishments are taken as a matter of fact by the literary establishment; Harold Bloom in The Western Canon called him the most representative poet of the twentieth century, along with Pablo Neruda. He is however, not well known or understood even by lovers of modern poetry and prose. Fernando Pessoa was the finest Portuguese poet, but even in his lifetime he had only published one small book of poetry, though he was a well-respected member of Lisbon’s intelligentsia and a leader of their Modernist movement. His method of writing was in a way self-immolating in that he rarely published under his own name. He developed a system of heteronyms which were more than pseudonyms, more like alter-egos in which he wrote in different styles, even sometimes directly criticizing each other.

His chief accomplishment during his lifetime was his body of poetry, but his most lasting monument is surely The Book of Disquiet. The Book of Disquiet is a collection of prose pieces, mostly brief, some very brief, which have a quality similar to journal entries which are nevertheless more than the sum of their parts. He wrote the book over a period of many years and did not at the time of his death have the manuscript organized in any meaningful sense. The date of composition is not an indicator of the intended order; the pages cannot be organized by topic or mood without creating false effects. Ever editor of these works has to decide on a system of organization, consequently I’ve included links to two different editions of the work, which given his method of subsuming his own persona with those of his heteronyms, I think would please him.

It is difficult to really find anything to compare these pieces with in order to discuss them fruitfully, but I think parts of The Book of disquiet can be compared without creating confusion to Kerouac’s Some of the Dharma, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Thoreau’s Walden. One of the chief similarities in these pieces is the author’s use of aphorism and metaphor. More so than the content of these books The Book of Disquiet resembles them in style, but perhaps its chief resemblance is the almost telepathic rendition of a man’s thoughts and experiences into prose. The book was written over many years and the style is not one hundred percent consistent throughout, but the effect of submersing yourself in another’s being is keenly felt whether you merely browse the book or apply yourself to it like a maniac.

To give you a better idea of the style of the thing let me quote a couple of sections in full (from the Penguin edition):

48

To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving. I know nothing more simultaneously false and telling than the statement by Leonardo da Vinci that we cannot love or hate something until we have understood it.

Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other’s presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.

271
It is not love, but love’s outskirts that are worth knowing…

The repression of love sheds much more light on its nature than does the actual experience of it. Virginity can be a key to profound understanding. Action has its rewards but brings confusion. To possess is to be possessed, and therefore to lose oneself. Only the idea can fathom reality without getting ruined.

313

I loathe the happiness of all these people who don’t know they’re unhappy. Their human life is full of what, in a true sensibility, would produce a surfeit of anxieties. But since their true life is vegetative, their sufferings come and go without touching their soul, and they live a life that can be compared only to that of a man with a toothache who won a fortune—the genuine good fortune of living unawares, the greatest gift granted by the gods, for it is the gift of being like them, superior just as they are (albeit in a different fashion) to happiness and pain.
That’s why, in spite of everything, I love them all. My dear vegetables!

I see now that I have for some reason made three selections that each dealt with love in some way. That probably distorts scope of the book and says more about me than it does about Pessoa, but I do think it is one of his typical areas of concern. Oh, what the heck, let me leave you with one more of his brief pieces that does not concern love:

424

Every day things happen in the world that can’t be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they’re mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can’t be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.

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