A Factless Autobiography

In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I (He) indifferently narrate my (his) factless autobiography, my (his) lifeless history. These are my (his) Confessions, and if in them I (He) say (-s) nothing, it’s because I (He) have (has) nothing to say.

Fernando Pessoa (he/him/the author)

The Book of Disquiet

by Bernardo Soares,

assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon

…

I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it — without knowing why. And since the human spirit naturally tends to make judgements based on feeling instead of reason, most of these young people chose Humanity to replace God.

…

Humanity, being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species. The cult of Humanity, with its rites of Freedom and Equality, always struck me as a revival of those ancient cults in which gods were like animals or had animal heads.

…

I softly sing — for myself alone — wispy songs I compose while waiting.

…

By day they’re (streets/others) full of meaningless activity; by night they’re full of a meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I.

…

And I suddenly experience the sublime feeling of a monk in the wilderness or of a hermit in his retreat, acquainted with the substance of Christ in the sands and in the caves of withdrawal from the world.

…

I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me.

…

Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be.

…

Me in this fourth-floor room, interrogating life! , saying what souls feel! , writing prose like a genius or a famous author! Me, here, a genius!..

…

Vasques my boss, Moreira the head bookkeeper, Borges the cashier, all the young men, the cheerful boy who takes letters to the post office, the boy who makes deliveries, the gentle cat — all this has become part of my life. And I wouldn’t be able to leave it without crying, without feeling that — like it or not — it was a part of me which would remain with all of them, and that to separate myself from them would be a partial death.

…

I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.

…

The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves.

…

Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colours with a durability not found in cellular life.

…

In my own way I sleep, without slumber or repose, this vegetative life of imagining, and the distant reflection of the silent street lamps, like the quiet foam of a dirty sea, hovers behind my restless eyebrows.

…

Not pleasure, not glory, not power… Freedom, only freedom.

…

Art, if it frees us from the abstract idols of old, should also free us from magnanimous ideas and social concerns, which are likewise idols.

…

But there are also moments, such as the one that oppresses me now, when I feel my own self far more than I feel external things, and everything transforms into a night of rain and mud where, lost in the solitude of an out-of-the-way station, I wait interminably for the next third-class train.

…

(and) I note with metaphysical astonishment how my most deliberate acts, my clearest ideas and my most logical intentions were after all no more than congenital drunkenness, inherent madness and huge ignorance. I didn’t even act anything out. I was the role that got acted.

…

I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.

…

It was just a moment, and I saw myself. I can no longer even say what I was.

…

The corpse looks to me like a suit that was left behind.

…

I’m grateful that my cell has windows inside the bars, and on the dust of the necessary that covers the panes I write my name in capital letters, my daily signature on my covenant with death.

…

(…) grandchildren of Destiny and stepchildren of God, who married Eternal Night when she was widowed by the Chaos that fathered us.

…

(…) a desire that one day — a day without time or substance — an escape leading outside of God will be discovered, and our deepest selves will somehow cease participating in being and non-being.

…

It`s like being intoxicated with inertia, drunk but with no enjoyment in the drinking or in the drunkenness. It’s a sickness with no hope of recovery. It’s a lively death.

…

To goldenly stagnate in the sun, like a murky pond surrounded by flowers.

…

I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like an image in a mirror.

…

The beauty of a naked body is only appreciated by cultures that use clothing.

…

I would wait in vain for what I didn’t know I was waiting for, and in the end there would be nothing but a slow falling of night, with the whole of space gradually turning the colour of the darkest clouds, which little by little would vanish into the abolished mass of sky.

…

To be a thing is to be the object of an attribution. It may be erroneous to say that a tree feels, that a river runs, that a sunset is sad or that the calm ocean (blue from the sky it doesn’t have) smiles (from the sun outside it).

…

(…) he’s a clockwork of subatomic movements, a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in miniature.

…

(…) with no flags to wave in battle and no sword I was strong enough to unsheathe.

…

I notice it in their silently moving lips and in their eyes’ vague uncertainty, or in the sometimes raised voice of their joint mumbling — like a flagless army fighting a hopeless war. (…) I turn around to see their slumping, defeated looking shoulders — share with me this sense of salesmanly squalor, of being no more than humiliatingly vanquished stragglers amid reeds and scum, with no moonlight over the shores or poetry in the marshes.

…

But they’re all poets, poor devils, who drag past my eyes, as I drag past theirs, the same sorry sight of our common incongruity. They all have, like me, their future in the past.

…

Perhaps he still hopes. If there’s any justice in the Gods’ injustice, then may they let us keep our dreams, even when they’re impossible, and may our dreams be happy, even when they’re trivial.

…

Poor salesmanly demigods who conquer empires with lofty words and intentions but need to scrounge up money for food and the rent!

…

I’m with the others, with the even more hapless, who have no one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them.

…

The entire life of the human soul is mere motions in the shadows. We live in a twilight of consciousness, never in accord with whom we are or think we are.

…

Civilization consists in giving something a name that doesn’t belong to it and then dreaming over the result.

…

A garden is a synopsis of civilization — an anonymous modification of nature.

…

No one will ever passionately be my friend. That’s why so many are able to respect me.

…

All that we love or lose — things, human beings, meanings — rubs our skin and so reaches the soul, and in the eyes of God the event is no more than this breeze that brought me nothing besides an imaginary relief, the propitious moment, and the wherewithal to lose everything splendidly.

…

Analysing myself this afternoon, I’ve discovered that my stylistic system is based on two principles, and in the best tradition of the best classical writers I immediately uphold these two principles as general foundations of all good style: 1) to express what one feels exactly as it is felt — clearly, if it is clear; obscurely, if obscure; confusedly, if confused — and 2) to understand that grammar is an instrument and not a law.

…

Just as Christianity was but the prophetic degeneration of a debased Neo-Platonism, the Romanization of Hellenism through Judaism, * so our age (…)

…

A lap or a cradle or a warm arm around my neck… A softly singing voice that seems to want to make me cry… A fire crackling in the fireplace… Heat in the winter… My consciousness listlessly wandering… And then a peaceful, soundless dream in a huge space, like a moon whirling among the stars…

…

Who am I, finally, when I’m not playing? A poor orphan left out in the cold among sensations, shivering on the street corners of Reality, forced to sleep on the steps of Sadness and to eat the bread offered by Fantasy.

…

When will all this end — these streets where I drag my misery, these steps where I coldly crouch and feel the night running its hands through my tatters?

…

In my own inner landscapes, all of them unreal, I’ve always been attracted to what’s in the distance, and the hazy aqueducts — almost out of sight in my dreamed landscapes — had a dreamy sweetness in relation to the rest of the landscape, a sweetness that enabled me to love them.

…

I have a world of friends inside me, with their own real, individual, imperfect lives.

…

To feel today what one felt yesterday isn’t to feel — it’s to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today’s living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.

…

And this somnolence that allows me to walk, bent forward in a march over the impossible, feels like a fresh breeze.

…

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. This is true in the whole gamut of love. In sexual love we seek our own pleasure via another body.

…

To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. (…) A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings in a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.

…

… the unrelenting sameness of everything, the absolute similarity of a mosque and a temple and a church, the exact equivalence of a cabin and a castle, the same physical body for a king in robes and for a naked savage…

…

Only the eyes we use for dreaming truly see.

…

To describe the universal is to describe what is common to all human souls and to all human experience — the broad sky, with day and night occurring in it and by it; the lowing of rivers, all with the same fresh and nunnish water; the vast waving mountains known as oceans, which hold the majesty of height in the secret of their depths; the fields, the seasons, houses, faces, gestures; clothes and smiles; love and wars; gods both finite and infinite; the formless Night, mother of the world’s origin; Fate, the intellectual monster that is everything…

…

Erudition of the sensibility has nothing to do with the experience of life. The experience of life teaches nothing, just as history teaches nothing.

…

I sleep when I dream of what doesn’t exist; dreaming of what might exist wakes me up.

…

He’s guided by norms without knowing that they guide him or even that they exist, and all his ideas, feelings and acts are unconscious — not because there’s no consciousness in them but because there aren’t two consciousnesses.

…

There are necessary poisons, and some are extremely subtle, composed of ingredients from the soul, herbs collected from among the ruins of dreams, black poppies found next to the graves of our intentions, the long leaves of obscene trees whose branches sway on the echoing banks of the soul’s infernal rivers.

…

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women.

…

Like Shelley, I loved the Absolute Woman before time was; temporal loves were flat to my taste, all reminding me of what I’d lost.

…

The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don’t hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can’t possibly cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don’t die or disappear.

…

Violence of whatever sort has always been, for me, a flagrant form of human stupidity. All revolutionaries, for that matter, are stupid, as are all reformers to a lesser extent — lesser because they’re less troublesome.

…

Revolutionary or reformer — the error is the same.

…

Unable to dominate and reform his own attitude towards life, which is everything, or his own being, which is almost everything, he flees, devoting himself to modifying others and the outside world.

…

But the terms ‘civic duty’, ‘solidarity’, ‘humanitarianism’ and others of the same ilk disgust me like rubbish dumped out of a window right on top of me.

…

Whether I like it or not, everything that isn’t my soul is no more for me than scenery and decoration. Through rational thought I can recognize that a man is a living being just like me, but for my true, involuntary self he has always had less importance than a tree, if the tree is more beautiful.

…

Those who truly suffer don’t form a group or go around as a mob. Those who suffer, suffer alone.

…

Slavery is the law of life, and it is the only law, for it must be observed: there is no revolt possible, no way to escape it. Some are born slaves, others become slaves, and still others are forced to accept slavery.

…

Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us, infiltrating our physical sensations and our feeling of life, and like spittle of the great Spider it subtly binds us to whatever is close, tucking us into a soft bed of slow death which is rocked by the win.

…

The generation I belong to was born into a world where those with a brain as well as a heart couldn’t find any support. The destructive work of previous generations left us a world that offered no security in the religious sphere, no guidance in the moral sphere, and no tranquillity in the political sphere.

…

metaphysical anguish, moral anxiety and political disquiet

…

… the generations that preceded us did away with the foundations of the Christian faith, for their biblical criticism — progressing from textual to mythological criticism — reduced the gospels and the earlier scriptures of the Jews to a doubtful heap of myths, legends and mere literature, while their scientific criticism gradually revealed the mistakes and ingenuous notions of the gospels’ primitive ‘science’.

…

A society so undisciplined in its cultural foundations could obviously not help but be a victim, politically, of its own chaos…

…

Today the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated.

…

Sinister peace of the heavens’ beauty, cold irony of the warm air, blue blackness misted by moonlight and reticent to reveal stars.

…

Perhaps the novel is a more perfect life and reality, which God creates through us. Perhaps we live only to create it. It seems that civilizations exist only to produce art and literature.

…

Nothing will remain of the man who wore feelings and gloves, who talked about death and local politics.

…

In the vast whirlwind where the whole world listlessly turns like so many dry leaves, kingdoms count no more than the dresses of seamstresses, and the pigtails of blonde girls go round in the same mortal whirl as the sceptres that stood for empires.

…

I open my mouth, but it’s I-another who speaks. The only thing I feel to be really mine is a huge incapacity, a vast emptiness, an incompetence for everything that is life. I don’t know the gestures for any real act.....

…

I’m older than Time and Space, because I’m conscious. Things derive from me; the whole of Nature is the offspring of my sensations.

…

It’s a blue sky tinged green and tending towards light grey, and on the left, over the hills of the opposite bank, there’s a cowering mass of brownish to lifeless pink fog.

…

… a sky with every fading colour: light blue, blue-green, pale grey between green and blue, fuzzy hues of distant clouds that aren’t clouds, yellowishly darkened by an expiring red.

…

I’m convinced that in a perfect, civilized world there would be no other art but prose.

…

We would let sunsets be sunsets, using art merely to understand them verbally, by conveying them in an intelligible music of colour. We wouldn’t sculpt bodies but let them keep for themselves their supple contours and soft warmth that we see and touch. We would build houses only to live in them, which is after all what they’re for. Poetry would be for children, to prepare them for prose, since poetry is obviously something infantile, mnemonic, elementary and auxiliary.

…

To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.

…

Reduce your necessities to a minimum, so as not to depend on anyone for anything.

…

Thus was born a literature and art made of the lower elements of thought — Romanticism. And with it, a social life made of the lower elements of action — modern democracy.

…

Art lies because it is social. And there are two great forms of art: one that speaks to our deepest soul, the other to our attentive soul. The first is poetry, the second is the novel.

…

I walked to the window with eyes that were burning from having stayed open all night. The light reflected off the crowded rooftops in various shades of pale yellow. I contemplated everything with the grand stupidity that comes from not sleeping. The yellow was wispy and insignificant against the hulking figures of the tall buildings. Far off in the west (the direction I was facing), the horizon was already a greenish white.

…

You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude.

…

Hapless you are if, having been born free, with the capacity to be isolated and self-sufficient, poverty should force you to live with others. This tragedy, yes, is your own, and it follows you.

…

I’m the father, mother, sons, cousins, the maid and the maid’s cousin, all together and all at once, thanks to my special talent for simultaneously feeling various and sundry sensations, for simultaneously living the lives of various people — both on the outside, seeing them, and on the inside, feeling them.

…

To create, I’ve destroyed myself.

…

I’ve so externalized myself on the inside that I don’t exist there except externally. I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

…

If man really felt, there would be no civilization. Art gives shelter to the sensibility that action was obliged to forget. Art is Cinderella, who stayed at home because that’s how it had to be.

…

Living was painful because we knew we were alive; dying didn’t scare us, for we had lost the normal notion of what death is.

…

Society would govern itself spontaneously if it didn’t contain sensitive and intelligent people. Primitive societies were happy because they didn’t have such people.

…

… since we live in society, our one duty as superiors is to reduce to a minimum our participation in the life of the tribe.

…

The highest honour for a superior man is to not know the name of his country’s chief of state, or whether he lives under a monarchy or a republic.

…

The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe in our meanings of other people’s words.

…

How much more beautiful the Mona Lisa would be if we couldn’t see it! And if someone were to rob it just to burn it, what an artist he would be, even greater than the one who painted it!

…

Only what we dream is what we truly are, because all the rest, having been realized, belongs to the world and to everyone.

…

… on the rare occasions when I go to the theatre or the circus: then I know that I’m finally watching life’s perfect representation. And the actors and actresses, the clowns and magicians, are important and futile things, like the sun and the moon, love and death, the plague, hunger and war among humanity. Everything is theatre. Is it truth I want? I’ll go back to my novel…

…

I love these lonely squares, tucked between streets with little traffic, and themselves with just as little.

…

He was the symbol of nobody, which is why he was in a hurry. He was the symbol of those who were never anything; that is why he suffered.

…

Every good conversation should be a two-way monologue… We should ultimately be unable to tell whether we really talked with someone or simply imagined the conversation…

…

I developed an attitude of transcendental honesty with respect to all action, and ever since this attitude took firm hold in my consciousness, it has prevented me from having intense relations with the tangible world.

…

What most characterizes this fellow called ‘the people’ is a narrow focus on his own interests, and a careful exclusion — as far as possible — of the interests of others.

…

To want is to be unable to achieve.

…

I profoundly wish to die, to cease, to see no more light shining on this city or any city, to think no more, to feel no more, to leave behind the march of time and the sun like a piece of wrapping paper, to remove like a heavy suit — next to the big bed — the involuntary effort of being.

…

Life would be unbearable if we were conscious of it. Fortunately we’re not. We live as unconsciously, as uselessly and as pointlessly as animals, and if we anticipate death, which presumably (though not assuredly) they don’t, we anticipate it through so many distractions, diversions and ways of forgetting that we can hardly say we think about it.

…

There’s no happiness without knowledge. But the knowledge of happiness brings unhappiness, because to know that you’re happy is to realize that you’re experiencing a happy moment and will soon have to leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything else. Not to know, on the other hand, is not to exist.

…

In order not to sink in our own estimation, all we have to do is quit having ambitions, passions, desires, hopes, whims or nervous disquiet.

…

All ideals and all ambitions are a hysteria of prattling women posing as men. No empire justifies breaking a child’s doll. No ideal is worth the sacrifice of a toy train. What empire is useful or what ideal profitable? It’s all humanity, and humanity is always the same — variable but unimprovable, with fluctuations but unprogressive.

…

We advanced to having a soul that’s basically clothed, in the same way that we advanced — as physical humans — to the category of clothed animals.

…

… it’s merely the vision of a human animal that inexorably inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality, and all the other illusions that form the civilization in which I feel and perceive.

…

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face — there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.

…