Disquiet

I have another post up at The Blog of Disquiet.

Disquiet

My first Blog of Disquiet entry has been posted.

Blogging Pessoa

At the instigation of Matthew Tiffany, of Condalmo, some of us will be writing about Fernando Pessoa's remarkable The Book of Disquiet. I received the book for Christmas, much to my delight, and have been reading it on and off for months. (For a taste, click on the Fernando Pessoa label below to read four passages I've posted at this blog.)

A few weeks ago, Matthew wrote that he was saving the book for when he "really need[ed] to be lost inside a book". I posted this comment in response:

Let me say that, in my opinion, it is NOT this kind of book. For me, it's perfect bedside reading, or perfect for when you want to read a few pages at a time, but in some respects it sort of resists getting "lost inside" of. I began reading it a few months ago and haven't finished it, but I have enjoyed it immensely and underlined many passages. There's not really a story to speak of, but there is a distinct consciousness, and it's wonderful.

Naturally, not everyone agrees, but this has (mostly) reflected my experience. I'll stop here; anything else I have to say about The Book of Disquiet will be posted at The Blog of Disquiet, which is now up and running. Please do drop by.

No greater proof

From Text 410 of The Book of Disquiet:

There's no greater proof of an impoverished mind than its inability to be witty except at other people's expense.

I've seen cats look at the moon

From Text 405 of The Book of Disquiet:

Life would be unbearable if we were conscious of it. Fortunately we're not. We live as unconsciously, as uselessly and 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.

That's how we live, and it's a flimsy basis for considering ourselves superior to animals. We are distinguished from them by the purely external detail of speaking and writing, by an abstract intelligence that distracts us from concrete intelligence, and by our ability to imagine impossible things. All this, however, is incidental to our organic essence. Speaking and writing have no effect on our primordial urge to live, without knowing how or why. Our abstract intelligence serves only to elaborate systems, or ideas that are quasi-systems, which in animals correspond to lying in the sun. And to imagine the impossible may not be exclusive to us; I've seen cats look at the moon, and it may well be that they were longing to have it.

Eternal Sunset

From Text 196 of The Book of Disquiet:

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are. The sensation we come to have of ourselves is of a deserted field at dusk, sad with reeds next to a river without boats, its glistening waters blackening between wide banks.

The Novelist is All of Us

From Text 27 of The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa:

Literature--which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality--seems to me the end towards which all human effort would have to strive, if it were truly human and not just a welling up of our animal self. To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. 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.

What moves lives. What is said endures. There's nothing in life that's less real for having been well described. Small-minded critics point out that such-and-such poem, with its protracted cadences, in the end says merely that it's a nice day. But to say it's a nice day is difficult, and the nice day itself passes on. It's up to us to conserve the nice day in a wordy, florid memory, sprinkling new flowers and new stars over the fields and skies of the empty, fleeting outer world.

Everything is what we are, and everything will be, for those who come after us in the diversity of time, what we will have intensely imagined--what we, that is, by embodying our imagination, will have actually been. The grand, tarnished panorama of History amounts, as I see it, to a flow of interpretations, a confused consensus of unreliable eyewitness accounts. The novelist is all of us, and we narrate whenever we see, because seeing is complex like everything.