Pessoa and The Book of Disquiet

July 12, 2004

I’ve been reading Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (read an interesting review from the Guardian, see the Amazon listing). Written under the heteronym Bernardo Soares, the Book of Disquiet is a journal of sorts, a kind of writer’s notebook in the guise of the observations of a bookkeeper about art, literature, and emotion. In short, about the stuff of life itself.

He writes of Omar Khayyam:

Someone like Omar, who is who he is, lives in only one world, the external world; someone like me, who is not who he is, not only lives in the external, objective world but in successive, diverse, internal worlds that are not subjective. My philosophy, even though it longs to be the same as Omar’s, cannot be the same. The result is that even though I really do not want them, I have in me the very philosophies I criticize, as if they were souls. Omar could reject them all because they were alien to him. I cannot reject them because they are who I am.

Or of poetry and prose [Pessoa is generally considered Portugal's greatest poet]:

I really believe that in a perfectly civilized world there would be no other art but prose. We would leave sunsets to the sunsets themselves, taking care, perhaps, in our art to understand them verbally by transmitting them in the intelligible music of color. We would not sculpt bodies, which would then keep, by being seen and touched, their mobile relief and their soft warmth. We would build houses only to live in them, which is, after all, whast they are really for. Poetry would exist so children could grow toward prose; poetry certainly does have something infantile to it, something mnemonic, auxiliary, and primordial.

This is not the kind of book you want to read sequentially, or all at once. Instead dip into it as you would cup cold water to your lips during a long hike… too much at once and you will ache despite your thirst. Most of the sequence to the pieces has been put there by editors anyway, who put the book together from a disordered set of scraps in a chest found after Pessoa died.

Incidentally, The Book of Disquiet would be a perfect candidate for hypertext, or a blogging effort like Pepys’ Duary or the nascent BlogThoreau. I doubt, given our Draconian copyright laws, that it is in the public domain. Yet another reason Free Culture and the Creative Commons should be well studied by everyone interested in the arts.

Tags: Books and Reading, Poetry and Poetics