Sometimes the story behind a work of art is just as fascinating as the work itself.
Sometimes its origin is part of its content.
The story of twentieth century writer Fernando Pessoa and his masterwork, The Book of Disquiet,
is one those cases—where the story behind it sounds like a work of fiction itself.
Pessoa was born in 1888 in Lisbon Portugal. At the early age of just five years old,
he was exposed to loss and impermanence when his father died of tuberculosis,
and then the following year his younger brother died. Not long after, his mother remarried,
and his family moved to South Africa, also taking from Fernando the landscape of his childhood.
While living in South Africa, Pessoa became fluent in English and developed an appreciation
for English literature. When he turned seventeen, he returned to Lisbon by himself,
where he would spend the rest of his life and dedicate most of his time to writing.
However, by the time he died in 1935 at the age of forty-seven, he had only published a few books
that went mostly unnoticed, and he essentially wrote in complete obscurity, unknown by anyone.
But yet, he seemingly died knowing that he was a great literary figure—or at the very least,
that he would likely become one. And in an almost unsettling, prophetic way, he was right.
After his death, Pessoa’s work—the manuscript for The Book of Disquiet along with tens of thousands
of other manuscript pages that are still to this day being edited—remained tucked away
in a wooden trunk, unknown by anyone. It wasn’t until 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa died,
eerily the exact same age of Pessoa when he died, that The Book of Disquiet was found and published.
This book would go onto become what is widely regarded as one of the most unique and important
literary works of the twentieth century. Inside the book is a lifetime worth of
Pessoa’s reflections and musings—about reality and dreaming, about tedium and selfhood,
about the absurdity of being and the futility of doing, about the simultaneous complexity and
simplicity of life, about the contradiction and paradox at the core of everything.
The book is made up of a collection of fragmented vignettes written in a style
somewhere between diary entries and poetry. There is no real linear order to the book, and it can
arguably be experienced just as well backwards as forwards. Even more interesting, Pessoa does
not claim to be the author of any of it. Rather, it is credited to a man named Bernardo Soares,
an assistant bookkeeper from Lisbon Portugal, as well as possibly a man named Vicente Guedes.
Guedes and Soares, however, aren’t real. They are characters Pessoa created to create the book.
Found throughout the massive collection of all of Pessoa’s manuscript pages are various
pseudonyms—fictitious authors that he credits different pages and collections to. These authors
aren’t just different pennames though. They are different characters with different writing styles
and personalities and views and backstories. Pessoa referred to these author characters
as heteronyms, and there are around eighty that he wrote under throughout his lifetime.
Thus, The Book Disquiet is not exactly a non-fiction book from an anonymous author,
but nor is it really a novel about a fictional character or story. It somewhere in between.
Because of this, it is often described as the weirdest autobiography ever written. Pessoa
himself described it as a factless autobiography, or an autobiography of someone who never existed.
The book’s unique structure and style is, in many ways, an essential supporting leg of the book’s
themes. The use of heteronyms seems to reinforce a key philosophical theme throughout the work:
the fragmented and illusory nature of the self. With incredible accuracy and poignancy that feels
cathartic to read, throughout the book, Pessoa frequently describes the inherent alienation,
disorientation, and loneliness associated with being a person.
He wrote: “I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm
a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed,
amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me. I'm always
thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling
through a trapdoor, through infinite space . . . in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a
black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around
a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever
saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices,
all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool. And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only
because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins,
I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre that exists only because every circle has one.”
For Pessoa, self-understanding, or perhaps the attempt of to understand the self,
is a free-fall down a rabbit hole with a landing that kills you. And
the impossibility of understanding and communicating one’s internal experiences
while on this freefall lends itself to a lifetime of disquiet and disorientation.
Throughout the book, Pessoa also often discusses themes of tedium, futility,
and meaninglessness. For him, everything is a sort of delusion. Life is a sequence of dreams.
“I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My
only real concern has been my inner life,” Pessoa wrote. For Pessoa, there is no real
point in doing or achieving anything. Reality, as we experience it, is as deluded and false and
meaningful as the several dreams we had last night that dissolved upon awaking, never to be known or
thought of again. Life is but a dream destined to be coated over with the fog of consciousness
and forgotten upon the morning’s sunrise. Pessoa wrote, “If I write what I feel, it’s
to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.”
The recognition of the futility of doing anything and the advocation of receding
into a dream world reinforces another major theme of the book: contradiction and paradox. Afterall,
why write about the pointlessness of doing anything and the impossibility of ever adequately
saying anything while doing something and saying things? Perhaps, however, this does not speak to
the incoherence of Pessoa, but rather, speaks to what Pessoa might believe is useful in paradox.
In medicine, certain preventative and preparation treatments contain forms
of the bacteria or virus that causes the disease the treatment is used to prevent.
Likewise, arguably, both creating and consuming good literature and good art,
expose you to the virus of being, so you can hopefully develop enough immunity to survive.
Perhaps paradoxically then, the driving force that compelled Pessoa to create and write and
do was the awareness that creating and writing and doing is pointless.
It is also relevant to note that The Book of Disquiet was left unfinished. With this,
it is almost as if the book mirrors Pessoa’s philosophical conception of existence.
Trapped inside a trunk, only truly known after Pessoa’s death, once it could no
longer be changed by him, interpreted only through a fragmented collection of vignettes,
written by someone who never existed, finished by time not by intention; the book itself seems to
be an almost perfect metaphor for a person. It is unsettling to consider all of this,
and then realize that the word Pessoa, his birth name, translates in English into person.
If that’s not enough, perhaps the most confounding aspect of The Book of Disquiet’s story is that it
contains passages that prophesize its fate. In it, Pessoa wrote:
It sometimes occurs to me, with sad delight, that if one day (in a future I won’t be part of) the
sentences I write are read and admired, then at last I’ll have my own kin, people who ‘understand’
me, my true family in which to be born and loved. But far from being born into it, I’ll have already
died long ago. I’ll be understood only in effigy, when affection can no longer compensate for the
indifference that was the dead man’s lot in life. Perhaps one day they'll understand that
I fulfilled, like no one else, my instinctive duty to interpret a portion of our century; and when
they've understood that, they'll write that in my time I was misunderstood, that the people around
me were unfortunately indifferent and insensitive to my work, and that it was a pity this happened
to me. And whoever writes this will fail to understand my literary counterpart in that future
time, just as my contemporaries don't understand me. Because men learn only what would be of use
to their great-grandparents. The right way to live is something we can teach only the dead.
And of course, all of this came true. It’s happening right now with these words. We
are currently participating in Pessoa’s fortune told by himself a century ago.
One can only wonder, was this a masterfully constructed plan by a genius creative mind? Was
it chance? Was it both? Or was it something else? Whatever the case may be, the story of The Book of
Disquiet seems to have almost become a part of its artistic creation. It elicits an almost mystical,
spiritual quality. It feels like a religious book for atheists. A manual for nihilists. It can and
probably will devastate most of those who read it. But it will also help comfort and remind one to
not take oneself or life too seriously. Sometimes, exposure to the ailment is part of the treatment.