The Book of Disquiet

Pessoa as: “A little fellow with a big head. He was brilliantly clever but quite mad.”

Life for us is whatever we imagine it to be. To the peasant with his one field, that field is everything, it is an empire. To Caesar with his vast empire which still feels cramped, that empire is a field. The poor man has an empire; the great man only a field. The truth is that we possess nothing but our own sensations; it is on them, then, and not on what they perceive, that we must base the reality of our life.

But all this is apropos of nothing

Lacking the ability to love, we grow weary, even before they are spoken, of the words we would have to say in order to be loved. Besides, which of us wants to be loved? Chateaubriand’s words “on le fatiguait en l’aimant” are not appropriate for us. The very idea of being loved wearies us to the point of alarm.

For Vicente Guedes, being self-aware was an art and a morality; dreaming was a religion.

Though naturally ambitious, he savored the pleasure of having no ambitions at all.

He was constitutionally condemned to suffer all kinds of anxieties, but fated to abandon them all.

Let us absurdify life from east to west.

My dreams: since I create friends in my dreams, I walk with them. Their alien imperfection …

Neither of us has a name or a plausible existence. If we could ever be noisy enough to imagine ourselves laughing, we would doubtless laugh at the thought of thinking we were alive.

Let us not remove from our finger the magic ring which, when rubbed, summons the fairies of silence and the elves of the shadows and the gnomes of forgetting …