"AN AR DE FILMES' PRODUCTION" "WITH THE FINANCIAL SUPPORT FROM:" "Photography:" "Sound:" "Art direction:" "Makeup artist:" "Editing:" "Sound mixing:" "Opera by:" "Assistant director:" "Production manager:" "Producer:" "Screenwriter and Director:" "In the 20th January of 1913," "Fernando Pessoa wrote this poem and scribbled vertically on its side, in capital letters and old writing, for the first time, the word "DESASSOCEGO" (DISQUIET)." "I grabbed my heart And held it in my hand." "I stared at it as if staring At a leaf or at grains of sand." "I stared as if pale and spent, As if I knew I were dead," "My soul stirred only by dreaming And scarcely touched by life." "THE FILM OF DISQUIET" "It was in the silence of my disquiet, at the hour of day when the landscape is a halo of Life and dreaming is mere dreaming, my love, that I raised up this strange book like the open doors of an abandoned house." "From THE BOOK OF DISQUIET" "Composed by Bernardo Soares, bookkeeper apprentice in the city of Lisbon, by Fernando Pessoa." "I offer you this book because I know it is beautiful and useless." "It teaches nothing, inspires no faith, and stirs no feeling." "And because this book is absurd, I love it;" "because it is useless, I want to give it away;" "and because it serves no purpose to want to give it to you," "I give it to you..." "I don't know what time is." "I don't know what its real measure is, presuming it has one." "I know that the clock's measure is false, as it divides time spatially, from the outside." "I know that our emotions' way of measuring is just as false, dividing not time but our sensation of it." "The way our dreams measure it is erroneous, for in dreams we only brush against time, now leisurely, now hurriedly, and what we live in them is fast or slow, depending on something in their flowing that I can't grasp." "Fairly tall and thin, he must have been about thirty years old." "He hunched over terribly when sitting down but less so standing up, and he dressed with a carelessness that wasn't entirely careless." "In his pale, uninteresting face there was a look of suffering that didn't add any interest, and it was difficult to say just what kind of suffering this look suggested." "It seemed to suggest various kinds:" "Hardships, anxieties, and the suffering born of the indifference that comes from having already suffered a lot." "Later on I came to know his name was Bernardo Soares." "What a remarkable den!" "I want to dance!" "This bar has no music." "It didn't, until you ladies arrived." "What can I offer you?" "What we want maybe you don't have..." "I have a lot of things." "Aznavour, I love it!" "If you have this song we will even drink your shitty champagne!" "You may sit down, I'll serve you in a minute." "First, the music." "Always!" "Let me laugh and let me sing Let me inebriate my soul" "So that I can forget the past That I carry on my shoulders." "Come and pour me the strongest wine Because the wine sings" "Bring and pour more and more I want to get drunk." "Two guitars on my chest, a great emotion revealing the validity of our existence." "So why do we live, why do we live?" "What is the reason for existing?" "I'm alive today, You're dead tomorrow, and even more dead the day after." "Thank you." "Saturday nights!" "One could write a beautiful text on what just took place." "True." "A beautiful text." "Do you write?" "Do you know Orpheu?" "Yes, I used to enjoy that magazine very much." "The texts were remarkable." "That's strange, because the art of those who write in Orpheu is meant for few..." "Maybe I am one of the few." "I also write, but I can't write poems." "Only fragments, fragments, fragments..." "What do you work on?" "I have a modest job, but I don't want to leave it." "I have nowhere to go, nothing to do." "I have no friends to call on me." "I have no interest in books." "I spend the nights, in my rented room, writing." "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." "There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul." "Did you thought it was going to rain?" "No." "As you may have already noticed, I have some difficulty walking." "I always bring an umbrella with me." "The dignity of tedium." "In rooms decorated in the modern style, tedium becomes a discomfort, a physical distress." "Nothing had ever obliged me to do anything." "I have spent my childhood alone." "I never joined any group." "I never pursued a course of study." "I never belonged to a crowd." "One could say that the circumstances of my life were tailored to the image and likeness of my instincts, which tended towards inertia and withdrawal..." "I never had to face the demands of society or of the state." "I even evaded the demands of my own instincts." "Nothing ever prompted me to have friends or lovers." "You are the first who is in some way my intimate." "Thank you so much." "Maybe you can publish them, who knows?" "I will read them with great curiosity." "Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one." "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." "Most of these young people chose Humanity to replace God." "I, however, am the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to," "seeing not only the multitude he's a part of but also the wide-open spaces around it." "I belong to a generation that inherited disbelief in the Christian faith and created in itself a disbelief in all other faiths." "Our fathers still had the believing impulse, which they transferred from Christianity to other forms of illusion." "Some were champions of social equality, others were wholly enamoured of beauty, still others had faith in science and its achievements, and there were some who became even more Christian, resorting to various Easts and Wests in search of new religious forms" "to entertain their otherwise hollow consciousness of merely living." "And so we were left, each man to himself, in the desolation of feeling ourselves live." "Thus we reproduced a painful version of the argonauts' adventurous precept:" "Living doesn't matter, only sailing does." "Without illusions, we live by dreaming, which is the illusion of those who can't have illusions." "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." "But those who formed the Terminal Race, the spiritual limit" "of the Deadly Hour, didn't have courage enough" "for true denial and asylum." "What we lived was in denial, discontent and disconsolation," "but we lived it within, without moving," "forever closed, at least in the way we lived," "inside the four painted walls of our room and the four stone walls of our inability to act." "Touch me, soft eyes." "Soft, soft hand." "I feel so lonely in here." "Oh touch me soon, now." "What is this word that everyone knows?" "I am here alone and still and also sad." "Touch me, touch me just as I am." "Just as I am." "Everything or nothing." "Everything or nothing." "But everything is imperfect." "There's no sunset so lovely it couldn't be yet lovelier, no gentle breeze bringing us sleep that couldn't bring a yet sounder sleep." "I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlours, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me." "I'm sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colours and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing, for myself alone, wispy songs I compose while waiting." "Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up." "Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life." "Could it think, the heart would stop beating." "For those few like me who live without knowing how to have life, what's left but renunciation as our way and contemplation as our destiny?" "What is the weight when you say "weight"?" "The law of the fall of the body." "Everyone falls on the ground." "On earth." "The force of earth's gravity is the weight." "A cup of coffee, a cigarette and my dreams can substitute quite well for the universe and its stars, for work, love, and even beauty and glory." "All that we know is our own impression, and all that we are is an exterior impression." "I need virtually no stimulants." "I have opium enough in my soul." "I have to choose what I detest, either dreaming, which my intelligence hates, or action, which my sensibility loathes;" "Detesting both, I chose neither;" "But since I must on occasion either dream or act," "I mix the two things together." "I have no theories about life." "I don't know or wonder whether it's good or bad." "In my eyes it's harsh and sad, with delightful dreams interspersed here and there." "Why should I care what it is for others?" "Other people's lives are of use to me only in my dreams, where I live the life that seems to suit each one." "I start to wonder how I'm able to go on, how I dare have the faint-heartedness to be here among these people." "Like flashes from a distant lighthouse," "I see all the solutions offered by the imagination's female side:" "Flight, suicide, renunciation..." "They weren't even sufficiently dirty." "Those who truly suffer don't form a group or go around as a mob." "Those who suffer, suffer alone." "What a pathetic group!" "What a lack of humanity and true pain!" "They were real and therefore unbelievable." "No one could ever use them for the scene of a novel or a descriptive blackdrop." "They went by like rubbish in a river, in the river of life, and to see them go by made me sick to my stomach and profoundly sleepy." "Absurdity is divine." "Let's develop theories, patiently and honestly thinking them out, in order to promptly act against them." "Let's buy books so as not to read them;" "let's go to concerts without caring to hear the music or to see who's there;" "let's take long walks because we're sick of walking;" "and let's spend whole days in the country because it bores us." "To find our personality by losing it, faith itself endorses this destiny." "I seek and don't find." "I want and can't have." "Without me the sun rises and expires;" "without me the rain falls and the wind howls." "It's not because of me that there are seasons, the twelve months, time's passage." "Lord of the world in me which, like earthly lands, I can't take with me..." "What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside me!" "But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life, me, so calm and peaceful?" "I yank from my neck a hand that was choking me..." "A cold hand squeezes my throat and prevents me from breathing life." "Everything is dying in me, even the knowledge that I can dream!" "Where is God, even if he doesn't exist?" "I envy all people, because I'm not them." "All of a sudden, as if a surgical hand of destiny had operated on a long-standing blindness with immediate and sensational results," "I lift my gaze from my anonymous life to the clear recognition of how I live." "And I see that everything I've done, thought or been is a species of delusion or madness." "I don't know if I have a fever, as I feel I do, or if I've stopped having the fever of sleeping through life." "But the city is unknown to me, the streets are new and the trouble has no cure." "And so, leaning over the bridge, I wait for the truth to go away and let me return to being fictitious and non-existent, intelligent and natural." "After I've slept many dreams, I go out to the street with eyes wide open but still with the aura and assurance of my dreams." "And I'm astonished by my automatism, which prevents others from really knowing me." "And I walk in the right direction;" "I don't stagger;" "I react well;" "I exist." "But that sudden light scorches everything, consumes everything." "It strips us naked of even ourselves." "Everyone has his alcohol." "To exist is alcohol enough for me." "Drunk from feeling, I wander as I walk straight ahead." "When it's time, I show up at the office like everyone else." "When it's not time, I go to the river to gaze at the river, like everyone else." "I'm no different." "And behind all this, O sky my sky," "I secretly constellate and have my infinity." "What if I threw myself in there?" "They are not that stupid!" "Excuse me Sir, I'm lost and I don't have anything..." "I don't get indignant, because indignation is for the strong;" "I'm not resigned, Because resignation is for the noble;" "I don't hold my peace, Because silence is for the great." "And I'm neither strong, Nor noble," "Nor great." "I suffer and I dream." "I complain because I'm weak." "And since I'm an artist," "I amuse myself by making my complaints musical and by arranging my dreams" "according to my idea of what makes them beautiful." "I only regret Not being a child," "Since then I could believe" "In my dreams..." "And a deep and weary disdain for all those who work for mankind, for all those who fight for their country and give their lives so that civilization may continue..." "Everything useful and external tastes frivolous and trivial in the light of my soul's supreme reality and next to the pure sovereign splendour of my more original and frequent dreams." "Sometimes I feel, I'm not sure why, a touch of foretold death..." "And then I wonder what this thing is that we call death." "I don't mean the mystery of death, which I can't begin to fathom, but the physical sensation of ceasing to live." "Whenever I see a dead body, death seems to me a departure." "The corpse looks to me like a suit that was left behind." "Someone went away and didn't need to take the one and only outfit he'd worn." "The coffin is so small!" "On what side the head lays?" "Usually it's on the side where the cross is, but the cross is in the middle." "Neither priest nor acolyte." "Poor creature." "A nature's mistake." "If he took after his mother he would be healthy, he took after his father a drunkard." "Better luck next time." "Stillbirth, without a baptism, he was refused a Christian funeral." "He never awoke." "He won't bother anyone." "What is serious is when a grown man ends his own life." "That is the worst of all." "To be born lifeless, what can one do about that?" "I'm sick of walking." "The death, there isn't room for all of them..." "This one is small, it occupies little room... if all the adults were buried standing up..." "Sitting or kneeling isn't proper." "Standing." "In that position the blood would seep down to the earth, fertilizing it." "I am so tired!" "My heart isn't what it used to be." "Afterall the heart is a pump, constantly pumping litres of blood." "Some nice day the pump clogs and then!" "When the hell will this be over?" "Lungs, heart, liver, old oxidated pumps." "To hell with the rest of it." "Maybe on the last day you will rise, on judgement day." "Sadly, or perhaps not, I recognize that I have an arid heart." "An adjective matters more to me than the real weeping of a human soul." "But sometimes I'm different." "Sometimes I have the warm tears of those who don't have and never had a mother;" "I don't remember my mother." "She died when I was one year old." "And everything bad about my sensibility comes from the warmth I didn't have." "They told me later on that my mother was pretty, and they say that, when they told me, I made no comment." "My father, who lived far away, killed himself when I was three, and so I never met him." "I still don't know why he lived far away." "I remember his death as a grave silence during the first meals we ate after learning about it." "I remember that the others would occasionally look at me." "And I would look back, dumbly comprehending." "Then I'd eat with more concentration, since they might, when I wasn't looking, still be looking at me." "That is me!" "I wrote that!" "Where might the living be?" "Nature is the difference between the soul and God." "Where's the salad?" "You don't get paid for chatting." "To need to dominate others is to need others." "The commander is dependent." "I have a very simple morality:" "Not to do good or evil to anyone." "I refrain." "I've never loved anyone." "To submit to nothing." "Free from ourselves as well as from others, contemplatives without ecstasy, thinkers without conclusions and liberated from God, we will live the few moments of bliss allowed us in the prison yard by the distraction of our executioners." "A man of true wisdom, with nothing but his senses and a soul that's never sad, can enjoy the entire spectacle of the world from a chair," "without knowing how to read and without talking to anyone." "Something that would make me almost feel, something that would make me not think." "Every pleasure is a vice, because to seek pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the only black vice is to do what everyone else does." "Human life is tedious." "An opinion is a vulgarity, even when it's not sincere." "Every instance of sincerity is an intolerance." "There are no sincere liberal minds." "There are, for that matter, no liberal minds." "Enthusiasm is a vulgarity." "To have opinions is to sell out to yourself." "To have no opinion is to exist." "To have every opinion is to be a poet." "Collective thought is stupid because it's collective." "We all love each other, and the lie is the kiss we exchange." "And when lying begins to bring us pleasure, let's give it the lie by telling the truth." "Might not God be an enormous child?" "Doesn't the whole universe seem like a game, like the prank of a mischievous child?" "The downfall of classical ideals made all men potential artists, and therefore bad artists." "When art depended on solid construction and the careful observance of rules, few could attempt to be artists, and a fair number of these were quite good." "But when art, instead of being understood as creation, became merely an expression of feelings, then anyone could be an artist, because everyone has feelings." "One tin fell, like the Fate of us all." "There's a thin sheet of glass between me and life." "However cleary I see and understand life, I can't touch it." "What they could say while they wait... they would stop thinking about their stomach." "What I really needed was a miracle." "Miracles are God's laziness, or rather, the laziness we ascribe to God when we invent miracles." "I'm suffering from a headache and the universe." "What I feel like doing is dying, at least temporarily, but this, as I've indicated, is only because my head aches." "Covering my eyes won't blind me, but it will keep me from seeing..." "My head aches because my head aches." "The universe hurts me because my head hurts." "But the universe that actually hurts me is not the true one, which exists only to me and which, should I pass my hands through my hair, makes me feel that each strand suffers for no other reason than to make me suffer." "God is good but the devil isn't so bad." "It's as if my life amounted to being trashed by it." "What do I have to do with life?" "The most contemptible thing about dreams is that everyone has them." "My sweat isn't cold, but my awareness of it is." "I'm not physically ill, but my soul's anxiety is so intense that it passes through my pores and chills my body." "So great is this tedium, so sovereign my horror of being alive..." "My God, my god, who am I watching?" "How many am I?" "Who is I?" "What is this gap between me and myself?" "I'm liberated and lost." "I feel." "I shiver with fever." "I'm I." "A cat wallows in the sun and goes to sleep." "Man wallows in life, and goes to sleep." "I will always belong to the Rua dos Douradores, like all of humanity." "I will always be, in verse or prose, an office employee." "I will always be local and submissive, a servant of my feelings and of the moments when they occur." "This posthumous coat, these old sleepers, play out in my useless reverie a dream no different from anybody else's." "The mistery of life distresses and frightens us in many ways." "Sometimes it comes upon us like formless phantom, and the soul trembles with the worst of fears, that of the monstrous incarnation of non being." "At other times it's behind us, visible only as long as we don't turn around to look at it, and it's the truth in its profound horror of our never being able to know it." "But the horror that's destroying me today is less noble and more corrosive." "It's a longing to be free of wanting to have thoughts, a desire to never have been anything, a conscious despair in every cell of my body and soul." "What do we possess?" "What do we possess?" "What makes us love?" "Beauty?" "And do we possess it when we love?" "If we vehemently, totally possess a body, what do we really possess?" "Not the body, not the soul, and not even beauty." "When we grasp an attractive body, it's not the beauty but fatty and cellular flesh that we embrace;" "Our kiss doesn't touch the mouth's beauty but the wet flesh of decaying, membranous lips;" "And even sexual intercourse, though admittedly a close and ardent contact, is not a true penetration, not even of one body into another." "What do we possess?" "What do we really possess?" "Our own sensations, at least?" "Listen to me." "Listen to me carefully." "Absurdity, confusion, oblivion, everything that isn't 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." "I sleep and unsleep." "It's in classical writers, in the calm-spirited in those who if they suffer don't mention it, that I feel like a holy transient, an anointed pilgrim, a contemplator for no reason of a world with no purpose" "prince of the Great Exile, who as he was leaving gave the last beggar the ultimate aims of his desolation." "I don't know why, but I'm troubled by this objective network of wide and narrow streets, this sucession of street lamps, trees, lighted and dark windows, opened and closed gates, heterogeneously nocturnal shapes which my near-sightedness" "makes even hazier, until they become subjectively monstrous, unintelligible and unreal." "I feel a certain duty to dream continuously since not being more nor wanting to be more than a spectator of myself," "I have to put on the best show I can." "And so I fashion myself out of gold and silks, in imaginary rooms, on a false stage, with ancient scenery:" "A dream created to invisible music and the play of soft lights." "I will always be, under the large blue canopy of the silent sky, a pageboy in an unintelligible rite," "dressed in life for the occasion, executing steps, gestures, stances and expressions without knowing why," "until the feast, or my role in it, ends and I can treat myself to tidbits" "in the large tents" "I've been told are down below, at the back of the garden." "If happiness and the new day would never come!" "If I opened my eyes from my pretended slumber I could see, on the darkly visible walls of my room, floating snatches of dreams to be dreamed, dim lights, black lines, hazy shapes climbing up and down." "The various pieces of furniture, larger than in the daytime, indistinctly blotted the dark's absurdity." "The door was distinguishable as something no whiter or blacker than night, just different." "My soul's solitude grew and spread, invading what I felt, what I wanted, and what I was going to dream." "Clouds..." "Today I'm conscious of the sky." "Clouds..." "Such disquiet when I feel, such discomfort when I think, such futility when I desire." "Clouds..." "I question myself and don't know me." "Nothing I've done has been useful, and nothing I do will be any different." "I've wasted part of my life in confusedly interpreting nothing at all, and the rest of it in writing these verses in prose for my incommunicable sensations, which is how I make the unknown universe mine." "I'm objectively and subjectively sick of myself." "I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything." "Clouds..." "They are everything:" "Disintegrated fragments of atmosphere, the only real things today between the worthless earth and the non-existent sky, indescribable tatters of the tedium I ascribe to them, mist condensed into colourless threats, dirty wads of cotton from a hospital without walls." "Clouds..." "They're like me, a ravaged passage between sky and earth, at the mercy of an invisible impulse, thundering, whitely giving joy or blackly spreading gloom, stray fictions in the gap, far from the earth's noise but without the sky's peace." "Clouds..." "Whoever lives like me doesn't die:" "He terminates, wilts, devegetates." "The place where he was remains without him being there;" "The street where he walked remains without him beeing seen on it;" "The house where he lived is inhabited by not-him." "That's all, and we call it nothing;" "These vegetable manifestation of both truth and life, dust on both the outside and the inside of the panes, grandchildren of Destiny and stepchildren of God, who married Eternal Night when she was widowed by the Chaos that fathered us." "To depart from the rua dos Douradores for the impossible..." "You look very good." "I've never had a flattering notion of my physical appearance, but I never felt it to be more insignificant than there, next to the familiar faces." "My gaunt and inexpressive face has no intelligence or intensity or anything else to raise it out of that lifeless tide of faces." "Lifeless, no." "There are some truly expressive psysiognomies there." "Senhor Vasques looks just like himself, broad, cheerful face with hard features and a steady gaze." "The two travelling salesmen look sharp." "And the local Sales representative turned out well, though he's half hidden by Moreira's shoulder." "And Moreiral Moreira, my supervisor, the epitome of monotonous constancy, looks much more alive than II" "What does this mean?" "What is this truth that film doesn't mistake?" "What is this certainty that a cold lens documents?" "Who am I, that I should look like that?" "A cold silence." "The sounds from the street seemed to be cut by a knife." "Then there was a long, cosmically held breath, a kind of generalized dread." "The entire universe had stopped dead." "Moments, moments, moments..." "Silence blackened the darkeness." "All of a sudden, live steel..." "Again, without warning, magnetic light gushes forth, flickering." "My heart beats with a gulp." "A glass dome shatters on high into large bits." "Senhor Vasques, his wan face is an unnatural and befuddled green." "I watch him take his laboured breaths with the kinship of knowing I'll be no different." "Oh Lisbon, my home!" "I remember, as clearly as what's before my eyes, the night when as a child I read for the first time, in an anthology," "Vieira's famous passage on King Solomon:" ""Solomon built a palace..."" "And I read all the way to the end, trembling and confused." "Then I broke into joyful tears, tears such as any of life's sorrows ever make me shed." "That hieratic movement of our clear majestic language, that expression of ideas in inevitable words, like water that flows because there's a slope, that vocalic marvel in which the sounds are ideal colours, all of this instinctively seized me like an overwhelming political emotion." "And I cried." "Remembering it today, I still cry." "Not out of nostalgia for my childhood, which I don't miss, but because of nostalgia for the emotion of that moment, because of a heartfelt regret that I can no longer read for the first time that great symphonic certitude." "I have no social or political sentiments, and yet there is a way in which I'm highly nationalistic." "My nation is the Portuguese language." "It wouldn't trouble me at all if Portugal were invaded or occupied, as long as I was left in peace." "But I hate with genuine hatred, with the only hatred I feel, not those who write bad Portuguese, not those whose syntax is faulty, but the badly written page itself, as if it were a person," "incorrect syntax, as someone who ought to be flogged, the substitution of i for y, as the spit that directly disgusts me, independent of who spat it." "Yes, because spelling is also a person." "The Word is complete when seen and heard." "And the pageantry of Graeco-Roman translitearion dresses it for me in its authentic royal robe, making it a lady and a queen." "But I don't write in Portuguese." "I write my own self." "So long, Mr. Soares, and I hope you feel better." "The trumpet blast of this simple phrase relieved my soul like a sudden wind clearing the sky of clouds." "Camaraderie has its subtleties." "Some govern the world, others are the world." "Between an american milionaire, a Caesar or Napoleon, or Lenin, and the Socialist leader of a small town, there's a difference in quantity but not of quality." "Bellow them there's us, the unnoticed:" "The reckless playwright William Shakespeare," "John Milton the schoolteacher, Dante Alighieri, the tramp, and the waiter who just now demonstrated his camaraderie by wishing me well, after noticing I'd drunk only half the wine." "I can assure you that I sometimes feel what I say and even, despite being a woman, what I say through my gaze..." "Aren't you being harsh on yourself?" "Do we really feel what we think we're feeling?" "Does this conversation, for example, have any semblance of reality?" "Surely not." "It would be unacceptable in a novel." "I realize it gives the impression of an overwrought, somewhat forced reality..." "To be an illustration seems to me the only ideal worthy of a contemporary woman." "As a child I wanted to be the queen of one of the suits in a deck of old cards we had at home..." "For a child, of course, such moral aspirations are common..." "Only later, when all our aspirations are immoral, do we really think about this." "You know, even now as I'm talking" "I'm trying to fathom the true meaning of the things you've been telling me." "Do you forgive me?" "Not entirely..." "We should never plumb the feelings that other people pretend to have." "They're always too intimate... don't think it doesn't hurt me to share these intimate secrets, all of which are false but which represent true tatters of my pathetic soul..." "You've hurt me." "Why ruin the constant unreality of our conversation?" "Now it's my turn to ask forgiveness..." "But I was distracted and really didn't notice that I'd said something that makes sense..." "How late it always is!" "Don't get upset again, the sentence I just said, after all, is complete nonsense..." "Don't apologize, and don't pay any attention to what we're talking about..." "Every good conversation should be a two-way monologue..." "The best and profoundest conversations, and the least morally instructive ones, are those that novelists have between two characters from one of their books." "For example..." "For heaven's sake!" "Don't tell me you were going to cite an example!" "That's only done in grammars;" "perhaps you've forgotten that we don't even read them." "Did you ever read a grammar?" "Never." "I've always despised knowing the correct way to say something..." "All I ever liked in grammar books were the exceptions and pleonasms..." "To dodge the rules and say useless things sums up the essentially modern attitude." "Isn't that how they say it?" "What's especially irritating in grammars is the chapter on verbs, since these are what give meaning to sentences..." "An honest sentence should always have any number of possible meanings." "Verbs!" "A friend of mine who committed suicide was going to dedicate his life to destroying verbs..." "Why did he commit suicide?" "He wanted to discover and develop a method for surreptitiously not completing sentences." "He commited suicide, yes, of course, because one day he realized what a tremendous responsability he'd assumed..." "The enormity of the problem made him go nuts..." "A revolver and..." "No..." "Don't you see that it could never be a revolver?" "A man like that never shoots himself in the head..." "You understand very little about the friends you've never had..." "The two figures sitting at the table surely didn't have this conversation." "But they were so well groomed and dressed that it seemed a pity for them not to talk this way..." "That's why I wrote this conversation for them to have had..." "Sometimes, when I lift my dazed head from the books where I record other people's accounts and the absence of a life I can call my own," "I feel a pshysical nausea, which might be from hunching over, but which transcends the numbers and my disillusion." "I find life distasteful, like a useless medicine." "We live by action, by acting on desire." "Those of us who don't know how to want, whether geniuses or beggars, are related by impotence." "What's the point of calling myself a genius, if I'm after all an assistant bookkeeper?" "I looked at it from the depths of the abyss, anonymous and attentive." "It was coloured by green shades of black-blue, and its shiny repulsiveness wasn't ugly." "A life!" "I didn't think:" "I felt." "It was carnally, directly, with profound and dark horror that I made this ludicrous comparison." "I was a fly when I compared myself to one." "I really felt like a fly when I imagined I felt like one." "And I felt I had a flyish, slept flyish and was flyish withdrawn." "And what's more horrifying is that I felt, at the same time, like myself." "I automatically raised my eyes towards the ceiling, lest a lofty wooden ruler should swoop down to swat me, as I might swat that fly." "When I lowered my eyes, the fly had fortunately disappeared without a sound, at least not any I could hear." "The involuntary office was again without philosophy." "In my kingdom love doesn't weary, for it doesn't long to possess;" "nor does it suffer from the frustration of never having posessed." "My hand lightly rests on the hair of those who think," "and they forget;" "those who have waited in vain lean against my breast," "and finally come to trust." "My lips utter no song like the sirens' nor any melody like that of the trees" "and fountains, but my silence welcomes like a faint music, and my stillness soothes" "like the torpor of a breeze." "In my domain, where only the night reins, you will be consoled, for your hopes will have ceased;" "you'll be able to forget, for your desire will have died;" "you will finally rest, for you'll have no life." "Drink from my inexhaustible chalice the supreme nectar which doesn't jade or taste bitter, which doesn't nauseate or inebriate." "Look out the window of my castle and contemplate not the moonlight and the sea, which are beautiful and thus imperfect things, but the vast, maternal night, the undivided splendour of the bottomless abyss!" "I will be your maternal wife, the twin sister you've at long last recovered." "And with all your anxieties married to me, you yourself will become lost in my mystic substance, in my forsworn existence," "in my breast where things smother, in my breast where souls drown, in my breast where the gods vanish." "Sovereign King of Detachment and Renunciation," "Emperor of Death and Shipwreck living dream that grandly wanders" "among the world's ruins and wastes!" "Sovereign King of Despair amid splendours, grieving lord of palaces" "that don't satisfy, master of processions and pageants" "that never succeed in blotting out life!" "Sovereign King Shepherd of the Watches, knight errant of Anxieties travelling on moonlit roads without glory and without even a lady to serve, lord in the forests and on the slopes, a silent silhouette with visor drawn shut," "Sovereing King consecrated by Death to be her own, consecrated by Death to be her own." "Bring the goblets, platters and garlands, all you pages and damsels and servants!" "Bring them for the feast!" "Bring them and come dressed in black," "With your heads crowned by myrtle." "Death is Life's triumph!" "Death is Life's triumph!" "Death is Life's triumph!" "It is by death that we live when we dream, since to dream is to deny life." "Death guides us, death seeks us, death accompanies us." "Your love for things dreamed" "Was your contempt for things lived." "Virgin King who disdained love, Shadow King who despised light," "Dream King who denied life!" "Amid the muffled racket of cymbals and drums," "Darkness acclaims you Emperor!" "Yes, it's the sunset." "Slowly and distractedly I reach the end of the Rua da Alfândega and see, beyond the Terreiro do Paço, a clear view of the sunless western sky." "An immense peace that I don't have is coldly present in the abstract fall air." "Not having it, I experience the feeble pleasure of imagining it exists." "But in reality there is no peace nor lack of peace, just sky, fuzzy hues of distant clouds that aren't clouds." "And all of this is a vision that vanishes as soon as it occurs, a winged interlude between nothing and nothing that takes place on high, in shades of sky and grief, diffuse and indefinite." "Ah, who will save me from existing?" "It's neither death nor life that I want:" "It's that other thing shining in the depths of longing, like a possible Diamond in a pit one can't descend." "It all amounts to the absence of a true God, an absence that is the empty cadaver of the lofty heavens and the closed soul." "Infinite prison, since you're infinite, there's no escaping you!" "Your ships, Lord, didn't make a greater voyage" "than the one made by my thought, in the disaster of this book." "They rounded no cape and sighted no far-flung beach, beyond what daring men had dared and what minds had dreamed," "to equal the capes I rounded with my imagination." "I too have finally arrived at the port-in-no-place of the World's abstract chasm, at the vacant end of things." "I have entered, Lord, that Port." "I have wandered, Lord, over that sea." "I have gazed, Lord, at that invisible chasm." "I dedicate this work of supreme Discovery to the memory of your Portuguese name," "of your Portuguese name," "creator of argonauts." "I'm so cold, so weary in my abandonment." "Go and find my Mother, O Wind." "Give me back my nursemaid, O vast Silence, and my crib and the lullaby that used to put me to sleep." "SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION" "For those who choose to make dreams their life, and to make a religion and politics out of cultivating sensations like plants in a hothouse, the sign that they've successfully taken the first step is when they feel the tiniest things in an extraordinary and extravagant way." "That's all there is to the first step." "To know how to sip a cup of tea with the extreme voluptuousness that the normal man experiences only when overcome by joy at seeing his ambition suddenly fulfilled or himself suddenly cured of a terrible nostalgia, or when he's in the final, carnal acts of love;" "To be able to achieve in the vison of a sunset or in the contemplation of a decorative detail that intensity of feeling which generally can't occur through sight or hearing but only by way of the carnal senses, touch, taste and smell," "when they sculpt the object of sensation on our consciousness;" "The creation of an automatically heightened and complex awareness of the simplest and commonest sensations leads not only to a vast increase in the enjoyment we get from feeling but also to a tremendous upsurge in the amount of pain we experience." "The second step for the dreamer should therefore be to avoid pain." "He shouldn't avoid it like the stoics or the early Epicureans, by abandoning the nest, for that will harden him against pleasure as well as against pain." "He should, instead, seek pleasure in pain, and then learn how to feel pain falsely, to feel some kind of pleasure, that is, whenever he feels pain." "There are various paths for reaching this goal." "One is to hyperanalyse our pain but only after we've first trainded ourselves to react to pleausure by exclusively feeling it, with no analysis." "This is an easier technique than it seems, at least for superior souls." "To analyse pain and to get in the habit of submitting all pains to analysis, until we do it automatically, by instinct, will endow every pain imaginable with the pleasure of analysing it." "Once our ability and instinct to analyse grow large enough, our practice of it will absorb everything, and there will be nothing left of pain but an indefinite substance for analysis." "Another method, more subtle and more difficult, is to develop the habit of incarnating the pain in an ideal figure." "First we must create another I, charged with suffering, in and for us, everything we suffer." "Next we need to create an inner sadism, completely masochistic, that enjoys its suffering as if it were someone else's." "This method, which on first reading seems impossible, isn't easy, but it is eminently attainable, presenting no special difficulties for those who are well versed in lying to themsleves." "Once this is achieved, pain and suffering acquire an absolutely tantalizing flavour of blood and disease, an incredibly exotic pungency of decadent gratification!" "The feeling of pain resembles the anguished, troubled height of convulsions, and suffering, the long and slow kind, has the intimate yellow which colours the vague bliss of a profoundly felt convalescence." "And an exquisite exhaustion tinged with disquiet and melancholy evokes the complex sensation of anguish that our pleasures arouse in the thought that they will vanish, as well as the melancholy pre-weariness we feel in our sensual delights, when we think of the weariness they'll bring." "There is a third method for subtilizing pains into pleasures and for making doubts and worries into a soft bed." "It consists in intensely concentrating on our anxieties and sufferings, making them so fiercely felt that by their very excess they bring the pleausure of excess, while by their violence they suggest the pleasure that hurts for being so pleasurable and the gratification that smacks of blood" "for having wounded us." "This can only hapen, of course, in souls dedicated to pleausure by habit and by education." "And when, as in me, all three methods are employed simultaneously, when every felt pain, felt so quickly there's no time for the soul to plan any defence, is automatically analysed to the core, ruthlessly foisted on an extraneous I," "and buried in me to the utmost height of pain, then I truly feel like a victor and a hero." "Then life stops for me, and art grovels at my feet." "Everything I've been describing is just the second step that the dreamer must take to reach his dream." "Who besides me has been able to take the third step, which leads to the sumptuous threshold of the Temple?" "This is the step which is indeed hard to take, for it requires an inward effort vastly greater than any effort we make in life, but it also rewards us to the heights and depths of our soul in a way that life never could." "This step is, once everything else has been completely and simultaneously carried out, the three subtle methods having been applied to the exhaustion, to immediatly pass the sensation through pure intelligence, filtering it through a higher analysis that shapes it into a literary form" "with its own substance and character." "Then I have completely fixed the sensation." "Then I have made the unreal real and have given the unattainable an eternal pedestal." "Then, within myself, I have been crowned Emperor." "Don't imagine that I write to publish, or merely to write, or to produce art." "I write because this is the final goal, the supreme refinement, the organically illogical refinement, of my cultivation of the states of soul." "If I take one of my sensations and unravel it so as to use it to weave the inner reality, you can be sure I don't do it for the sake of a lucid and shimmering prose, nor even for the sake of the pleasure I get from that prose" "but to give complete exteriority to what is interior, thereby enabling me to realize the unrealizable, to conjoin the contradictory and, having exteriorized my dream, to give it its most powerful expression as pure dream." "Yes, this is my role as a stagnator of life, chiseller of inaccuracies, sick pageboy of my soul and queen, reading to her at twilight not the poems from the book of my Life that lies open on my knees, but the poems that I invent and pretend to read," "and that she pretends to hear, while somewhere and somehow the Evening is softening, over this metaphor raised up in me into Absolute Reality, the last hazy light of a mysterious spiritual day." "The caress never comes, the stone in your ring" "bleeds in the growing darkness..." "The dark, far-away night of the argonauts, and my forehead burning with their primitive ships..." "Everything belongs to others except my grief for not having any of it." "I suffered in me, with me, the aspirations of all eras, and every disquietude of every age walked with me to the whispering shore of the sea." "We are who we're not, and life is quick and sad." "The sound of the waves at night is a sound of the night, and how many have heard it in their own soul, like the perpetual hope that dissolves in the darkness with a faint splash of distant foam!" "What tears were shed by those who achieved, what tears lost by those who succeeded!" "And all this, in my walk to the seashore, was a secret told to me by the night and the abyss." "How many we are!" "How many of us fool ourselves!" "What seas crash in us, in the night when we exist, along the beaches that we feel ourselves to be, inundated by emotion!" "Who even knows what he thinks or wants?" "Who knows what he is to himself?" "How many things music suggests, and we're glad they can never be!" "How much I die if I feel for everything!" "How much I feel if I meander this way, bodiless and human, with my heart as still as a beach." "The idea of travelling nauseates me." "I've already seen what I've never seen." "I've already seen what I have yet to see." "Ah, let those who don't exist travel!" "The train slows down, we're at Cais do Sodré." "I've arrived at Lisbon, but not at a conclusion." "O night in which stars feign light," "O night that alone is the size of the Universe, make me, body and soul, part of your body, so that, being mere darkness, I'll lose myself and become night as well, without any dreams as stars within me," "nor a hoped-for sun shining with the future." "A few vestiges of consciousness persist." "I feel the weight of slumber but not of unconsciousness." "I don't exist." "The wind..." "I wake up and go back to sleep without yet having slept." "There's a landscape of loud and indistinct sound beyond which I'm a stranger to myself." "Dreamed madness in that estranging silence!" "Our life was all our life..." "And what a fresh and happy horror that there was nobody there!" "Not even we, who walked there, were there." "Faint and dispersed but definite sounds dawn in my awareness, filling my consciousness of our room with the fact that the day is broken..." "Our room?" "Mine and who else's, if I'm here alone?" "I don't know." "Everything blends and all that remains is a fleeting mist of reality in which my uncertainty founders and my self-awareness is lulled to sleep by opiums..." "Let us give up the illusion of hope, which betrays;" "Of love, which wearies;" "Of life, which surfeits but never satisfies;" "And even of death, which brings more than we want and less than we hope for." "Let us not weep, nor hate, nor desire..." "Let us cover with a sheet of fine linen, O Silent Soulmate, the dead, stiff profile of our Imperfection..." "Peace at last." "All that was dross and residue vanishes from my soul as if it had never been." "I'm alone and calm." "But although I'm no longer attracted to anything down here," "I'm also not attracted to anything up above." "I feel free, as if I'd ceased to exist" "and were conscious of that fact." "Peace, yes, peace." "A Great calm, gentle like something superfluous, descends on me to the depths of my being." "The pages I read, the tasks I complete, the motions and vicissitudes of life," "all has become for me a faint penumbra, a scarcely visible halo circling something tranquil that I can't identify." "Go swiftly by, life that's not felt, a stream flowing silently under forgotten trees!" "Go gently by, soul that's not known, an unseen rustle beyond large fallen trees!" "Go uselessly by, pointlessly by, consciousness conscious of nothing, a hazy flash in the distance amid clearing in the leaves, coming from and going to we don't know where!" "Go, go, and let me forget!" "Faint breath of what never dared live, dull sigh of what failed to feel, useless murmur of what refused to think, go slowly, go slackly, go in the eddies you have to have and in the dips you're given," "go to the shadow or to the light, brother of the world, go to glory or to the abyss, son of Chaos and of the Night, but remembering some obscure part of you that the Gods came late" "and that they will also pass." "The man in the corner of the dance-hall dances with all the dancers." "He sees everything, and because he sees everything, he lives everything." "Since everything is ultimately our own sensation, to have actual contact with a body counts for no more than seeing it or just remembering it." "I dance, therefore, when I see someone dance." "How is your colleague doing?" "He passed away yesterday." "Flatly answered the barber's voice behind me and the linen cloth." "The whole of my irrational good mood abruptly died, like the eternally missing barber from the adjacent chair." "A chill swept over all my thoughts." "I said nothing." "Tomorrow I too will vanish from the Rua da Prata, the Rua dos Douradores, the Rua dos Fanqueiros." "Tomorrow I too, I this soul that feels and thinks, this universe I am for myself, yes, tomorrow I too will be the one that no longer walks these streets, whom others will vaguely evoke with a "what's become of him?"." "The highest stage of dreaming is when, having created a picture with various figures whose lives we live all at the same time, we are jointly and interactivelly all of those souls." "This leads to an incredible degree of depersonalization and the reduction of our spirit to ashes." "And it is hard, I admit, not to feel a general weariness throughout one's entire being." "But what triumph!" "This is the only final asceticism." "It's an asceticism without faith and without any God." "God am I." "Let's go gentlemen, I want to close in five minutes." "Can you please stop playing with that shit?" "I can't look at the blade it reminds me the history of Rome!" "Thank you Mr. Pessoa." "I'll see you tomorrow." "Good night." "Take care." "I'll be right back." "Mr. Pessoa, Mr. Pessoa!" "Distracted, as always!" "That isn't mine!" "It was left on a chair at your table." "It isn't mine." "I have no idea what this is." "Who else has been sitting in that table today?" "You sir, nobody else." "Keep it." "It may interest you somehow, who knows?" "If someone claims it, I'll warn you Mr. Pessoa." "Okay." "Have a goodnight sleep Mr. Pessoa!" "Ah, to sleep..." "Excerpts from "The Book of Disquiet" according to Richard Zenith's translation"