This Codex Journal was scheduled to go out yesterday, but we decided to delay it. So, without further ado, we’ll now talk about a special book from our collection. A book that showed us beauty in the ordinary, prompted reflection, and infused an appreciation for the quiet and anonymous life. This book is called The Book of Disquiet. Authored by Fernando Pessoa.
We can’t discuss this book without me telling you how I came across it. There is nothing remarkable about how it happened aside from the fact that it happened. Several years ago, I was living in Atlanta with my younger brother who was, at the time, studying philosophy. It was equally a good time and a hard time for me. A time of dreaming, radical change, and uncertainties.
The first time I saw the book was around the coffee table. I ignored it. At that time, I was busy looking for a job. Over some days, I reached a point of exhaustion, and in an effort to “get my mind off of things” I picked up the book lying on the coffee table. For weeks, I slipped into what felt like a reality-distorting wormhole. Amazed by the words glowing from the pages. When I asked my brother how he came across the text, he told me, “Last semester. It found me.” That’s how The Book of Disquiet made its way into my world and now it’s making its way into yours.
This book is not ordinary. It’s a collection of writings, reflections, aphorisms, and musings. Reminiscent of a passionate religious teacher, the manner in which Pessoa writes is full of vitality and vigor.
He writes about perfection:
We worship perfection because we can’t have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.
As you read through the book you begin to see why Pessoa calls it “the saddest book in Portugal.”
I feel more kinship and intimacy with certain characters described in books and certain images I’ve seen in prints than I feel with many so-called real people, who are of that metaphysical insignificance known as flesh and blood. And ‘flesh and blood’ in fact describes them rather well: they’re like chunks of meat displayed in the window of a butcher’s, dead things bleeding as if they were alive, shanks and cutlets of Destiny.
And through his observations, we learn to travel between the links of life, dreaming, and everything in between. We see things differently in the process. The stuff of life. The familiar becomes unfamiliar. One of Pessoa’s greatest gifts is his ability to present the mundane, as is, only that in the process of him doing so, one can not help but notice the hidden Beauty.
The joy of being understood by others cannot be had by those who want to be understood, for they are too complex to be understood; and simple people, who can be understood by others, never have the desire to be understood.
Nobody achieves anything … Nothing is worth doing.
Fernando Pessoa went by many names eight one in fact. Adding to this, his pseudonyms each have their own stories and bodies of work. At first, I was puzzled at the use of so many pseudonyms. Sensing I was missing a vital clue somewhere, I’ve explored more of them and discovered that the more I read the works of Pessoa or his heteronym Alberto Caeiro, or the others, a constellation began to form. One that seems to point us somewhere right back into ourselves and our own humanity.
These pages are the scribbles of my intellectual self-unawareness. I trace them in a stupor of feeling whatever I feel, like a cat in the sun, and I sometimes reread them with a vague, belated astonishment, as when I remember something I forgot ages ago. When I write, I pay myself a solemn visit. I have special chambers, remembered by someone else in the interstices of my imagining, where I take delight in analysing what I don’t feel, and I examine myself like a picture in a dark corner.
The Book of Disquiet is not a rare book in the sense that it is difficult to find. It’s a rare book in another sense. Rare in that it stands as its own work. It’s the result of a writer writing for the sake of writing over a lifetime.
Nothing had ever obliged him to do anything. He had spent his childhood alone. He never joined any group. He never pursued a course of study. He never belonged to a crowd. The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon – perhaps, in fact, it’s true for all lives – of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended towards inertia and withdrawal.
The contents that make up The Book of Disquiet were originally found as unorganized jottings, scribbles, and notebooks sometimes containing a rough date. By some divine intervention, the writings were found in a chest and published in 1982. Nearly half a century after Pessoa died. This begs the question, how many more beautiful things remain hidden waiting to be discovered?