Library of Congress
Catalog Card Number: 91-61197
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Pessoa, Fernando
The book of disquiet
I. Title 869.341
ISBN 1-85242-204-1
First publication as Livro do desassossego por Bernardo Soares Translation copyright c 1991 by Serpent's Tail

The edition follows the selection made by Maria Jose de Lancastre for the Italian edition published by Feltrinelli.
Publication was partly made possible by financial support from the Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon and the Comission of the European Communities, Brussels.

The edition first published in 1991 by Serpent's Tail, 4 Blackstock Mews, London N4, and 401 West Broadway #2 New York, NY 10012

Student Work Designed and Illustrated By: Kaitlin Kall
All illustrations are a copyright of Kaitlin Kall
©2012

Fernando Pessoa was born in Lison in 1888. He spent most of his life there but, after his father's death, he lived in South Africa for nine years when his mother married the Portuguese consul in Durban. In those years he became fluent in English and developed a love for English writers such as Shakespeare and Milton. This influenced him to write his first collections of poems and journals in English, while his first book in Portuguese was published just two years after his death.

On leaving South Africa he returned to Lisbon, where he became involved in the modernist group 'Orpheu' and had a major role in the development of modernism in Portugal. During his life he was virtually unknown, avoiding society and the literary world, and although he wrote a vast amount, most of it was published posthumously. After his death in Lisbon in 1935, a trunk was found containing over 25,000 items - among them were collections of poems, letters and journals, from which The Book of Disquiet is a selection.

The Book of Disquiet (Livro do desassossego) is the most extensive prose work written by Portugal's greatest poet, Fernando Pessoa. He was engaged in writing it, always in fragmentary form, from 1912 until his death in 1935, although the first complete Portuguese edition only appeared in 1982. As well as writing under his own name, Pessoa created a number of 'heteronyms', imaginary authors to whom he gave complete biographies and who wrote in styles and expressed philosophies and attitudes different from his own. Pessoa attributed the authorship of The Book of Disquiet to Bernardo Soares, who was, he said only 'a semi-heteronym because, although his personality is not mine, it is not different from but rather a simple mutilation of my personality. It's me minus reason and affectivity.'

Very little of this 'intimate diary' was published in his lifetime. The book itself was handwritten in notebooks or typed on frequently undated and undatable sheets of paper. The work of deciphering and collating all this material was carried out by Maria Aliete Galhoz, Teresa Sobral Cunha and Jacinto do Prado Coelho. This translation is based on the thematic selection edited by Maria Jose de Lancastre, a leading Pessoa scholar. The numbers given in parentheses at the beginning of each text refers to the numbering of the original 1982 edition published in Lisbon by Atica [. . .] indicates that words or phrases in the original are either illegible or missing.

The translator would like to thank Pete Ayrton, Annella McDermott, Faye Carney and Martin Jenkins for all their help and advice.

Sometimes I think I will never leave Rua dos Douradores. Once written down, that seems to me like eternity.

The journey in my head

In the plausible intimacy of approaching evening, as I stand waiting for the stars to begin at the window of this fourth floor room that looks out on the infinite, my dreams move to the rhythm required by long journeys to countries as yet unknown, or to countries that are simply hypothetical or impossible.

Today, during one of those periods of daydreaming which, though devoid of either purpose of dignity, still constitute the greater part of the spiritual substance of my life, I imagined myself free forever of Rua dos Douradores, of my boss Vasques, of Moreira the book-keeper, of all the other employess, the errand boy, the post boy, even the cat. In dreams, that freedom felt to me as yet undiscovered. Freedsom would mean rest, artistic achievement, the intellectual fulfilment of my being.

But suddenly, even as I imagine this (during the brief holiday afforded by my lunch break), a feeling of displeasure erupted into the dream: I would be sad. Yes, I say it quite seriously: I would be sad. For my boss Vasques, Moreira the book-keeper, Borges the cashier, all the lads, the cheery boy who takes the letters to the post office, the errand boy, the friendly cat - they have all become part of my life. I could never leave all that behind without weeping, without realizing, however displeasing the thought, that part of me would remain with them and that losing them would be akin to death.

Moreover, if I left them all tomorrow and discarded this Rua dos Douradores suit of clothes I wear, what else would I do? Because I have to do something. And what suit would I wear? Because I would have to wear another suit.

We all have a Senor Vasques; sometimes he's a tangible human being, sometimes not. In my case he is really called Vasques and he's a pleasant, healthy chap, a bit brusque sometimes but he's no double dealer. He's selfish but basically fair, much fairer than many of the great geniuses and many of the human marvels of civilization on both left and right. For many people Vasques takes the form for vanity, a desire for greater wealth, for glory and immortality... Personally I prefer to have Vasques as my real life boss since, in times of difficulty, he's easier to deal with than an abstraction the world has to offer.

The other day a friend, who's a partner in a prosperous company that does business throughout the country and who considers my salary to be distinctly on the low side, said to me: 'You're being exploited, Soares.' This made me realize that indeed I am; but since it's the fate of everyone in this life to be exploited, my question would be: is it any worse to be exploited by Senor Vasques than by vanity, glory, resentment, envy or the impossible?

Some, the prophets and saints who walk this vacuous world, are exploited by God himself.

And as I return to another's house, to the spacious office in the Rua dos Douradores, the way some return to their homes. I approach my desk as if it were a bulwark against life. I feel such an overwhelming sense of tenderness that my eyes fill with tears for my books that in reality the books of other people whose accounts I keep, for the inkwell I use, for Sergio's stooped shoulders as, not far from me, he sits writing out bills of lading. I feel love for all of this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love or perhaps too, because even though nothing truly merits the of any soul, if, out of sentiment, we must give it, I might just as well lavish it on the smallness of an inkwell on the grand indifference of the stars.

With the soul's equivalent of a wry smile, I calmly confront the prospect that my life will consist of nothing more than being shut up forever in the Rua dos Douradores, in the office, surrounded by these people. I have enough money to buy food and drink, I have somewhere to live and enough free time to dream, write- and sleep- what more can I ask of the gods or hope for from Fate?

I had great ambitions and extravagant dreams, but so did the errand boy and the seamstress; for everyone has dreams; the only difference is whether or not we have the strength to fulfil them or a destiny that will fulfil them through us.

When it comes to dreams, I'm no different from the errand boy and the seamstress. The only thing that distinguishes me from them is that I can write. Yes, that's an activity, a real fact about myself that distinguishes me from them. But in my soul I'm just the same.

I know that there are islands in the South and grand cosmopolitan passions and [...]. I'm sure that even if I held the world in my hand, I'd exchange it all for a tram ticket back to Rua dos Dourades.

Perhaps it's my destiny to remain a book-keeper for ever and for poetry and literature to remainsimply butterflies that alight on my head and merely underline my own ridiculousness by their very beauty.

I'll miss Moreira, but what does missing someone matter compared with a chance for real promotion?
I know that the day I'm made chief book-keeper to Vasques & Co. will be one of the greatest days of my life. I know it with a prescient bitterness and irony but I know it with all the finality that certainty can bring.

Senhor Vasques. I often find myself memorized by Senhor Vasques. What does this man represent to me beyond the chance inconvenience of his being master of my time, of the daylight hours of my life? He treats me well, he always talks to me in a friendly enough matter except on the odd occasion when he's been offhand because of some private worry, but then he was offhand with everyone. So why do I think about him so much? Is he a symbol? A motive force? What is he to me?

Senhor Vasques. I remember him now as I will in the future with the nostalgia I know I will feel for him then. I'll be living in a little house somewhere in the suburbs, enjoying a peaceful existence not writing the book I'm not writing now and, so as to continue not doing so, I will come up with different excuses from the ones I use now to avoid actually confronting myself. Or else I'll be interned in a poorhouse, content with my utter failure, mingling with the riffraff who believed they were geniuses when in fact they were just beggars with dreams, mixing with the anonymous mass of people who had neither the strength to triumph nor the power to turn their defeats into victories. Wherever I am, I will think nostalgically of my boss Senhor Vasques and the office in Rua dos Douradores, and for me the montony of my daily life will be like the memory of loves that never came my way and of triumphs that were never to be mine.

Senhor Vasques. I see him from that future perspective as clearly as I see him here today: medium height, thickset, coarse, with his particular limitations and affection, frank and astute, brusque and affable. It isn't only money that marks him out as a boss, you can see it in his slow, hairy hands marked by plump veins like colored muscles, his neck, strong but not too thick, and his firm, rosy cheeks above the dark, neatly trimmed beard. I see him, see the deliberate but energetic gestures, his eyes reflecting from within his thoughts about the world without. I'm troubled if I displease him and my soul is gladdened by his smile, a broad, human smile, warm as the applause of a large crowd.

Perhaps the reason the ordinary, almost vulgar figure of Senhor Vasque so often tangles with my intelligence and distracts me from myself is simply because there's no one else in my life of greater stature. I think there's some symbolism in all this. I believe, or almost believe, that somewhere in a distant life this man was more to me than he is today.

Ah, now I understand! Senhor Vasques is Life; Life, monotonous and necessary, commanding and unknowable. This banal man represents the banality of life. On the surface he is everything to me, just as, on the surface, Life is everything to me.

And if the office in the Rua dos Douradores represents Life for me, the second floor room I live in on the same street represents Art. Yes, Art, living on the same street as Life but in a different room; Art, which offers relief from life without actually relieving one from living, and which is as monotonous as life itself but in a different way. Yes, for me Rua dos Douradores embraces the meaning of all things, the resolution of all mysteries, except the existence of mysteries themselves which is something beyond resolution.

I went into the barber's as I usually do, experiencing the pleasure I always get from being able to enter places known to me without suffering the least distress. My sensitivity to all things new is a constant affliction to me; I only feel safe in places I have been in before.

When I sat down in the chair and the young barber placed a clean, cold, linen towel around my neck, it occurred to me to ask after his colleague, a vigorous, older man, who had been ill but who usually worked at the chair to my right. The question arose spontaneously, simply because the place reminded me of him. As fingers busied themselves tucking in the last bit of towel between my neck and my collar, the voice behind the towel and me answered flatly: 'He died yesterday.' My irrational good humour died as suddenly as the now eternally absent barber from the chair beside me. My every thought froze. I said nothing.

Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of life.

The dull old man with dirty gaiters I often used to pass at half past nine in the morning. The lame lottery salesman who pestered me without success. The plump, rosy old gentleman with the cigar, who used to stand at the door of the tobacconist's. The pale-cheeked tobacconist himself. What has become of those people who, just because I saw them day after day, became part of my life? Tomorrow I too will disappear from Rua da Prata, Rua dos Douradores, Rua dos Fanqueiros. Tomorrow I too, this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself - yes, tomorrow I too will be someone who no longer walks these streets, someone other will evoke with a vague: 'I wonder what's become of him?' And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other.

25.4.1930

The sleeping partner of the company, a man much troubled by obscure aliments, was suddenly taken with the notion (a caprice that came on him, it seems, between afflictions) that he wanted to have group photograph taken of the office staff. So, the day before yesterday, following the instructions of the jolly photographer, we all lined up against the grubby white partition that serves as a rickety wooden division between the general office and Senhor Vasque's office. In the center stood Vasques himself; on either side of him, according to a hierarchy that began logically enough but rapidly broke down, stood the other men who gather here each day, in body, to perform the small tasks, the ultimate aim of which is a secret known only to the gods. Today when I arrived in the office, a little late and having in fact completely forgotten about the frozen moment captured twice by the photographer, I found Moreira, an unexpectedly early bird, and one of the clerks poring over some blackish objects that I recognized with a start as being the first prints of the photograph, the one that had come out best.

I experienced the pain of truth when I saw myself there, because, inevitably, it was my face that I looked for first. I have never had a very high opinion of my physical appearance but never before have I felt such a nonentity as I did then, comparing myself with the other faces, so familiar to me, in that line-up of my daily companions. I look like a rather dull Jesuit. My thin, inexpressive face betrays no intelligence, no intensity, nothing water to make it stand out from the stagnant tide of the other faces. But they're not a stagnant tide. There are some really expressive faces there. Senhor Vasques is exactly as he is in real life - the firm, likable face, the steady gaze, all set off by the stiff moustache. The energy and intelligence of the man - qualities which are after all utterly banal and to be found in thousands of other men all over the world - are stamped on that photograph as if it were a psychological passport. The two travelling salesmen look superb; the clerk has come out well but he's half hidden behind Moreira. And Moreira! My immediate superior Moreira, the embodiment of monotony and routine, looks more human than I do! Even the errand boy - I detect in myself, without being able to suppress it, a feeling that I hope is not envy - has a directness in his smile that far outshines the insignificant dullness of the face, of me, the sphinx of the stationary cupboard.

What does all this mean? Is it true that the camera never lies? What is the truth documented by a cold lens? Who am I that I possess such a face? Honestly... And then to add injury... Moreira suddenly said to me: 'It's a really good one of you.' And then, turning to the clerk, 'It's the absolute image of him, isn't it?' The clerks happy and companionable agreement signalled my final relegation to the rubbish heap.

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddle strings and harps, drums and tambours I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.

Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized I am nobody, absolutely nobody. When the lightening flashed, I saw that what I thought to be a city was in fact a desert plain and, in the same sinister light that revealed me to myself, there seemed to be no sky above it. I was robbed of any possibility of having existed before the world. If I was ever reincarnated, I must have done so without myself, without a self to reincarnate.

I am the outskirts of some nonexistent town, the long winded prologue of an unwritten book. I am nobody, nobody. I do not 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 even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breath life into me.

I'm always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trap door, through infinite, infitious* space, in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of the vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like the whirlwinds then waters, float images of all I have ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in the 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. I, I myself, am the well in which the walls have fallen away to leave only viscous slime. I am the centre of everything surrounded by the great nothing.

And it is as if hell itself were laughing within me but, instead of the human touch of diabolical laughter, there's the mad croak of the dead universe, the circling cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds drifting blackly in the wind, misshapen, anachronistic, without the God who created it, without God himself who spins in the dark of darks, impossible, unique, everything.

If only I could think! If only I could feel!

My mother died very young; I never knew her. . .

Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul.

20.6.1931

Today is one of those days when monotony of everything closes about me as if I had just entered a prison. That monotony, however, is just the monotony of being me. Each face, even if it belongs to someone we saw only yesterday, is different today simply because today is not yesterday. Each day is the day it is, and there will never be another like it in the world. Only in the soul is there absolute identity (albeit a false identity) in which everything resembles everything else and everything is simplified. The world is made up of promontories and peaks but all our myopic vision allows us to see is a thin all-pervading mist.

I'd like to run away, to flee from what I know, from what is mine, from what I love. I want to set off, not for some impossible Indies or for the great islands that lie far to the south of all other lands, but for anywhere, be it a village or desert, that has the virtue of not being here. What I want is to not see the faces, this daily round of days. I want to rest from, to be other than, my habitual pretending. I want to feel the approach of sleep as if it were a promise of life, not rest. A hut by the sea, even a cave on a rugged mountain ledge, would be enough. Unfortunately, my will alone cannot give me that.

Slavery is the only law of life, there is no other, because this law must be obeyed; there is no possible rebellion against it or refuge from it. Some are born slaves, some become slaves, some have slavery thrust upon them. The cowardly love we all have of freedom - which if it were given to us we would all repudiate as being too new and strange - is the irrefutable proof of how slavery weighs upon us. Even I, who have just expressed my desire to have a hut or cave where I could be free from the monotony of being myself, would I really dare to go off to this hut or cave, knowing and understand that, since the monotony exists in me alone, I would never be free of it? Suffocating where I am and because I am where I am, would I breathe any better there when it is my lungs that are diseased and not the air around me? Who is to say that I, longing out loud for the pure sun and the open fields, for the bright sea and the wide horizon, would not miss my bed, or my meals, or having to go down eight flights of stairs to the street, or dropping in at the tobacconist's on the corner, or saying good morning to the barber standing idly by?

Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us, it seeps into us with every experience of the flesh and of life and, like the web of the great Spider, binds us subtly to what is near, ensnares us in a fragile cradle of slow death, where we lie rocking in the wind. Everything is us and we are everything, but what is the point if everything is nothing? A ray of sun, a cloud whose own sudden shadow warns of its coming, a breeze getting up, the silence that follows when it drops, certain faces, some voices, the easy smiles as they talk, and then the night into which emerge, meaningless, the broken hieroglyphics of the stars.

I often wonder what kind of person I would be if I had been protected from the cold wind of fate by the screen of wealth, and my uncle's moral hand had never led me to an office in Lisbon, and I had never moved on from there to other offices to reach the tawdry heights of being a good assistant book-keeper in a job that is about as demanding as an afternoon nap and offers salary that gives me enough to live on.

I know that had the non-existent past existed, I would not now be capable of writing these pages, which, though few, are at least better than all the pages I would undoubtedly have only day-dreamed about given more comfortable circumstances. For banality is a form of intelligence, and reality, especially if it is brutish and rough, forms a natural complement to the soul.

Much of what I feel and think I owe to my work as a book-keeper since the former exists as a negation of and flight from the latter.

If I had to fill in the space provided on a questionnaire to list one's formative literary influences, on the first dotted line I would write the name of Cesario Verde, but the list would be incomplete without the names of Senhor Vasques, Moreira the book-keeper, Vieira the cashier and Antonio the office boy. And after each of them I would write in capital letters the key word: LISBON.

In fact, they were all as important as Cesario Verde in providing corrective coefficients for my vision of the world. I think 'corrective coefficients' is the term (though, of course, I'm unsure of its exact meaning) that engineers use a methodology that applies mathematics of life. If it is the term, that's what they were to me. If it isn't, let it stand for what might have been, and my intention serve in place of a failed metaphor.

When I consider, with all the clarity I can muster, what my life has apparently been, I imagine it as some brightly colored scrap of litter - a chocolate wrapper or cigar ring - that that eavesdropping waitress brushes lightly from the soiled tablecloth into the dust pan, amongst the crumbs and crusts of reality itself. It stands out from those things whose fate it shares by virtue of a privilege that is also destined for the dustpan. The gods continue their conversations above the sweeping, indifferent to these incidents in the world below.

Yes, if I had been rich, cosseted, carefully groomed and ornamental, I would never have known that brief moment as a pretty piece of paper amongst the breadcrumbs; I would have been left on one of fortune's trays - "Not for me, thank you" - and returned to the sideboard to grow old and stale. Discarded once I have served my purpose, I am thus relegated to the rubbish bin, along with the crumbs of what will come after, under what stars; but I know there will be an 'after'.

I've come to the realization that I'm always thinking and listening to two things at once. I expect everyone does that a little. Some impressions are so vague that only when we remember them afterwards are we aware of them at all. I think these impressions form a part (the internal part, perhaps) of this double attention we all pay to things. In my case the two realities I attend to have equal weight. In that lies my originality. In that, perhaps, lie both my tragedy and the comedy of my tragedy.

I write carefully, bent over the book in which I measure out in balance sheets the futile history of an obscure company and, at the same time and with equal amounts of attention, my thoughts follow the route of an imaginary ship through oriental landscapes that have never existed. The two things are equally clear, equally visible to me: the ruled page on which I meticulously write the lines of the epic commercial poem that is Vasques & Co. and the deck where, a little to one side of the lines made by the tarred spaces between the planks, I watch intently the rows of deck-chairs and the stretched-out legs of people relaxing on the voyage.

(If I were knocked down by a child's bicycle, that bicycle would become part of my story.)

The smoking room protrudes on to the deck, preventing me from seeing anything more than their legs.

I reach for the inkwell with my pen and from the door of the smoking room - [. . .] right where I feel myself to be standing - emerges the figure of the stranger. He turns his back on me and goes over to the others. He walks slowly and I can deduce nothing from his back [. . .]. I begin another entry in the accounts book. I try to see where I went wrong. Marque's accounts should be debited not credited (I imagine him: plump, amiable, full of jokes and, in an instant, the ship has vanished).

30.12.1932

After the last of the rain had fallen from the sky and come to earth - leaving the sky clear and the earth damp and gleaming - the world below grew joyful in the cool left by the rain, and the greater clarity of life that returned with the blue of the heavens furnished each soul with its own sky, each heart with a new freshness.

Whether we like it or not, we are slaves to the hour in all its forms and colors, we are the subjects of heaven and earth. The part of us that despises its surroundings and plunges deepest into the forests within us does not take the same paths when it rains as when the sky is clear. Simply because it's raining or has stopped raining, obscure transmutations take place, felt only perhaps in the very heart of our more abstract feelings; we feel the weather even when we are unaware that we do.

Each of us is more than one person, many people, a proliferation of our one self. That's why the same person who scorns his surroundings is different from the person who scorns his surroundings is different from the person who is gladdened or made to suffer by them. In the vast colony of being there are many different kinds of people, all thinking and feeling differently. Today, as I note down these few impressions in a legitimate break brought about by a shortage of work, I am the person carefully transcribing them, the person who looks at the sky even though he can't actually see it from here, the person who is pleased not to have to work just now, the person who looks at the sky even though he can't actually see it from here, the person who is thinking all this, and the person feeling physically at ease and noticing that his hands are still slightly cold. And, like a diverse but compact multitude, this whole world of mine, composed as it is of different people, projects but a single shadow, that of this calm figure who writes, leaning against Borge's high desk where I have come to find the blotter he borrowed from me.

[. . .] Ships that pass in the night and neither acknowledge nor recognize one another [. . .]

As with all tragedies, the real tragedy of my life is just an irony of Fate. I reject life because it is a prison sentence, I reject dreams as being a vulgar form of escape. Yet I live the most sordid and ordinary of real lives and the most intense and constant of dream lives. I'm like a slave who gets drunk during his rest hour - two miseries inhabiting one body.

With the clarity afforded by the lightning flashes of reason that pick out from the thick blackness of life the immediate objects it is composed of, I see with utter lucidity all that is base, flaccid, neglected and factitious in this Rua dos Douradores that makes up my entire life: the squalid office whose squalor seeps into the very marrow of its inhabitants' bones, the room, rented by the month, in which nothing happens except the living death of its occupant, the grocer's shop on the corner whose owner I know only in the casual way people do know each other, the boys standing at the door of the old tavern, the laborious futility of each identical day, the same characters constantly rehearsing their roles, like a drama consisting only of scenery and in which even that scenery is facing the wrong way. . .

But I also see that in order to flee from all this I must either master it or repudiate it. I do not master it because I cannot rise above reality and I do not repudiate it because, whatever I may dream, I always remain exactly where I am.

And what of my dreams? The shameful flight into myself, the cowardice of mistaking for life the rubbish tip of the soul that others only visit in their sleep, in that semblance of death through which they snore, in that calm state in which, more than anything, they look like highly evolved vegetables! Unable to make a single noble gesture other than to myself, or to have one vain desire that was not utterly vain!

Caesar gave the ultimate definition of ambition when he said: 'Better to be the chief of a village then an subaltern in Rome'. I enjoy no such position either in a village or in Rome. At least the grocer merits some respect on the block between Rua da Assumpcao and Rua da Victoria; he's the Caesar of the whole block. Am I superior to him? In what respect when nothingness confers no superiority, no inferiority, and permits no comparisons?

The grocer is the Caesar of a whole block and the women, quite rightly, adore him.

And so I drag myself along, doing things I don't want to do and dreaming of what I cannot have [. . .] as pointless as a public clock that's stopped. . .

In the first few days of this sudden autumn, when the darkness seems in some way premature, it feels as if we have lingered too long over our daily tasks and, even in the midst of the daily round, I savoir in advance the pleasure of not working that the darkness brings with it, for darkness means night and night means sleep, home, freedom. When the lights go on in the big office, banishing the darkness, and we move seamlessly from day to evening shift, I am assailed by an absurd sense of comfort, like the memory of another, and I feel as contented with what I write as if I were sitting reading myself to sleep in bed.

We are all of us the slaves of external circumstance: even at a table in some backstreet cafe, a sunny day can open up before us visions of wide fields; a shadow over the countryside can cause us to shrink inside ourselves, seeking uneasy shelter in the doorless house that is our self; and, even in the midst of daytime things, the arrival of darkness can open out, like a slowly spreading fan, a deep awareness of our need to rest.

But we don't get behind in our work because of this, rather it cheers us on. We're not working any more; we're enjoying ourselves performing the task of which we are condemned. And suddenly, there on the vast ruled sheet of my book-keepers destiny, stands my old aunts's house, quite shut off from the world, where the tea is still brought in at the sleepy hour of ten o'clock, and the oil lamp of my lost childhood, it's pool of light illuminating only the tablecloth, plunges into darkness my vision of Moreira, infinitely far from me, lit now by a black electricity. Tea is served - by the maid who is even older than my aunts and who brings it in with a slightly sleepy demeanor and the tetchily patient tenderness of very old servants - and across the whole of my dead past I faultlessly write a number or a sun. I am reabsorbed into myself again, I lose myself in me, I forget myself in those far-off nights, unpolluted by duty and the world, virginally pure of mystery and the future.

And so gentle is this feeling distracting me from this debit and credit columns that if someone asks me a question, I reply with equal gentleness, as if my very being were hollow, as if I were nothing but a typewriter that I carry with me, a portable version of my own open self. Such an interruption of my dreams does not jar; so gentle are they that I continue to dream them even while I speak, write, answer, carry on a conversation. At last the lost teatime draws to an end and it's time for the office to close. I slowly shut the book and raise my eyes, wear with unshed tears, and all the mingled feelings this arouses, I feel more then anything else a sense of sadness that the closing of the office may mean the ending of my dream; that the gesture of my hand closing the book may mean covering up my own irreparable past; that I will go to the bed of life not in the least tired, but companion less and troubled, caught in the ebb and flow of my confused consciousness, twin tides flowing in the black night, at the outer limits of nostalgia and desolation.

Today my body felt afflicted by the old anguish that occasionally wells up inside me and at the restaurant or eating house, whose upstairs room provides some basis of continuity to my existence, I neither ate properly nor drank as much as I would normally drink. When I left, the waiter, noticing that the bottle of wine was still half-full, turned to me and said:'Good night, Senhor Soares. Hope you feel better tomorrow.'

Just as if the wind had suddenly dispersed the clouds obscuring the sky, the clarion call of that simple phrase eased my soul. And then I realized something I have never fully recognized before: that I have a spontaneous, natural sympathy with these waiters in cafe's and restaurants, with barbers and street corner errand boys, which I cannot honestly say I feel for those with whom I have more intimate relations, if 'intimate' is the right word...

Fraternity is a very subtle thing.

Some govern the world, others are the world. Between an American millionaire with property in England and Switzerland and the Socialist boss of a village there is no qualitive difference, only quantative. Below [. . .] them comes us, the amorphous ones, the unruly dramatist William Shakespeare, the school teacher John Milton, that vagabond Dante Alighieri, the boy who ran an errand for me yesterday, the barber who always tells me stories, and the waiter who, simply because I drank only half my bottle of wine, proffered the fraternal hope that I would feel better tomorrow.

Only one thing surprises me more than the stupidity with which most men live their lives and that is the intelligence inherent in the stupidity.

To all appearance, the monotony of ordinary lives is horrific. I'm having lunch in this ordinary restaurant and I look over at the cook behind the counter and at the old waiter right next to me, serving me as he has served others here for, I believe, the past thirty years. What are these men's lives like? For forty years the cook has spent nearly all of every day in a kitchen; he has a few breaks; he sleeps relatively little; sometimes he goes back to his village whence he returns unhesitatingly and without regret; he slowly accumulates his slowly earned money, which he does not propose spending; he would fall ill if he had to abandon (for ever) his kitchen for the land be bought in Galicia; he's living in Lisbon for forty years and he's never even been to Rotunda, or to the theatre, and only once to the Coliseu (whose clowns still inhabit the inner interstices of his life). He got married, how or why I don't know, has four sons and one daughter and, as he leans out over the counter towards my table, his smile conveys a great, solemn, contented happiness. He isn't pretending, nor does he have any reason to. If he seems happy it's because he really is.

And what about the old waiter who serves me and who, for what must be the millionth time in his career, has just placed a coffee on the table for me? His life is the same as the cook's, the only difference being the four or five yards that separate the kitchen where one works from the restaurant dining room where the other works. Apart from minor differences like having two rather than five children, paying more frequent visits to Galicia, and knowing Lisbon better than the cook (as well as Oporto where he lived for four years), he is equally contented.

I look again, with real terror, at the panorama of those lives and, just as I'm about to feel horror, sorrow and revulsion for them, discover that the people who feel no horror or sorrow or revulsion are the very people who feel no horror or sorrow or revulsion are the very people who have the right to, the people living those lives. That is the central error of the literary imagination: the idea that other people are like us and must therefore feel like us. Fortunately for humanity, each man is only himself and only the genius is given the ability to be others as well.

In the end, everything is relative. A tiny incident in the street, which draws the restaurant cook to the door, affords him more entertainment than any I might get from the contemplation of the most original idea, form reading the best book or from the most pleasant of useless dreams. And, if life is essentially monotonous, the truth is that he has escaped from that monotony better and more easily than I. He is no more the possessor of the truth than I am, because the truth doesn't belong to anyone; but what does possess is happiness.

The wise man makes his life monotonous, for then even the tiniest incident becomes imbued with great significance. After his third lion the lion hunter loses interest in the adventure of the hunt. For my monotonous cook there is something modestly apocalyptic about every streetfight he witnesses. To someone who has never been out of Lisbon the tram ride to Benfica is like a trip to the infinite and if one day he were to visit Sintra, he would feel as if he had journeyed to Mars. On the other hand, the traveller who has covered the globe can find nothing new for 5,000 miles around, because he's always seeing new things; there's novelty and there's the boredom of the eternally new and the latter brings about the death of the former.

The truly wise man could enjoy the whole spectacle of the world from his armchair; he wouldn't need to talk to anyone or to know how to read, just how to make use of his five sense and a soul innocent of sadness.

One must monotonize existence in order to rid if of monotony. One must make the everyday so anodyne that the slightest incident proves entertaining. In the midst of my day-to-day work, dull, repetitive and pointless, visions of escape surface in me, vestiges of dreams of far-off islands, parties held in the avenues of gardens in some other age, different landscapes, different feelings, a different me. But, between balance sheets, I realize that if I had all that, none of it would be mine. The truth is that Senhor Vasques is worth more than all those broad avenues in impossible gardens. Because I have Senhor Vasques I can enjoy the dreams of the Dream Kings; because I have the office in Rua dos Doursdores I can enjoy my inner visions of non-existent landscapes. But if the Dream Kings were mine, what would I have to dream about? If I possessed the impossible landscapes, what would remain of the impossible?

May I always be blessed with the monotony, the dull sameness of identical days, my indistinguishable todays and yesterdays, so that I may enjoy with an open heart the fly that distracts me, drifting randomly past my eyes, the gust of laughter that wafts volubly up from the street somewhere down below, the sense of vast freedom when the office closes for the night, and the infinite rest of my days off.

Because I am nothing, I can imagine myself to be anything. If I were somebody, I wouldn't be able to. An assistant book-keeper can imagine himself to be a Roman emperor; the King of England can't do that, because the King of England had lost that ability in his dreams to be any other king than the one he is. His reality limits what he can feel.

The morning unfurls itself upon the city, interleaving light and shade (or rather degrees of intensity of light) amongst the houses. It does not seem to come from the sun but from the city itself, for the light issues forth from the city's walls and roofs (not from them physically but from the simple fact of their being there).

As I feel that, I feel full of hope, at the same time recognizing that hope is a purely literary feeling. Tomorrow, spring and hope are all words connected poetically with one emotion and in the soul with the memory of another emotion. No, if I observe myself as closely as I observe the city, I realize that all I have hope for is that today, like every other day, will come to an end. The eyes of reason also look at the dawn and I see that the hope I placed in it, if it ever existed, was not mine. It belonged to those men who live for the passing hour and whose way of thinking I, for a moment, unwittingly embodied.

Hope? What have I got hope for? The only promise the day holds for me is that it will be just another day with a fixed course to run and a conclusion. The light cheers but does not change me for I will leave here as I came - older by a few hours, gladdened by a new feeling but saddened by a thought. Whenever something is being born one can as easily concentrate on the fact of its birth as imagine its inevitable death. Now, in the strong, generous sunlight, the city landscape looks like a field of houses - broad, natural and orderly. But, even as I see all this, can I really forget my own existence? Deep down my consciousness of the city is my consciousness of myself.

I suddenly remember as a child seeing, as I can no longer see it, day breaking over the city. The sun did not rise for me then, it rose for all of life, because I (still an unconscious being) was life. I saw the morning and I was happy; today I see the morning and I am first happy, then sad. The child in me is still there but has fallen silent. I see as I used to see but from behind my eyes I see myself seeing and that one fact darkens the sun, dulls the green of the trees and withers the flowers before they even appear. Yes, once I belonged here; today, however new a landscape might be to me, I return from my first sight of it as a foreigner, a guest and a wanderer, a stranger to all I see and hear, old man that I am.

I've seen everything before, even what I have never seen and never will see. Even the lest significant of future landscapes flows already in my blood and the anguish of knowing that I will have to see again landscapes seen before fills me in advance with boredom.

Leaning over the balcony, enjoying the day, looking out at the diverse shapes of the whole city, just one thought fills my soul - the deep-seated will to die, to finish, no more to see light falling on a city, not to think or feel, to leave it behind me, like discarded wrapping paper, the course of the sun and its days, and to peel off the involuntary effort of being as one would discard one's heavy clothing at the foot of the great bed.

With an enormous effort I rise from my seat only to find that I still seem to be carrying it around with me, only now it's even heavier because it's become the seat of my own subjectivity.

In these lingering summer evenings, I love the quiet of this the commercial part of town, all the more because it's such a contrast with the noisy bustle that fills it during the day. Rua dos Arsenal, Rua da Alfandega, the sad roads that reach out to the east where the Alfandega ends, and the long, solitary line of quiet quays: they comfort me with sadness on those evenings when I choose to share their solitude. I'm transported back to a time long before the one I actually live in. I like to imagine myself a contemporary of Cesario Verde and feel within myself, not more verses like the ones he wrote, but the substance of his verses.

The life I drag around with me until night falls is not dissimilar to that of the streets themselves. By day they are full of meaningless bustle and by night full of an equally meaningless lack of bustle. By day I am nothing, by night I am myself. There is no difference between me and the streets around the Alfandega, except that they are streets and I am a human soul, and this, when weighed against the essence of all things, might also count for little. Men and objects share a common abstract destiny: to be of equally insignificant value in the algebra of life's mystery.

But there is something else. . . In those slow, empty hours a sense of the sadness of all existence rises from my soul to my mind, the bitter sense that everything is at once both felt by me and external to me, and that I am powerless to change it. How often have I seen my own dreams take physical shape - assailing me from without in the form of a tram turning the corner at the end of the street, or the voice of a streetseller at night (selling who knows that) singing on Arab melody, a sudden gush of sound breaking the monotony of the evening - not in order to provide me with a substitute reality but to declare themselves equal in their independence from my will.