The Book of Disquiet, text 30

Mean Squares 3.4

Yesterday they told me that the assistant in the tobacconist's had committed suicide, I couldn't believe it. Poor lad, so he had existed too!
[...]
No, other people don't exist... It is for me alone that the setting sun holds out its heavy wings of harsh, misty colors. It is for me alone, even though I cannot see its waters flowing, that the wide river glitters beneath the sunset. It is for me alone that this open square was built looking out over the river and its turning tide. Was it today that the tobacconist's assistant was buried in a common grave? Today's sunset is not for him. But, even as I'm thinking that, quite against my will I suddenly understand that it's not for me either.

More from Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet.

The Book of Disquiet, text 191

tomato soup by cemedia

It isn't true that life is painful, or that it's painful to think about life. What is true is that our pain is only as serious and important as we pretend it to be. If we lived naturally, it would pass as quickly as it came, it would fade as quickly as it bloomed. Everything is nothing, and our pain is no exception.

More from Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet.

A while ago I was in a restaurant having lunch, and nearby was a table with four American girls in their early twenties, really lively and fun, and there was nothing about them I didn't like. And I realized that it had been a long time since I'd been sitting at table like that, and I couldn't remember the last time I'd had a long or lively conversation in English with anyone who wasn't a student. But I think that'll change in the new year, because I can feel the current system underlying things starting to give way, and it feels good to be easing into another, as yet unknown, way of being / critical state.

I don't believe in magical thinking, but rather in attention and forgetfulness, things unfolding and then more comes along. There's a certain level of idiocy that comes with this, but I've plenty of down time to dwell on random things. Like the idea that we're closely related to ragworms.

we accept you, one of us

What works at the moment is health, frugality, attention and forgetfulness.

The Book of Disquiet, text 151

We are all accustomed to think of ourselves as essentially mental realities and of others as merely physical realities; because of the way others respond to us, we do vaguely think of ourselves as physical beings; we vaguely think of other people as mental beings, but only when we find ourselves in love or conflict with another do we really take in the fact that others have a soul just as we do.

More from Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet.

somewhere in california

"You're strange. I've seen a lot of types - hundreds, maybe - but none like you. Do you know what I think?"

"You think I'm insane," Jason said.

"Yes." Kathy nodded. "Clinically, legally, whatever. You're psychotic; you have a split personality. Mr No One and Mr Everyone. How have you survived up until now?"

He said nothing. It could not be explained.

Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, part one

The Book of Disquiet, text 155

FelipeArte

I have no faith in anything, no hope in anything, no charity for anything. I feel nothing but aversion and disgust fro the sincere adherents of every kind of sincerity and for the mystics of every kind of mysticism or rather for the sincerities of all sincere people and for the mysticism of all mystics. I feel an almost physical nausea when those mysticisms turn evangelical, when they try to convince another intelligence or another will to find the truth or change the world.

More from Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet

The Book of Disquiet, text 172

Living mentally on what is not and cannot be, we are, in the end, unable even to ponder what might really be.

More from Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet.

Rear Window

The Book of Disquiet, text 170

Blackpio

I found myself in the world one day, I don't know when, and until then, from birth I presume, I had lived without feeling. If I asked where I was, everyone deceived me, everyone contradicted everyone else. If I asked them to tell me what to do, everyone lied and told me something different. If I became lost and stopped along the road, everyone was shocked that I didn't just continue on to wherever the road led (though no one knew where that was), or simply did not retrace my steps - I, who did not even know whence I came, having only woken up at the crossroads. I realized that I was on a stage and did not know the words that everyone else picked up instantly even though they did not know them either. I saw that though I was dressed as a page they had given me no queen to wait on and blamed me for that. I saw that I had in my hands a message to deliver and when I told them my paper was blank, they laughed at me. I still don't know if they laughed because all such pieces of paper are blank or because all messages are only hypothetical.

More from Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet.

The Book of Disquiet, text 152

Picasso's last drawing, a self portrait the day before he died at 91, which looks a lot like me at 38

In order to understand, I destroyed myself.

More from Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet.

Cool adolescent quote, but to what end? Disquiet is full of great things, and passages that don't work today will another time, but I'm curious how much Pessoa had a good life, on his own terms, and if not, why not. I know almost nothing about him. Still, it's the book of disquiet, so naturally it's full of disquieting passages, with other feelings written down or not and kept elsewhere or forgotten. But he is often moping, when Lisbon is a very fun city, with possibilities for any kind of diversion.

There is a short Chinese work that acts as a counterpoint to all this, Ah, is this not happiness?, that I can't seem to find complete online. I could add it here, although I don't remember it as being all that great. Disquiet is so much easier to write about than happiness.

The Book of Disquiet, text 150

Bumble heaven

No problem is soluble. None of us unties the Gordian knot; we either give up or cut it. We brusquely resolve with our feelings problems of the intellect and do so because we are tired of thinking, because we are too timid to draw conclusions, because of an absurd need for support, or because of our gregarious impulse to rejoin others and rejoin life. Since we can never know all the factors involved in an issue, we can never resolve it. To reach the truth we lack both the necessary facts and the intellectual processes that could exhaust all possible interpretations of those facts.

More from Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet.

I'm sure the passage above is about personal problems, but I came to it thinking about chaos in general, and the importance of long practice and then a lack of awareness when engaged in the task at hand. Being prepared and then letting things happen

...the only system that can replicate the behavior of the Universe in every detail is - the Universe itself. Even if...the Universe is entirely deterministic and the whole future is contained within its present state, there is no way at all to predict or know the future, except by watching the universe evolve. Whether or not we have free will, the Universe behaves as if we have free will, which is really all that matters. The Universe is ignorant it's own future, and is its own fastest simulator.

John Gribbin, Deep Simplicity, p69

The Book of Disquiet, text 139

From Almost Taiwan

Inside the chicken coup, from whence he will go to be killed, the cock sings hymns to freedom because they gave him two perches all to himself.

More from Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet.

A turkey is fed for a 1,000 days—every day confirms to its statistical department that the human race cares about its welfare "with increased statistical significance". On the 1001st day, the turkey has a surprise.

Nassim Taleb, The Limits of Statistics [9.15.08]

Related posts: Wilhem Reich's Listen, Little Man

A fair exchange

Suckling pig from Mid-Autumn Festival barbecue

I finish work at 9pm on Friday night on the other side of town, although that's only a 15 minute scooter ride from home. The joys of high density living. It means I get out of the east district and finish the week in the bright night lights of an area filled with bars, restaurants, pachinko halls and sex work places.

Today I left work feeling good and with enough $ in my wallet to own the night. I went to a barbecue restaurant and sat inside at a corner table and ordered draft beer in frozen mugs and ate only meat. I didn't want to see anyone. I'd found Pessoa again, lost in the shuffle of the books being read / to read heap on a low shelf behind this desk.

Reading in such places is great, I feel like a king. All the distractions are good ones - just the girls in skimpy clothes promoting beer, office ladies after work, and people who bring me food and drink if I ask them. Bending their will, and for what? For the paper I have in my pocket. It's a fair exchange if they're happy to make it.

The Book of Disquiet, text 134

I finally managed to get my permanent residency visa application in on the last day of the three-month deadline. It'll take another one to three months to process, and then I should get a little card that means I'm no longer tied to a job and can pretty much do as I please. A decisive shift in the current balance of terror between myself and my employer. And so the 50+ hr weeks are to get the f*** you money to back up the visa and put independence in my back pocket. After 10 yrs it'll be good to be free in Taiwan.

More from Pessoa.

One's life should be so arranged that it remains a mystery to other people, so that those who know one best in fact know one only as little as anyone else, only from a slightly nearer vantage point. That is how, almost without thinking, I have designed my life, but such was the instinctive art I put into it that even to myself my individuality is not entirely clear-cut or precise.

The Book of Disquiet, text 54

Tokyo Undressed

The most contemptible thing about dreams is that everyone has them. In the dark, the errand boy dozes away the day as he leans against the lamp post in the intervals between chores, immersed in thoughts about something or other. I know what he's daydreaming about: the same dreams I plunge into between entries in the summer tedium of the utterly still, silent office.

Text 54

I don't see anything contemptible in the shared quality of dreams. We're all rulers of our heads, at least in theory, and there's reason to feel that someone else's sovereignty in any way detracts from your own.

Had a student come to class today with a low cut top, a push-up bra and plenty to put inside. It was distracting, so I kept trying to avoid her side of the room, but it was like a loose tooth that will nag until you poke it.

Tom Waits says you're innocent when you dream, but I don't know if that holds for daydreams.

I'm innocent until then.

Buy Frank's Wild Years by Tom Waits.
Buy The Book of Disquiet.

The Book of Disquiet, text 69

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

Text 69

More from Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet.

The Book of Disquiet, text 58

Dr Hofmann died today

More Pessoa:

Each of us is intoxicated by different things. There's intoxication enough for me in just living. Drunk on feeling I drift but never stray. If it's time to go back to work, I go to the office just life everyone else. If not, I go down to the river to stare at the waters, again just like everyone else. I'm just the same. But behind this sameness, I secretly scatter my personal firmament with stars and therein create my own infinity.

Text 58

I think even behind the last sameness there's more of the same. Doesn't everyone secretly scatter their personal firmament with stars and therein create their own infinity? If not, why not?

The Book of Disquiet, text 76

More from The Book of Disquiet.

Like history, experience of life teaches us nothing. True experience consists in reducing one's contact with reality whilst at the same time intensifying one's analysis of that contact. In that way one's sensibility can widen and deepen since everything lies within us anyway; it is enough that we seek it out and know how to do so.

Text 76

The Book of Disquiet, text 60

A long week that crept up on me like a kick to the back of the knees. The week after my birthday [38th] and it's like time has cranked up another gear. Anyway, Friday night, beer, more Pessoa.

I live always in the present. I know nothing of the future and no longer have a past. The former weighs me down with a thousand possibilities, the latter with the reality of nothingness. I have neither hopes for the future nor longings for what was. Knowing what my life has been up till now - so often contrary to the way I wished it to be- what assumptions can I make about my life except that it will be neither what I presume nor what I want it to be, that it will be something that happens to me from outside, even against my own will?

Text 60

The Book of Disquiet, text 212

I was in Taipei last weekend, and went to the Page One bookstore in Taipei 101 for the second time. It's the best English bookstore on the island, although it seemed better the first time I went there, when I was so surprised that something like it was sitting in Taiwan, the kind of thing that makes me regret living down south. But only for a while. I like being out of things.

The first time I went I picked up Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, and have been very slowly going through it ever since. It's nearly all good, and the parts that aren't now will be later.

From birth to death man lives enslaved by the same external concept of the self as do the animals. He does not live his life, he merely vegetates on a higher, more complex level. He follows norms he neither knows exist nor knows himself to be guided by, and his ideas, his feelings, his actions are all unconscious - not because they lack consciousness but because they lack any consciousness of being conscious.

Text 212

Since that is how we live, there is really no justification for our thinking ourselves superior to animals. We differ from them only in purely external details, in the fact of our speaking and writing, in having an abstract intelligence to distract us from our concrete intelligence, and in our ability to imagine the impossible. All these things, however, are just the chance attributes of our organism. Speaking and writing make no difference to our basic instinct to survive, which is quite unconscious. All our abstract intelligence is good for is constructing systems, or semi-systemic ideas, which for animals is a simple matter of lying in the sun. Even our ability to imagine the impossible may not be a unique talent, for I've seen cats staring the moon, and for all I know they may be wishing for it.

Text 211

The Book of Disquiet, text 166

Busy with work, so more Pessoa, and a picture from the Hubble telescope.

Why shouldn't the truth turn out to be something utterly different from anything we imagine, with no gods or men or reasons why? Why shouldn't it be something we can't even conceive of not conceiving, a mystery from another world entirely?

Text 166

The Book of Disquiet, text 135

More from The Book of Disquiet:

Having seen with what lucidity and logical coherence certain madmen (with method in their madness) justify their crazed ideas to themselves and to others, I have lost forever any real confidence in the lucidity of my own lucidity.

Text 135

So many well-argued, articulate pages of nonsense to be found online. You come across it and think what kind of intelligence is producing this, what could be achieved if it was all channeled to more appropriate ends?

The Book of Disquiet, texts 183 & 204

More from Pessoa's Book of Disquiet.

I believe that the present is very ancient simply because everything, when it did exist, existed in the present.

Text 183

Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are only free if you can withdraw from men and feel no need to seek them out for money, or society, or love, or glory, or even curiosity, for none of these things flourish in silence and solitude. If you cannot live alone, then you were born a slave.

Text 204