Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. by Richard Zenith (Penguin, 2002)T h e M o s t I m p o r t a n t B o o k O f T h e 20th C e n t u r y
Other poets, notably Rilke, have experienced such hours of explosive prodigality. But Pessoa's case is different and, probably, unique. The first set of poems was by one 'Alberto Caeiro' - 'my Master had appeared inside me.' The next six were composed by Pessoa struggling against the 'inexistence' of Caeiro. But Caeiro had disciples, one of whom, 'Ricardo Reis', contributed further poems. A fourth individual 'burst impetuously on the scene. In one fell swoop, at the typewriter, without hesitation or correction, there appeared the "Ode Triumphal" by "Alvaro de Campos" - the Ode of that name and the man with the name he now has.'
Pseudonymous writing is not rare in literature or philosophy (Kierkegaard provides a celebrated instance). 'Heteronyms', as Pessoa called and defined them, are something different and exceedingly strange. For each of his 'voices', Pessoa conceived a highly distinctive poetic idiom and technique, a complex biography, a context of literary influence and polemics and, most arrestingly of all, subtle interrelations and reciprocities of awareness. Octavio Paz defines Caeiro as 'everything that Pessoa is not and more'.
He is a man magnificently at home in nature, a virtuoso of pre-Christian innocence, almost a Portuguese teacher of Zen. Reis is a stoic Horatian, a pagan believer in fate, a player with classical myths less original than Caeiro, but more representative of modern symbolism. De Campos emerges as a Whitmanesque futurist, a dreamer in drunkenness, the Dionysian singer of what is oceanic and windswept in Lisbon. None of this triad resembles the metaphysical solitude, the sense of being an occultist medium which characterise Pessoa's 'own' intimate verse.
Other masks followed, notably one 'Bernardo Soares'. At some complex generative level, Pessoa's genius as a polyglot underlies, is mirrored by, his self-dispersal into diverse and contrasting personae. He spent nine of his childhood years in Durban. His first writings were in English with a South African tincture. He turned to Portuguese only in 1910 (there are significant analogies with Borges).
Pessoa earned his living as a translator. His legacy, enormous and in large part unpublished, comports philosophy, literary criticism, linguistic theory, writings on politics in Portuguese, English and French. Like Borges, Beckett or Nabokov, Pessoa shows up the naive, malignant falsehood still current in certain Fenland English faculties whereby only the monoglot and native speaker is inward with style and literary insight.
The fragmentary, the incomplete is of the essence of Pessoa's spirit. The very kaleidoscope of voices within him, the breadth of his culture, the catholicity of his ironic sympathies - wonderfully echoed in Saramago's great novel about Ricardo Reis - inhibited the monumentalities, the self-satisfaction of completion. Hence the vast torso of Pessoa's Faust on which he laboured much of his life. Hence the fragmentary condition of The Book of Disquiet which contains material that predates 1913 and which Pessoa left open-ended at his death. As Adorno famously said, the finished work is, in our times and climate of anguish, a lie.
It was to Bernardo Soares that Pessoa ascribed his Book of Disquiet, first made available in English in a briefer version by Richard Zenith in 1991. The translation is at once penetrating and delicately observant of Pessoa's astute melancholy. What is this Livro do Desassossego? Neither 'commonplace book', nor 'sketchbook', nor 'florilegium' will do. Imagine a fusion of Coleridge's notebooks and marginalia, of Valery's philosophic diary and of Robert Musil's voluminous journal. Yet even such a hybrid does not correspond to the singularity of Pessoa's chronicle. Nor do we know what parts thereof, if any, he ever intended for publication in some revised format.
What we have is a haunting mosaic of dreams, psychological notations, autobiographical vignettes, shards of literary theory and criticism and maxims. 'A Letter not to Post', an 'Aesthetics of Indifference', 'A Factless Autobiography' and manual of welcomed failure (only a writer wholly innocent of success and public acclaim invites serious examination).
If there is a common thread, it is that of unsparing introspection. Over and over, Pessoa asks of himself and of the living mirrors which he has created, 'Who am I?', 'What makes me write?', 'To whom shall I turn?' The metaphysical sharpness, the wealth of self-scrutiny are, in modern literature, matched only by Valery or Musil or, in a register often uncannily similar, by Wittgenstein. 'Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other's presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.' This very scrutiny, moreover, is fraught with danger: 'To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving.' These findings arise out of a uniquely spectral yet memorable landscape: 'A firefly flashes forward at regular intervals. Around me the dark countryside is a huge lack of sound that almost smells pleasant.'
Throughout, Pessoa is aware of the price he pays for his heteronomity. 'To create, I've destroyed myself... I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.' He compares his soul to 'a secret orchestra' (shades of Baudelaire) whose instruments strum and bang inside him: 'I only know myself as the symphony.' At moments, suicidal despair, a 'self-nihilism', are close. 'Anything, even tedium', a finely ironising reservation, rather than 'this bluish, forlorn indefiniteness of everything!' Is there any city which cultivates sadness more lovingly than does Lisbon? Even the stars only 'feign light'.
Yet there are also epiphanies and passages of deep humour. In the 'forests of estrangements', Pessoa comes upon resplendent Oriental cities. Women are a chosen source of dreams but 'Don't ever touch them'. There are snapshots of clerical routine, of the vacant business of bureaucracy worthy of Melville's Bartleby. The sense of the comedy of the inanimate is acute: 'Over the pyjamas of my abandoned sleep...' The juxtapositions have a startling resonance: 'I'm suffering from a headache and the universe.' A sort of critical, self-mocking surrealism surfaces: 'To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.' Or that fragment of a sentence which may come close to encapsulating Pessoa's unique reckoning: '... intelligence, an errant fiction of the surface'.
This is not a book to be read quickly or, necessarily, in sequence. Wherever you dip, there are 'rich hours' and teasing depths. But it will, indeed, be a banner year if any writer, translator or publisher brings to the reader a more generous gift." - George Steiner
"[Pessoa’s] chief accomplishment during his lifetime was his body of poetry, but his most lasting monument is surely The Book of Disquiet.. It is difficult to really find anything to compare these pieces with in order to discuss them fruitfully, but I think parts of The Book of Disquiet can be compared without creating confusion to Kerouac’s Some of the Dharma, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Thoreau’s Walden. One of the chief similarities in these pieces is the author’s use of aphorism and metaphor. More so than the content of these books The Book of Disquiet resembles them in style, but perhaps its chief resemblance is the almost telepathic rendition of a man’s thoughts and experiences into prose. The book was written over many years and the style is not one hundred percent consistent throughout, but the effect of submersing yourself in another’s being is keenly felt whether you merely browse the book or apply yourself to it like a maniac.
To give you a better idea of the style of the thing let me quote a couple of sections in full:
48
To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving. I know nothing more simultaneously false and telling than the statement by Leonardo da Vinci that we cannot love or hate something until we have understood it.Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other’s presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.
271
It is not love, but love’s outskirts that are worth knowing…
The repression of love sheds much more light on its nature than does the actual experience of it. Virginity can be a key to profound understanding. Action has its rewards but brings confusion. To possess is to be possessed, and therefore to lose oneself. Only the idea can fathom reality without getting ruined.
313
I loathe the happiness of all these people who don’t know they’re unhappy. Their human life is full of what, in a true sensibility, would produce a surfeit of anxieties. But since their true life is vegetative, their sufferings come and go without touching their soul, and they live a life that can be compared only to that of a man with a toothache who won a fortune—the genuine good fortune of living unawares, the greatest gift granted by the gods, for it is the gift of being like them, superior just as they are (albeit in a different fashion) to happiness and pain.
That’s why, in spite of everything, I love them all. My dear vegetables!
I see now that I have for some reason made three selections that each dealt with love in some way. That probably distorts scope of the book and says more about me than it does about Pessoa, but I do think it is one of his typical areas of concern. Oh, what the heck, let me leave you with one more of his brief pieces that does not concern love:
424
Every day things happen in the world that can’t be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they’re mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can’t be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows." - Edwine Smith
"...The Book of Disquiet is a diary, but of a self that is several and precarious, and always more potential than actual. Its floating boundaries expand and contract, lazily animated by “the horror of making our soul a fact.” As Pessoa/Soares writes, “I’m always astonished whenever I finish anything. Astonished and depressed. My desire for perfection should prevent me from ever finishing anything; it should prevent me even from starting.” Presumably it was this desire that prevented Pessoa from publishing more than one book in Portuguese during his life. That was a book of poetry, a nationalistic collection called Mensagem (Message), and for many years Pessoa was known only as a poet, Portugal’s greatest since the equally nationalistic Camões. He and his three main heteronyms are indeed very good poets, but it seems that it was as Soares and in the prose of The Book of Disquiet, where he wrote of the “desire to die another person beneath unknown flags,” that he found himself more truly.
...Reading a page or two a day, I would find myself curiously preoccupied along certain lines for a week or more—weird: in the sunlight I’d been thinking constantly of rain—and then the topic would change and, like a spell of weather, move on. I suppose this is just as well if Pessoa is right and
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 the others and rejoin life....Certain philosophers passed much of the twentieth century in an effort to exorcise the ghost of Descartes—to rid us of the notion that every self is split between subject and object, one who is versus one who thinks, a watcher versus a doer. But Pessoa represents a kind of kudzu Cartesianism: a crazy interior multiplication of egos, each thought or feeling producing a separate spectator self, a subject then made into the object of a brand new subject, and so on indefinitely. From The Book of Disquiet:
I created various personalities within myself. I create them constantly. Every dream, as soon as it is dreamed, is immediately embodied by another person who dreams it instead of me.
In order to create, I destroyed myself; I have externalized so much of my inner life that even inside I now exist only externally....The Book of Disquiet most often seduced me as a perversely cheerful apologia for withdrawal from everything, for “the sweetness of having neither family nor companions, the gentle pleasure akin to that of exile, in which we feel the pride of distance shade into a hesitant voluptuousness.” Behold the paradise of Bernardo Soares: “A cup of coffee, a cigarette, the penetrating aroma of its smoke, myself sitting in a shadowy room with my eyes half-closed.” Elsewhere he is more elaborate: “To live a dispassionate, cultured life beneath the dewfall of ideas, reading, dreaming and thinking about writing, a life slow enough to be always on the edge of tedium, but considered enough not to slip into it. To live a life removed from emotions and thoughts, enjoying only the thought of emotions and the emotion of thoughts. To stagnate, golden, in the sun like a dark lake surrounded by flowers.” The best guess is that the bending flowers themselves are narcissi.
And it’s easy and correct enough to say that Pessoa and his work are simply narcissistic. He and the heteronyms seem intent on nothing so much as their arrested development; they are life-long adolescents, addicts of potential. The less one acts, the more potential is conserved, or so you can believe. Pessoa and Soares et al. are not, therefore, the best group to fall in with in your twenties. The big task of people my age, those who haven’t yet found a partner or exactly settled on a profession, must be to enter the really existing world without getting broken in the process, to distinguish realism from selling-out and also ideals from excuses. Pessoa’s work, on the other hand, is testimony to the melancholy pleasure of shirking this task permanently and devotedly. Like a temp, Soares has taken his job as an assistant bookkeeper reluctantly, because he must: “Anyone reading the earlier part of this book will doubtless have formed the opinion that I’m a dreamer. If so, they’re wrong. I don’t have enough money to be a dreamer.” But this only means that he lacks enough to dream full-time. Getting called a good-for-nothing would not affront him. He enjoys quoting the French philosopher Gabriel Tarde: “Life is a search for the impossible via the useless.”
Work and love are alleged to be the keys to happiness, but Soares and Pessoa, who have each other, demur. Pessoa is never more audacious, characteristic, or sinister than when he says such things as: “Woman is a rich source of dreams. Never touch her.” Friendship doesn’t fare much better in his account: “The only possible reason for asking other people’s advice is to know, when we subsequently do exactly the contrary of what they told us to do, that we really are ourselves, acting in complete disaccord with all that is other.”All throughout the year of my reading The Book of Disquiet I was also finishing up grad school; making a first go of a freelance career; eating and dressing a little better than before, and a little beyond my means; hanging out with the friends who have, like me, ended up in the huge funnel of New York; and alternately suffering and enjoying an on-again, off-again love affair, or affaire maudite, with that girlfriend whom I loved and often avoided. I was also working on a novel—the completion of which seemed to recede further away the more I wrote. I’m referring to “the horror of making our soul a fact.” Yet it doesn’t seem impossible or even all that unlikely that I will more or less get what I want and what I’d come here for, in this city that more than any other is consecrated to such desires. No doubt I would have hesitated in the face of a threatened fulfillment no matter what book I’d left by my bedside for months, but it remains hard to imagine one that would have more exacerbated my hesitations, or better improved upon them, as the case may be, than The Book of Disquiet.
“I like to read the way a chorus girl does,” E. M. Cioran writes, “identifying myself with the author and the book.” So it is for me too. In many ways Pessoa and I couldn’t be more different. My politics are to the left, I’m reasonably abstemious, I travel when I can, I have more than enough friends, and to my barbaric ear, Portuguese—Pessoa’s “clear, majestic language”—sounds like Spanish as spoken by Eastern Europeans. Yet The Book of Disquiet, the work of a royalist loner and virgin dead sixty-seven years ago from too much drink, has often seemed as intimate a book as if the words were mine. At times it was as if someone had drawn up my confession, to which I need only supply the crime.
I seemed to savor my life by my reluctance to live it. The romance I was in, as I finished The Book of Disquiet, was presumed to be ending again, and again not actually acting like it was. In my politics too there were issues of “commitment.” The power of my left-wing analysis seemed constantly to increase while—despite the rallies attended, the petitions signed—the power of the left itself steadily diminished. And the great novel I was writing I suspended or abandoned in order to work on something shorter and less important to me. Even in small things—what to do next week with a friend—I was hesitant and uncertain. Decisiveness seemed to shear the edges off time, permitting the days to lapse by too quickly, and I didn’t know—I still don’t—any better way of slowing things down than to enter a pleasant little agony of abulia. The Book of Disquiet, involved in all this, had become my book of hours.
...But I think my susceptibility to Pessoa’s “cold in the soul” had to do with his own susceptibility. Where the others make arguments, he confesses himself in fragments. The transvaluation of values he proposes—all the customary grails turned upside down—is more persuasive to me than Nietzsche’s much more strenuous operation, not only because Pessoa will have nothing to do with the despicable will-to-power, but because he suffers his truths at least as much as he advances them. After all, he is giving things up not because he doesn’t want them, but because he does. The image of the Gordian knot isn’t an idle one:
The further we advance in life, the more we become convinced of two contradictory truths. The first is that, confronted by the reality of life, all the fictions of literature and art pale into insignificance… They are just dreams from which one awakens, not memories or nostalgic longings with which we might later live a second life.
The second is this: every noble soul wishes to live life to the full, to experience everything and every feeling, to know every corner of the earth and, given that this is impossible, life can only be lived to the full subjectively, only lived in its entirety once renounced.
These two truths are mutually irreducible…Nothing satisfies me, nothing consoles me, everything—whether or not it has ever existed—satiates me. I neither want my soul nor wish to renounce it. I desire what I do not desire and renounce what I do not have. I can be neither nothing nor everything: I’m just the bridge between what I do not have and what I do not want. This bridge—Pessoa is often writing about bridges—is also between the self and the world. Pessoa’s intuition was that the two could not both be real at once. Meanwhile there was the bridge, nothing solid on either side.
These days it often seems to me high time that I try to take a single shape in the world, that I make a sincere effort to live the best of my possible lives. At such times my way of reading The Book of Disquiet appears in retrospect as a bad habit and a symbol of undisclosed troubles. What did this book do for me but aggravate my indecision and help perfect my bad conscience? The advice anyone would give is to get it together and be serious, and although I can quote chapter and verse against this counsel—“The world belongs to the unfeeling. The essential condition for being a practical man is the absence of any sensitivity” — I feel guilty not taking it.
And there are other arguments to be made against Pessoa-ism, or Soares-itis, or whatever it is. For one thing, Pessoa rarely specifies the contents of his dreams, and while this strange emptiness invites the reader to take the book as his own, it doesn’t only do that. It also breeds the suspicion that Pessoa is more capable of relishing his dreams than of having them. For how long can he keep up their production without believing in or really desiring their realization?
Yet just as often as I am tempted to give in to misgivings and guilt, I feel something else—I feel that I’m right to clutch the thought of The Book to me, and to prefer, to any satisfaction I might obtain, the excitement and dread of being solitary and unrealized. This is especially so when I’m back in my apartment, alone with my books. Then I wonder again if it’s true that “Freedom is the possibility of isolation.” Meanwhile, “Life, obvious and unanimous, flows past outside me in the footsteps of the passers-by.” All that is quoting Pessoa, with whom I may have identified too strongly, as a patient becomes a part of his disease, or disquiet. Yet the ideal reader is an invalid. He lies in bed and imagines the life he might lead once recovered. If the illness is prolonged, what was a chance occurrence, an event separate from him, alters his character somewhat and becomes a part of it. Of course I’m not sick at all, and in reading The Book of Disquiet I took all the pleasure that is the mark of good health. Nevertheless, even now that I haven’t taken the book down from its shelf in my bedroom for several months, sometimes when I am walking through New York, with its hurry and din and its large portion of purposeful and enviable people (I have sometimes even heard that I am one of them), I look around and think, thinking of The Book of Disquiet, “I’ll never set foot in this world.” Whether this sentence, uttered silently in a voice not quite my own, amounts to a boast, a bizarre lie, or a statement of sad fact is one of many things I don’t know and, if the example of Pessoa is any guide, may contrive never to learn." - Benjamin Kunkel
arquivopessoa.net/
site de poesias coligidas de F E R N A N D O P E S S O A
Fernando Pessoa: Alberto Caeiro: Complete Poems
nescritas.com/tributefpessoa/
Fernando Pessoa, Philosophical Essays: A Critical Edition, Conta Mundum Press, 2013.
Fernando Pessoa claimed to be inhabited by “thousands of philosophies,” all of which he intended to develop in his unfinished project of English-language Philosophical Essays. The resulting fragments were never published by Pessoa himself and almost the entirety of them are presented in this edition for the very first time in history.
This volume exhibits Pessoa’s musings and wild insights on the history of philosophy, the failures of subjectivity, and the structure of the universe to reveal an unexpectedly scholarly, facetious, and vigorous theoretical mind. Written under the pre-heteronyms of Charles Robert Anon and Alexander Search, these texts constitute the foundation for the fabrication of Pessoa’s future heteronyms. They are the testimony of a writer who referred to himself as a “poet animated by philosophy.”
Through editor Nuno Ribeiro’s careful critical efforts, a new and fundamental facet of the work of one of modernity’s most seminal geniuses has now been brought to light in a remarkably reliable and clear fashion.
“I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties.” As a summary of the work of the writer generally known as Fernando Pessoa, this autobiographical declaration poses some unusual problems. Most of Pessoa’s prolific writings, only a single volume of which appeared in print in his own language during his lifetime, were written under the name not of the Portuguese man of letters, who was born in Lisbon in 1888 and died there in 1935, but under those of a host of fictive personalities – “heteronyms”, as he came to call them – some more enduring than others but all of whom had for him an independent existence.
The work for which Pessoa is best known to English readers, The Book of Disquiet, is the “factless autobiography” of one of these heteronyms, though the fragments found in a trunk after Pessoa’s death from which versions of the book have been assembled may contain traces of a number of personae, including “Pessoa” himself.
Pessoa is remembered nowadays in Portugal chiefly as a poet but much of his poetry was the work of heteronyms with different styles and philosophies –nature mysticism, melancholy paganism and the futurist pursuit of movement and sensation, among others – each of whom speaks in a distinct and convincing voice. No one knows how many heteronyms Pessoa spun off during his lifetime but probably something approaching 100 can be identified from the writings he left behind.
Problematic as it may be – since the reader can never be sure which persona is speaking – Pessoa’s self-description as a poet inspired by philosophy is apt and illuminating. Many kinds of writing flowed from this most elusive figure, one of the greatest 20th-century writers and still one of the least known. Prose of all sorts –manifestos for obscure or imaginary literary movements, critical essays on Dickens, Wilde and other English writers he cherished, a tourist guide to Lisbon written in 1925 and only published almost 70 years later – poured out alongside the poetry, the best of which was written in Portuguese by three of Pessoa’s more enduring heteronyms. (A superb collection translated and edited by Richard Zenith, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, contains many of these poems.)
The verses of Alberto Caeiro – the first of Pessoa’s significant heteronyms and the only one he described as his “master” – are the most astonishing, since he goes as far as any writer has done in using language to express what cannot be put in words. A seer who looked for no hidden meaning in things, Caeiro was a tranquil mystic of the sort that Pessoa may have dreamed of being.
Pessoa’s visible life was uneventful. Making ends meet by office work, a small inheritance and an intermittent income from solving English crossword puzzles that reached him via a Lisbon mailbox registered under the name of A A Crosse, having only one known close personal relationship (apparently conducted mainly by letter), spending time drinking in quiet cafés and dying from cirrhosis, he eluded the inconsequential routine of his days by internal migration into an inner world that contained a multiplicity of identities.
Taken as a whole – if something so multifarious can ever be seen as a totality – Pessoa’s writings are a dialogue between these several selves. Very often, the conversations concern philosophical questions, though these are not pursued with the pious earnestness that is generally associated with philosophical inquiry.
Much of the work that flowed from Pessoa and his many alter egos shows him playing with philosophy, not in order to establish any kind of “truth” – an aspiration dismissed with a smile by pretty well all of his heteronyms – but to rid the mind of the false certainty that comes when it is fixated on any single view of the world.
Pessoa shared the view of Jorge Luis Borges – a lifelong admirer – when the Argentine writer later described philosophy as “a branch of fantastic literature”, a genre that, like poetry, aims to expand the imagination rather than to demonstrate or persuade. Like many at the time, Pessoa was drawn to occultism – he corresponded with Aleister Crowley and assisted the celebrated satanist in a fake suicide attempt in 1930 – but he never accepted the central occultist conceit of belonging to an elite of initiates with access to a secret order of things.
For Pessoa, there was no order, secret or otherwise, only the passing impressions of disjointed individuals who devise many different pictures of the world as they go through life. Occultism was no different from classical metaphysics – the elaborate intellectual structures produced from Aristotle and Plato and their successors up to the modern devotees of materialism – in being an unwitting exercise in the composition of fictions.
Once philosophy is understood in this way, its central role in Pessoa’s work becomes clear. Yet it is only now that we have a full version of the texts that show how far back in Pessoa’s life his philosophical impulse goes. Written in English in the years immediately following his return to Lisbon from South Africa, where he was educated after his stepfather became Portuguese consul in Durban in 1896, the essays collected here are the work of two of Pessoa’s “pre-heteronyms” – Charles Robert Anon and Alexander Search.
Beautifully edited and presented with a spirited afterword, the essays form part of over 1,400 separate sheets, themselves only a small part of over 27,000 sheets that are preserved in the Pessoa archive in the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.
Often fragmentary, at times not much more than jottings, these essays lack the elegance of Pessoa’s verse and the wistful charm of his hetero-biographical prose. However, they abound in arresting and surprising insights and this book will be of absorbing interest not only to those who love Pessoa but also anyone who wants philosophy to be more than the dull rehearsal of commonplace pieties.
Already well read in the subject, Pessoa attended classes in philosophy at the University of Lisbon in 1906-07. The essays show his two avatars moving freely in the intellectual currents of the time while constantly ridiculing any claim to truth about the ultimate nature of things.
“Reason is powerless to arrive at any conclusion as to the fundamentals of being,” Pessoa writes. He did not deny the practical knowledge we rely on in everyday life. Like the early modern sceptic Michel de Montaigne, he saw human knowledge as being embodied in habits of behaviour. What Pessoa rejected was any attempt to turn these practices into systems of belief (or unbelief).
Writing more than a century before today’s turgid disputes about religion, he was clear that belief is a weakness of the mind that persists long after traditional faiths have been rejected. “Atheism is not a form of unbelief,” he writes, “but of belief . . . [Hence] that buoyant faith of a militant unchristian.” Primitive rationalism is a mode of belief, whereas sceptical doubt – which Pessoa describes as “the higher rationalism” – points beyond reason: “Scepticism, as in Pascal, was ever the fore-prey of mysticism.”
As Pessoa saw it, “Humanitarianism is the last bulwark of the Christian creed.” He was similarly dismissive of the militant political faiths of his day – fascism and communism – and, less than a year before he died, he received the accolade of being barred from political activity by the Salazar regime.
That is not to say he was in any sense a figure of the liberal left. A wayward but resolute individualist, Pessoa scorned belief in democracy as well as the totalitarian faiths that possessed so many European intellectuals of his generation. “It is almost invariable,” he writes here, “that the lower rationalist should be a democrat, a believer in that myth called ‘the people’. As he is generally an atheist – that is to say, a believer with a minus sign –he carries the typical attitude of belief into a concrete sphere.”
Too much given to doubt and irony to belong in any congregation of the faithful, Pessoa was particularly scornful of the secular surrogates of Christianity. “Where one believes in the Pentateuch, another believes in democracy,” he writes. Pessoa believed in neither but it is not hard to guess which of the two he preferred.
Judged by the standards of academic philosophy, there is little that is original in these pages. Pessoa’s scepticism is not greatly different in its view of the limits of human reason from the sceptical philosophy developed in the ancient world by Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus, versions of which have been revived in modern times not only by Montaigne but also by David Hume.
Where Pessoa differs from most exponents of systematic doubt is in his intent, which was not to prove the validity of scepticism or even – like Hume, in some moods – to encourage people to give up philosophising and return to everyday life. If Pessoa’s philosophical writings had any overall purpose, it was simply to emancipate the mind and enlarge the imagination. The human value of philosophy was not in underwriting any view of things but in making possible a certain kind of mental freedom.
Reading these essays, it is difficult to imagine anything more remote from how philosophy is practised today. No matter how politically radical or countercultural in tone, the implicit goal of most contemporary philosophers is to supply a rationale for prevailing hopes and ideals – an aspiration that reliably produces what Wittgenstein described as “bourgeois philosophy”.
Canonically exemplified in the work of the Harvard philosopher John Rawls, this involves weaving together widely shared intuitions and using the resulting construction to frame an ideal version of what is currently accepted as a morally respectable way of living – in Rawls’s case, one that features personal autonomy and the implementation of “a rational plan of life”.
There are issues about whether the intuitions that are invoked are in reality so widely held – they tend to be those that occur to people who have organised and attended university seminars in a handful of western countries over the past few decades, hardly a representative cross section of humankind – but a more fundamental question concerns the goal of providing an apology for prevailing values. This is, after all, a variation on the method used by anxious religious believers to persuade others – and, perhaps, themselves – of their beliefs. The resulting apologias are rarely very interesting or terribly persuasive.
Pessoa is something else. Far from trying to persuade anyone of any set of convictions, he used philosophy to liberate the mind from belief. If you are content with the seeming solidity of conventional opinion, you will do best to stick to philosophy as it is nowadays commonly practised. However, if you enjoy the free play of the mind and imagination, read these essays and some of the poems they inspired.
Pessoa was – with all of his fictive selves – a unique modern spirit. It is a cause for celebration that more of his writings are coming into print. - John Gray
Fernando Pessoa no Rossio, com um jornal na mão
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Fernando Pessoa descendo o Chiado, com Augusto Ferreira Gomes
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Aleister Crowley and Fernando Pessoa
Back on New Year's Eve (while everyone else was perhaps celebrating), I posted some random covers, including this oddity:
I noted, "A Crowley-related object found while searching for books by Pessoa?!"
Levi Stahl commented that he had known of a connection between the two.
It turns out that someday we might get to read the letters between Crowley and Pessoa. See Michael Kimmelman's article in the Times, "Portugal Holds on to Words Few Can Grasp."
It begins: "The latest brouhaha involving cultural property is unfolding here -- and not, for a change, over stolen vases or precious war booty, but a poet's correspondence. As usual, it's a window onto a nation's character. The elderly heirs of Fernando Pessoa, the exalted Portuguese writer, plan this fall to auction Pessoa's correspondence with Aleister Crowley, the early-20th-century British mystic, mountaineer, writer and practitioner of black magic. Portugal's culture minister is among those who have shown distress in recent days about the letters' leaving the country."
Claudia linked to this photo*** of Crowley & Pessoa:
And Neil wrote: "This may be the first and last ever instance of a culture minister being distressed by evidence of Aleister Crowley's existence being removed from their purview. The correspondence between Crowley and Pessoa started in 1929, and is probably confined to 29/30. Pessoa translated Crowley'sHymn to Pan into Portuguese, and published it in his Presenca, in 1931. In September 1930 Crowley visited Portugal with his latest Scarlet Woman, Hanni Jaeger. The usual Crowley melodramatics followed, with Hanni dissolving into 'a very long fit of hysterical sobbing' and being rescued by the American consul. Fernando Pessoa then thought it amusing to aid Crowley in a fake suicide at the Boca do Inferno. There was an international furore, only resolved when Crowley appeared large as life and twice as unnatural at the opening of an exhibition of his paintings in Berlin on 11 October."
***Nuno commented that "There are considerable doubts if it is really Pessoa in that picture. The person with the hat has a cane in his right arm (Pessoa didn't) and his face is different if you look closely. You can see a high-res version of that image here." Any thoughts?
Check out Nuno's Pessoa site.
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