The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet is like nothing I'd ever read before, and probably like nothing I'll ever read again. Pessoa was a flaneur (the short way to define this is "street walker", but that's not feasible, for obvious reasons. It means a cultured observer, who strolls throughout a city) in Lisbon during the first 30someodd years of the 20th century, but this book isn't quite what would be expected. Rather than a record of the various characters one encounters while walking, the bustle of the markets, the crowds in squares, public transport, the views and buildings, this is a diary of an inner life, slightly informed by these scenes.

Pessoa's dreamy, expansive work is divided into nearly 500 fragments, and nearly fifty short essays. A few are so short as to be aphorisms, but none stretch more than a few pages. This makes the book easy to swallow, but difficult to digest. It took me at least a month and a half to finish this, and I doubt I fully absorbed it all. Due to its structure, this isn't a book to read straight through a second time, and perhaps not even the first. Perhaps I'll build a randomizer to pick a passage.

Pessoa spends a lot of time dwelling on tedium and withdrawal from life, on how to experience reality, on how the weather, or the scenery, or a chance encounter makes him feel. Or not so much feel, as how these stimuli set his thoughts in a certain direction. It's a different way to think, that I think we'd all do well to delve into.