The Book of Disquiet Read Online Free Page B

probably both ac.v. for Soares and a Table of Contents for The Book of Disquiet . And at the bottom of the page we find this strange observation: ‘Soares is not a poet. In his poetry he falls short; it isn’t sustained like his prose. His poems are the refuse of his prose, the sawdust of his first-rate work.’
    Pessoa, in the late 1920s, felt ambivalent about the Intersectionist and ultra-Sensationist poems he had written under his own name almost fifteen years previous. Reassigning them to The Book of Disquiet would not only save Pessoa’s name from the momentary embarrassment he may have felt for being their author; it could also help redeem them, by providing an enhancing context. But it was a short lived idea. In a follow-up note (see Appendix III ) written on the same typewriter as the inventory, we read:
    Collect later on, in a separate book, the various poems I had mistakenly thought to include in The Book of Disquiet ; this book of poems should have a title indicating that it contains something like refuse or marginalia – something suggestive of detachment.
    Pessoa, forever indecisive, just like his semi-heteronym, had gone back to his original plan: a book of prose, in elegant and even poetic Portuguese, but still and always prose. What had ever given him the idea of bringing poetry into it?
    The Book of Disquiet had become one of Pessoa’s pet projects, and he desperately, if somewhat ineptly, tried to make its disparate parts cohere. The prose that had made its way into The Book was so heterogeneous that its new agent of cohesion, Bernardo Soares, would have to be much more than a diarist. To make Soares a believable author of such a multifaceted work, Pessoa decided to widen his literary horizons in a big way, making him even a poet. If Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis, fundamentally poets, also wrote prose, why shouldn’t Bernardo Soares write verses? But no: this would have only complicated matters. Pessoa realized this and backed down, repossessing the poems he had passed on to Soares, as we can deduce from a letter, written in 1935, which cites ‘Slanting Rain’ as an ‘orthonymic’ work (attributed to Pessoa himself). Soares retained possession of the poetic prose he had inherited, however, and he legitimated that inheritance by his own practice, admirably demonstratedin the excerpt (Text 386) he wrote on 28 November 1932, an obvious sequel to ‘In the Forest of Estrangement’. And in another text (420), Soares ingeniously brings the ‘Funeral March of Ludwig II, King of Bavaria’ to the Rua dos Douradores. Fighting his incurable tendency to creative and intellectual entropy, Pessoa sought at least a relative unity for his Book of Disquiet , ‘without giving up the dreaminess and logical disjointedness of its intimate expression’ (from the cited ‘note’ in Appendix III).
    In Bernardo Soares – a prose writer who poetizes, a dreamer who thinks, a mystic who doesn’t believe, a decadent who doesn’t indulge – Pessoa invented the best author possible (and who was just a mutilated copy of himself) to provide unity to a book which, by nature, couldn’t have one. The semi-fiction called Soares, more than a justification or handy solution for this scattered Book , is an implied model for whoever has difficulty adapting to real, normal, everyday life. The only way to survive in this world is by keeping alive our dream, without ever fulfilling it, since the fulfilment never measures up to what we imagine – this was the closest thing to a message that Pessoa left, and he gave us Bernardo Soares to show us how it’s done.
    How is it done? By not doing. By dreaming insistently. By performing our daily duties but living , simultaneously, in the imagination. Travelling far and wide, in the geography of our minds. Conquering like Caesar, amid the blaring trumpets of our reverie. Experiencing intense sexual pleasure, in the privacy of our fantasy. Feeling everything in every way, not in the