The book infesting my brain today

I have been reading Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet in small doses. It is a fictional narrative diary of Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper’s reflection of the distance between his soul’s feelings and his life.

"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. (Pessoa, 15)"

This book is a selected compilation from a trunk of 25,000 items of letters, notes, poems and journals found after Pessoa’s death. The book was written from 1912 to his death in 1935; written in notebooks, scraps of paper, and undated typed sheets of paper. It was not until 1982 that it was finally published and not until 1991 when it appeared in English.

I found the book by accidental design while researching my new novel. When I plot or write a new book I try reading books that knock my brain off balance; to put on skins I am uncomfortable wearing. I went back to Institute Benjamenta by Robert Walser which I had read while writing Zed. It turns it was not a solitary odd and disturbing book, but that the independent publisher Serpent’s Tail put out a entire series of disturbing books called The Extraordinary Classics. In the series, each book represents one letter in the word Extraordinary. There is no complete list of the books, nor any indication the series didn’t abruptly end at R or D. I ordered what I could find (including Artemisia by Anna Banti).

The Book of Disquiet discomforts by its familiarity. It is revelation that a lost and sensitive dreamer who fights to be heard among the urban apathy and the blanketing mundane is both an individual and a constant. And yet, to find that others live, struggle and wither without ever finding a comparable soul isn’t the greatest encouragement to a struggling writer.

"It is not tedium that one feels. It is not grief. It is the desire to go to sleep clothed in a different personality, to forget, dulled by an increase in salary. You feel nothing except the mechanical rise and fall of your legs and they walk involuntarily forwards on feet conscious of the shoes they’re wearing. Perhaps you don’t even feel that much….

At the end of this day there remains what remained yesterday and what will remain tomorrow; the insatiable, unquantifiable longing to be both the same and other. (Pessa, 25)"