“Why is art beautiful? Because it is useless. Why is life ugly?
Because it is all aims and purposes and intentions. All its roads are intended to go from A to B. If only we could be given a road built between a place that no one ever leaves and another that no one ever goes to!
“ Introduction Hey everyone, Fernando Pessoa wrote about his rebellion against a society dominated by purpose, ambition, goals and achievements. Today is no different. Pessoa instead wrote about uselessness, purposelessness, and aimlessness.
Not only that, his writing reveals an extremely solipsistic, pessimistic, lonely and melancholic existence. In this video I will do three things. First I will look at Pessoa’s life, then attempt to summarise his masterpiece, the Book of Disquiet, and finally 10 lessons we can learn from him.
Whether you’re a writer, artist, reader, or simply tired of the modern rat-race, Pessoa has amazing insights on the human condition. So sit back with a cup of coffee and enjoy the video on an alternative way of thinking. Life Born in 1888 in Lisbon, Portugal, Pessoa lost his father when he was 5, so he was raised mostly by his mother.
Between the age of 12 to 17, due to his step-father’s job, Pessoa lived in South Africa, where he was educated in English. He was fluent in 3 languages: Portuguese, French and English, which allowed him to read books, not in one, not in two but in three languages. Later on in life, he worked as a translator to earn a living.
He dropped out of university, never married, had no children and it’s likely he died a virgin. So what did he do with his life? He wrote.
But here is the twist. Pessoa wanted to be nothing. Do nothing.
Achieve nothing. Yet he achieved so much. He says: “Please don’t think I write in order to publish, or simply for the sake of writing or making art.
I write as an end in itself…”. Before his death in 1935, he put all his written notes in a wooden trunk. In 1982, 47 years after his death, that trunk gave us one of the most profound books of the 20th century.
The Book of Disquiet made him one of the most famous writers not only in Portugal, and made him a worldwide sensation. But here is the irony though. Pessoa never finished this book.
To make it even more interesting, it wasn’t written as a book. The Book of Disquiet is a collection of diaries, ideas, stories, poems but above all unfulfilled dreams and fancies. Yes, you heard it right, it is a book of dreams.
If I have to change the title that fits the content, I would copy James Joyce: A Fragmented Portrait of a Lonesome Dramer as Young Man. Just like Franz Kafka, some 50 years after his death, Pessoa's writing resurrected him as a genius of the 20th century. A loner who took refuge in reading and writing, produced one of the most unique books in literature.
But what is The Book of Disquiet about? The Book of Disquiet It’s hard to summarise the book because it is highly fragmented thoughts of a man over a period of 23 years, starting in 1912 when he was 25 years old and ending in 1935 when he was 47 at the time of his death. The only thing these fragments have in common is that they came from Pessoa himself.
But even that’s problematic because he used heteronyms, so we cannot be sure if Pessoa meant it. The only common theme in all the fragments is the idea of thinking or dreaming. A man who is lost in his own thoughts.
Or submerged in his own dreams. A man who prefers inaction, purposelessness, uselessness and everything that goes against society’s values in terms of success, achievement and action. The Book of Disquiet is the introspection and reflections of a man living in his own little head.
A man who reads a lot and wants to be a writer. Very similar to Marcel Proust who also lived around the same time. So did Kafka.
But unlike Kafka and Proust, Pessoa was even more disconnected from reality. Or he avoided the real and instead took refuge in his dreams and emotions. But at the same time he acknowledges that taking refuge in your dreams might keep you physically safe as you don’t have to go out and battle the world, but this dreaming, thinking, and imagining might leave you wounded on the inside.
Living in your dreams doesn’t injure you physically but it scars you mentally and emotionally. Quote: “I bear all the wounds of all the battles I avoided. ” Thus the book has the word disquiet in the title.
As much as dreams are an escape from hardship and terror of reality, reality can also be an amazing escape from bad dreams or nightmares. When you wake up after a terrible nightmare, you’re extremely happy with your reality of being safe in bed and that nothing in that nightmare was true. So what can we get out of this book?
This is the wrong question to ask, because Pessoa or his alter-ego heteronyms despised utility and purpose. But we live in a world where our time is precious, so in the next section, I will outline 10 philosophical ideas or lessons we can learn from Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. 1-Useless things can be beautiful Most evolutionary biologists believe that 99.
9% of all species that have ever lived are extinct, which leads us to believe that nature has no clear purpose or really bad at it. A male animal ejaculates millions of sperms, but you only need one to impregnate an egg. Darwin called nature clumsy and wasteful.
Yet despite that we are led to believe that purpose is the most important thing in our lives. If you have no purpose, or have not achieved certain goals, you’re useless. Pessoa operated in the realms of uselessness which liberated him to create beauty.
When you’re too focused on a goal, you don’t see beauty that is around you. If there is one thing that the Book of Disquiet is firmly against is having a purpose. It champions what is usually considered useless.
If you think about it, art is the product of trying to do useless things. It doesn’t feed you. While some do succeed, most artists die without a penny to their names, just as those who built the Egyptian pyramid, or the Roman Colosseum or the Great Wall of China.
Pessoa says: “And I am offering you this book because I know it to be both beautiful and useless. It teaches nothing, preaches nothing, arouses no emotion. It is a stream that runs into an abyss of ashes that the wind scatters and which neither fertilises nor harms—I put my whole soul into its making, but I wasn’t thinking of that at the time, only my own sad self and of you, who are no one.
And because this book is absurd, I love it; because it is useless I want to give it to you, and because there is no point in wanting to give it to you, I give it anyway…. ” In the olden days, people went on pilgrimages and today people go hiking, bird-watching, forest-bathing, writing poetry, etc. To understand beauties hidden to most people during our daily chores, Pessoa remained observant.
If you are too focused on a destination, i. e. making money, you might miss the journey or the process.
Pessoa dedicated his life to writing useless things, which turned out to be gems in conveying hidden beauties of life. We busy people, often do not notice or even cannot notice as we scurry from work to home and back to work. Pessoa says, quote: “Life gets in the way of being able to express life.
If I were to experience a great love, I would never be able to describe it. ” Pessoa collected and hid his writings like a squirrel hides his nuts but miraculously we get to enjoy them now. 2-Self is fragmented Most philosophers and religions believed that each person has a solid self with some a fundamental essence, but two German philosophers questioned this essentialist concept.
First Friedrich Schlegel 1772-1829 and then Friedrich Nietzsche argued we are not human beings but human becomings. In other words as we grow, we get solidified more and more. Marcel Proust made this idea central to his novel, In Search of Lost Time, that throughout our lifetime, we die many times.
We are almost not recognizable from our childhood, teenage years, adulthood, and old age, not just to others but to ourselves too. Every encounter we have with strangers, we portray a different self to them. When we see people familiar to us, we try to remember what persona we had with them before, maybe not always consciously.
This is why Buddhists believe the thing we call the self is nothing but an illusion. There are times, when someone reminds of our personality in the past, we somehow do not recognise that would have been us. If you speak two languages you notice how your personality, ways of thinking or even talking changes when you switch between languages.
Pessoa, whose name simply means person in Portuguese, spoke 3 languages. Pessoa was not real. During his lifetime, Pessoa created 81 heteronyms, each with unique characteristics, jobs, stories and styles of writing.
One of them was Bernardo Soares, who resembles Pessoa himself the most, who is also the author of the Book of Disquiet. He lived a paradoxical life. He would collect books without reading them.
He had no ambition but had a desire for fame after his death. He himself was a dreamer but he hated other dreamers. The other major heteronyms are Álvaro de Campos, Caeiro, and Ricardo Reis.
Despite populating his world with these characters, perhaps to escape his loneliness, Pessoa was still a lonely man. He says: “Yet no soul is so lonely as mine—not lonely, be it noted, from exterior but from interior circumstances. ” 3-Even Love is a form of narcissism “Beside my pain, all other pains seem false or insignificant.
They are the pains of happy people or of people who are alive enough to complain. Mine is the pain of someone imprisoned in life, cut off …” Today the term narcissism is a big buzzword. If you cannot bend the other person’s will to behave in a way that suits you, you deem them as narcissistic, but we all want our partners, friends and families to behave in a way that makes us happy.
What could be more narcissistic than that? Buddhists believe the thing we call the self is not real, just an illusion we create for ourselves perhaps for an anchor and mental stability or to achieve our goals, desires and ambitions. Schopenhauer says we are ruled by a blind will, which pushes and pulls us in different directions.
In response to this aimless blind will, aimlessly pulling us around, we try to create a solid self, an ego to show that we are in charge of our lives. Schopenhauer argues that for example, to us love appears almost divine and other worldly, but it is nothing more than our sexual urge to find a mate to make copies of ourselves. Pessoa agrees with this pessimistic, yet incredibly realistic view.
Quote: “We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept - our own selves - that we love.
This is true in the whole gamut of love. In sexual love we seek our own pleasure via another body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via our own ideas.
The masturbator may be abject, but in point of fact he's the perfect logical expression of the lover. He's the only one who doesn't feign and doesn't fool himself. ” 4-Self is solipsism Quote: “I am nothing.
I'll never be anything. I couldn't want to be something. Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.
” How do we understand reality? Is it possible that everything is in our own little head? Rene Descartes said I think therefore I am.
Emmanuel Kant said we are not passive receivers of reality, but we impose our mental structure to the world by categorising it. Johann Fichte (1762-1814) went a step further saying that reality is nothing but a mental creation. We’re the lens, the censor and the detector of reality.
Since all our tools of observation is the creation of the human mind, therefore the way reality exists is also a mental creation. Carl Jung said, we’re wired for stories. If storytelling is our software, language is how the software is written.
Pessoa says: “So why travel? In Madrid, in Berlin, in Persia, in China, at the North and South Poles, where would I be other than inside myself, feeling my particular kind of feelings? ” 1931.
Pessoa’s creation of all the heteronyms could be interpreted as temporary solutions to the fact that we cannot be in someone else’s head, which makes everything solipsistic. Pessoa spoke three languages so he had to deal with human solipsism in three languages. Quote: “Nearly all men dream, deep down, of their own mighty imperialism: the subjugation of all men, the surrender of all women, the adoration of all peoples and—for the noblest dreamers—of all eras.
” 5-Life is a dream For billions of years we didn’t exist, then for a short while 70-80 years we were alive and then we returned to oblivion for billions of years to come. Leo Tolstoy said that life is a dream and death is waking up. If you have to sum up the entirety of Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, you could say it is a book of dreams.
In the Book of Disquiet, Pessoa says that in your dreams you can achieve anything. You can also be anyone, a philosopher, a writer, an artist or composer. Not a logician or mathematician because they’re limited by their knowledge.
Quote: “The river of my life flowed into an inner sea. Around my dreamed estate all the trees wore autumn colours. That circular landscape is my soul’s crown of thorns.
The happiest moments of my life have been dreams, dreams of sadness, where I would gaze at myself in their lakes like a blind Narcissus enjoying the close coolness of the water, conscious that he was leaning over it, thanks to some earlier, nocturnal vision, whispered to his abstract emotions and stored away with an almost maternal care in the secret corners of his imagination …” Only through dreams can you abandon yourself. For Pessoa, thinking is nothing but dreaming. Imagining is nothing but dreaming.
6-Reality is also an escape from dreams Most of us escape our own dreaming mind through distractions in the shape of work, play, entertainment, reading, sports etc. Pessoa, however says, quote: “I hide behind the door, so that when Reality comes in, it won't see me. I hide under the table and suddenly spring out to startle Possibility.
I withdraw from myself, as if from the arms of an embrace, the two great tediums that encircle me—the tedium of being able to live only the Real, and the tedium of being able to imagine only the Possible. ” Pessoa makes a distinction between those who dream of achieving material things. Today we all dream of big houses, fast cars and beautiful partners and endless happiness.
Pessoa’s dreams are vastly different. Quote: “I pity those who dream the probable, the reasonable and the accessible more than those who fantasise about the far-off and unusual. Big dreamers are either lunatics who believe in what they dream and are happy, or they're mere daydreamers whose reveries are like the soul's music, lulling them and meaning nothing.
But those who dream the possible will, very possibly, suffer real disillusion. I can't be too disappointed about not having become a Roman emperor, but I can sorely regret never once having spoken to the seamstress who at the street corner turns right at about nine o'clock every morning. The dream that promises us the impossible denies us access to it from the start, but the dream that promises the possible interferes with our normal life, relying on it for its fulfilment.
“ 7-Adults mourn the child that dies inside them Literature is grownups attempting to be children again. Children are honest, so is literature. Literature is to make dreams appear real.
Sigmund Freud once argued that writing fiction is adults’ attempt at recreating a child’s play. Children at play create roles and characters who go through a journey. What is literature?
It is the same thing. Pessoa says: “To live is to be other. It’s not even possible to feel, if you feel today what you felt yesterday.
To feel today what you felt yesterday isn’t to feel — it is to remember today what you felt yesterday, to be today’s living corpse of what yesterday was live and lost. ” But it goes even deeper for Pessoa. Our adult life is nothing but our attempt to resurrect the child that dies inside us as we grow up into adulthood.
The child who was innocent, who could do no wrong, who was liberated from the burdens of life. Oblomov the famous Russian character refused to get out of bed simply because he wanted to dream about his childhood again. One of the biggest mysteries of life is sleep.
Why do animals need sleep? Pessoa offers a very unique answer. Pessoa says, quote: “When asleep we all become children again.
Perhaps in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life. The greatest criminal and the most self-absorbed egotist are holy, by natural magic, as long as they’re sleeping. For me there’s no discernible difference between killing a child and killing a sleeping man.
” So sleeping is the perfect way to escape reality and be the child we once were. 8-Reading is another way to escape from reality “The world of my imagination was always the only true world for me. I never had loves so real, so full of verve, of blood, and of life as the ones I had with characters whom I myself created.
” In literature two of the greatest victims of reading are Emma Bovary and Don Quixote who consumed adventurous, romantic, chivalric tales, or trashy fiction and once their heads filled with these stories, they embarked to enact those dreams in their lives. While reading can be a great escape from reality, it can also further bend reality to the point of delusion. Perhaps the reason Pessoa is so pessimistic, and melancholic in his writing was the fact that he was a reader.
To counter the dangers of reading, Pessoa wrote. 9- Art is an escape from existential pain In this abyss full of anxiety, pain, despair and darkness where thoughts and dreams swirl, Pessoa took refuge in art, the art of writing. Instead of complaining to those around him, he turned those emotions, dreams and thoughts into a beautiful piece of art.
He says: “In general, men weep little and, when they do complain, they make literature out of it. …Those who bemoan the ills of the world are an isolated few - they are only bemoaning their own ills. “ In the Book of Disquiet he sets up a step-by-step guide to become an artistic dreamer.
It’s a short recipe for those who want to become a creative writer. Step1: Read novels. Make sure you are fully involved in the story.
You surrender yourself to the story, so much so that you forget your own problems, or family’s grievances. You’re engrossed in the problems of the characters that you no longer live in reality. Step2: You’re so engrossed in the story that it leaves you bruised and wounded.
You feel the weight of the actions or the anxieties of the characters with your own physical being. Your legs are tired of running, your arms feel the weight of the armour, your heart starts beating faster. All these lead to climax when everything is released.
Step3: Now the physical sensations are no longer present but they only exist on a mental and intellectual level. No physical effort is required now. Your mind does the job of imagining things without involving your body.
Step 4: Write your own novel. Create a cast of characters. Don’t involve faith, or god.
You are the god in this universe. You’re the creator of your own dream world. You can be anyone.
This is how we escape our loneliness. But expect that no-one will recognise your talent. Understand that you might die as an unknown, unrecognised and unappreciated artist.
10- Life is a paradox Modernity has made us slaves to utility and purpose. We are breathing, walking utilitarian monsters roaming the streets, clogging cities and highways and filling commuter trains just like worker ants seeking nectar. Everything we do is measured by how useful it is.
Pessoa shows us that there is a whole different world outside this utilitarian world. It’s a world of useless dreams which you can only understand once it is too late. Pessoa read, dreamt and wrote, without ever fully knowing that one day someone might read his fragmented thoughts and dreams.
Writing was his catharsis, therapy and cure from loneliness, melancholy and despair. Deep down we are all alone, with our own thoughts and dreams. Pessoa has given us the words to describe those dreams and express our emotions.
One of the biggest paradoxes of life is that we only appreciate something we do not have or when we lose it. Pessoa says you can only teach the fundamental rules of life to those who are already dead. Quote: “I sometimes think with sad pleasure that if, one day in a future to which I will not belong, these sentences I write should meet with praise, I will at last have found people who “understand” me, my own people, a real family to be born into and to be loved by.
But far from being born into that family, I will have been long dead by then. I will be understood only in effigy, and then affection can no longer compensate the dead person for the lack of love he felt when alive. One day, perhaps, they will understand that I fulfilled, as did no other, my inborn duty as interpreter of one particular period of our century; and when they do, they will write that I was misunderstood in my own time; they will write that, sadly, I lived surrounded by coldness and indifference, and that it is a pity it should have been so.
And the person writing, in whatever future epoch he or she may live, will be as mystified by my equivalent in that future time as are those around me now. Because men only learn in order to teach their greatgrandfathers who died long ago. We are only able to teach the real rules of life to those already dead”—Pessoa (The Book Of Disquiet 1919).
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