The Book of Disquiet
Metadata
- Author: Fernando Pessoa
Highlights
The environment is the soul of things. Each thing has its own expression and this expression comes from outside it. Each thing is the intersection of three lines, and these three lines form the thing: a certain quantity of material, the way in which we interpret it, and the environment it’s in.
To be a thing is to be the object of an attribution. It may be erroneous to say that a tree feels, that a river runs, that a sunset is sad or that the calm ocean (blue from the sky it doesn’t have) smiles (from the sun outside it). But it’s every bit as erroneous to attribute beauty to things. It’s every bit as erroneous to say that things possess colour, form, perhaps even being.
From previous, the soul must therefore exist insofar as there is a being to interpret its existebce; a soul is ibterpretation, and thus even objects have souls. Without interpretation, pelle and things are mere objects.
This false disdain and feeble hatred are merely the plinth
Everything wearies me, including what doesn’t weary me. My happiness is as painful as my pain. If only I could be a child sailing paper boats in a cistern on the farm, with a rustic canopy of criss-crossing trellis vines projecting chequers of sunlight and green shade on the shiny dark surface of the shallow water.
You sound depresing and seeking comfolrt in an imagined simpler life.
I can think about sleeping. I can dream of dreaming. I see more clearly the objectivity of everything. The outer feeling of life is more agreeable to me. And all of this because a slight shift in the breeze delights the surface of my skin as I approach the street corner.
Note the focus on emptions, on outer feeling as a way tp focus the mind.