This is one strange book. On the surface it is an autobiography written by two people, neither of them real. Pessoa’s mind inhabited many characters, personas whom he called his heteronyms. They had their own fictional biographies, philosophies, and writing styles. Pessoa created complete imaginary worlds for each of these writers. In “The Book of Disquiet” Pessoa begins writing as Vicente Guedes and then switches over to Bernardo Soares, a semi-heteronym, because he is a mere mutilation of Pessoa’s own personality. The book itself is more treatise of philosophy than memoir. Pessoa pontificates on the meaning of life and other big questions through the heteronyms Guedes and Soares. Pessoa despises banality, even as he observes the everyday in Lisbon. His prose reads like poetry. With flowery verse, Pessoa gallantly describes the world he inhabits, while you get the feeling he is not quite of this world. There is a mysticism and a remove, though not an asceticism by any means. He begins, as Vicente Guedes, by describing his soul, “My soul is a hidden orchestra. I do not know what instruments, what violins and harps, drums and tambours, sound and clash inside me. I know myself only as a symphony.” Life’s purpose is a constant theme, "Some have a great dream in life, and fall short of it. Others have no dream, and also fall short of it.” And the banality of the mundane, "The only thing that prevents the everyday greeting of "How are you?" from being an unforgivable insult is the fact that in general it is utterly empty and insincere.” Even as he describes the commonplace, Guedes despises it, "Practical life always seemed to me to be the least comfortable of suicides.” He thinks of himself as a man above the masses, “All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does.” Soares, Pessoa reveals, is more like his real self, in style if not in content. Soares, although a humble bookkeeper, also lives apart from the world, “For me, everything that is not my soul is, whether I like it or not, mere scenery, mere decor. Even if I recognize intellectually that a man is a living being like myself, my real instinctive self has always felt him to be of less importance than a tree, if the tree is more beautiful than him.” He ruminates on the escape of death often, “Perhaps death will wake us up, but there is no answer to that either, apart from faith, for which it is enough to believe, and hope, for which to desire is to have, and charity, for which to give is to receive.” Life for him is a living death, “We are death. This thing we consider to be life is the sleep of a real life, the death of what we truly are. The dead are born, they do not die. The two worlds have been switched. When we think we are alive, we are dead; let us live while we are dying.” Soares lives in his writing, not in his life, “I am, for the most part, the very prose that I write. I shape myself in periods and paragraphs, I punctuate myself and, in the unleashed chain of images, I make myself king, as children do, with a crown made from a sheet of newspaper or, in finding rhythms in mere strings of words, I garland myself, as madmen do, with dried flowers that in my dreams still live.” He barely touches on politics, except to decry its pettiness, “I always find it hard to admit that anything done collectively can possibly be sincere, since the only true sentient being is the individual.” For Soares, art and literature are the highest of pursuits, “The value of art is that it takes us away from here.” He is not tired by life, but seeks to live apart from it, “Tedium is not a sickness brought on by the boredom of having nothing to do, but the worse sickness of feeling that nothing is worth doing.” His metaphysics is one of disrespect, “The Gods are the incarnation of what we can never be. The weariness of all hypotheses….” He lives an unfulfilled existence in the knowledge that his personality could never properly be fulfilled, “I was more of a genius in dreams than in life. That is my tragedy.” Perhaps what Soares is seeking no man has found, “Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are only free if you can withdraw from men and feel no need to seek them out for money, or society, or love, or glory, or even curiosity, for none of these things flourish in silence and solitude. If you cannot love alone, then you were born a slave…. To be born free is Man’s greatest quality; it is what makes the humble hermit superior to kings, superior even to gods, who are sufficient unto themselves only by virtue of their power but not by virtue of their disdain for it.”
No comments:
Post a Comment