Sometimes the story behind a work of art is just as fascinating as the work itself. Sometimes its origin is part of its content. The story of twentieth-century writer Fernando Pessoa and his masterwork, The Book of Disquiet, is one of those cases—where the story behind it sounds like a work of fiction itself. Pessoa was born in 1888 in Lisbon, Portugal. At the early age of just five years old, he was exposed to loss and impermanence when his father died of tuberculosis, and then the following year his younger brother died. Not long after, his mother remarried, and his family moved to South Africa, also taking from Fernando the landscape of his childhood. While living in South Africa, Pessoa became fluent in English and developed an appreciation for English literature. When he turned seventeen, he returned to Lisbon by himself, where he would spend the rest of his life and dedicate most of his time to writing.

However, by the time he died in 1935 at the age 
of forty-seven, he had only published a few books, that went mostly unnoticed, and he essentially 
wrote in complete obscurity, unknown by anyone. But yet, he seemingly died knowing that he was 
a great literary figure—or at the very least, that he would likely become one. And in an 
almost unsettling, prophetic way, he was right. After his death, Pessoa’s work—the manuscript for 
The Book of Disquiet, along with tens of thousands of other manuscript pages that are still to 
this day being edited—remained tucked away in a wooden trunk, unknown by anyone. It wasn’t 
until 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa died, eerily the exact same age of Pessoa when he died, 
that The Book of Disquiet was found and published. This book would go onto become what is widely

literary works of the twentieth century.
Inside the book is a lifetime worth of Pessoa’s reflections and musings—about reality 
and dreaming, about tedium and selfhood, about the absurdity of being and the futility 
of doing, about the simultaneous complexity and simplicity of life, about the contradiction 
and paradox at the core of everything. The book is made up of a collection of 
fragmented vignettes written in a style somewhere between diary entries and poetry. There 
is no real linear order to the book, and it can arguably be experienced just as well backwards 
as forwards. Even more interesting, Pessoa does not claim to be the author of any of it. Rather, 
it is credited to a man named Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper from Lisbon Portugal, 
as well as possibly a man named Vicente Guedes. Guedes and Soares, however, aren’t real. They 
are characters Pessoa created to create the book.

Found throughout the massive collection of all of Pessoa’s manuscript pages are various pseudonyms—fictitious authors that he credits different pages and collections to. These authors aren’t just different pennames though. They are different characters with different writing styles and personalities and views and backstories. Pessoa referred to these author characters as heteronyms, and there are around eighty that he wrote under throughout his lifetime. Thus, The Book Disquiet is not exactly a non-fiction book from an anonymous author, but nor is it really a novel about a fictional character or story. It somewhere in between. Because of this, it is often described as the weirdest autobiography ever written. Pessoa himself described it as a factless autobiography, or an autobiography of someone who never existed. The book’s unique structure and style is, in many ways, an essential supporting leg of the book’s themes. The use of heteronyms seems to reinforce a key philosophical theme throughout the work:

the fragmented and illusory nature of the self. 
With incredible accuracy and poignancy that feels cathartic to read, throughout the book, Pessoa 
frequently describes the inherent alienation, disorientation, and loneliness 
associated with being a person. He wrote:
“I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering 
in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite 
managed to breathe life into me. I'm always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack 
all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trapdoor, through infinite space . . 
. in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about 
a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like 
whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever

saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, 
boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool. 
And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; 
I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre 
that exists only because every circle has one.” For Pessoa, self-understanding, or perhaps 
the attempt of to understand the self, is a free-fall down a rabbit hole 
with a landing that kills you. And the impossibility of understanding and 
communicating one’s internal experiences while on this freefall lends itself to a 
lifetime of disquiet and disorientation. Throughout the book, Pessoa also often 
discusses themes of tedium, futility, and meaninglessness. For him, everything is a 
sort of delusion. Life is a sequence of dreams.

“I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life,” Pessoa wrote. For Pessoa, there is no real point in doing or achieving anything. Reality, as we experience it, is as deluded and false and meaningful as the several dreams we had last night that dissolved upon awaking, never to be known or thought of again. Life is but a dream destined to be coated over with the fog of consciousness and forgotten upon the morning’s sunrise. Pessoa wrote, “If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.” The recognition of the futility of doing anything and the advocation of receding into a dream world reinforces another major theme of the book: contradiction and paradox. After all, why write about the pointlessness of doing anything and the impossibility of ever adequately

saying anything while doing something and saying 
things? Perhaps, however, this does not speak to the incoherence of Pessoa, but rather, speaks to 
what Pessoa might believe is useful in paradox. In medicine, certain preventative and 
preparation treatments contain forms of the bacteria or virus that causes the 
disease the treatment is used to prevent. Likewise, arguably, both creating and 
consuming good literature and good art expose you to the virus of being, so you can 
hopefully develop enough immunity to survive. Perhaps paradoxically then, the driving force 
that compelled Pessoa to create and write and do was the awareness that creating 
and writing and doing is pointless. It is also relevant to note that The Book 
of Disquiet was left unfinished. With this, it is almost as if the book mirrors Pessoa’s 
philosophical conception of existence. Trapped inside a trunk, only truly known 
after Pessoa’s death, once it could no

longer be changed by him, interpreted only 
through a fragmented collection of vignettes, written by someone who never existed, finished by 
time not by intention; the book itself seems to be an almost perfect metaphor for a person.
It is unsettling to consider all of this, and then realize that the word Pessoa, his 
birth name, translates in English into person. If that’s not enough, perhaps the most confounding 
aspect of The Book of Disquiet’s story is that it contains passages that prophesize its fate.
In it, Pessoa wrote: It sometimes occurs to me, with sad delight, that 
if one day (in a future I won’t be part of) the sentences I write are read and admired, then at 
last I’ll have my own kin, people who ‘understand’ me, my true family in which to be born and loved. 
But far from being born into it, I’ll have already

died long ago. I’ll be understood only in effigy, 
when affection can no longer compensate for the   indifference that was the dead man’s lot in 
life. Perhaps one day they'll understand that   I fulfilled, like no one else, my instinctive duty 
to interpret a portion of our century; and when   they've understood that, they'll write that in my 
time I was misunderstood, that the people around   me were unfortunately indifferent and insensitive 
to my work, and that it was a pity this happened   to me. And whoever writes this will fail to 
understand my literary counterpart in that future   time, just as my contemporaries don't understand 
me. Because men learn only what would be of use   to their great-grandparents. The right way to 
live is something we can teach only the dead. And of course, all of this came true. It’s 
happening right now with these words. We   are currently participating in Pessoa’s 
fortune told by himself a century ago.

One can only wonder, was this a masterfully 
constructed plan by a genius creative mind? Was it chance? Was it both? Or was it something else?
Whatever the case may be, the story of The Book of Disquiet seems to have almost become a part of its 
artistic creation. It elicits an almost mystical, spiritual quality. It feels like a religious book 
for atheists. A manual for nihilists. It can and probably will devastate most of those who read it. 
But it will also help comfort and remind one to not take oneself or life too seriously. Sometimes, 
exposure to the ailment is part of the treatment.

The Terrible Paradox of Self-Awareness | Fernando Pessoa

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