每日阅读系列之《The Book of Disquiet》

从2021年4月12日到今天，我以每天两页的速度朗读《The Book of Disquiet》，是要出声音的真正的朗读，上午，终于读完了。

封面就充满了“不安”感。

P.9 and if in them I say nothing,it’s because I have nothing to say.

P.12 But everything is imperfect.

P.20 Everything interests me,but nothing holds me.

P.21 …and if in them I say nothing, it’s because I have nothing to say.

P.31 …and I took a long time getting ready to exist.

P.48 …we cannot love or hate something until we’ve understood it.

P.66 A pinewood table is still pinewood, but it’s also a table….And I stop writing because I stop writing.

P.68 I’m liberated and lost./I feel.I shiver with fever.I’m I.

P.78 My soul is weary of my life!..Everything wearies me, including what doesn’t weary me. My happiness is as painful as my pain.

P.97 I always live in the present. I don’t know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing….We and the world and the mystery of both.

P.99 …I’m tired from having dreamed but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because dreaming is forgetting, and forgetting doesn’t weigh a thing; it’s a dreamless sleep in which we’re awake.

P.100 In youth we’re twofold. Our innate intelligence, which may be considerable, coexists which the stupidity of our inexperience, which forms a second, lesser intelligence. Only later on do the two unite. That’s why youth always blunders - not because of its inexperience, but because of its non-unity.

P.104 …I secretly constellate and have my infinity….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….Understanding is what wearies us most of all. To live is to not think.

P.107 To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

P.108 All literature is an attempt to make life real. As all of us know, even we don’t know what we’re doing, life is absolutely unreal absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our selves….To say! To know how to say!

P.117 I suffer and I dream. I complain because I’m weak….I’m not a pessimist. I’m sad….I’ve always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I’m not,…

P.123 without a world, without heavens, without a soul - a dead sea of emotion reflecting an absence of stars!

P.124 No matter how high we climb or how low we descend, we never escape our sensations….Renunciation is liberation. Not wanting is power.

P.126 Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess noting, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.

P.128 Each drop of rain is my failed life weeping in nature. There’s something of my disquiet in this drop after drop, this bucket after bucket, of the day’s sorrow uselessly pouring itself out over the earth.

P.133 …humble people like me console themselves.

P.139 This book is my cowardice….How everything wearies when it’s defined!

P.156 …today an exact copy of yesterday…

P.158 I’m sleepy, very sleepy, totally sleepy!

P.166 Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny.

P.171 Some say that without hope life is impossible, others that with hope it’s empty.

P.224 A toothache is enough to make one disbelieve in the goodness of the Creator.

P.225 All marriages are flawed, because each partner holds inside,…The happinest people are unaware of their frustrated inclinations; the less happy are aware but choose to ignore them,…

P.231 In me all affections take place on the surface, but sincerely. I’ve always been an actor, and in earnest. Whenever I’ve loved, I’ve pretended to love, pretending it even to myself.

P.244 ‘Most people are other people,’said Oscar Wilder, and he was right. Some spend their lives in pursuit of something they don’t want; other pursue something they want that’s useless to them; still others lose themselves ……

P.304 Do we possess the soul? Listen carefully: no, we don’t. Not even our own soul is ours. And how could a soul ever be possessed? Between one and another soul lies the impassable chasm of the fact that they’re two souls.

P.329 To exist is to deny. What am I today, living today, but the denial of what I was yesterday? To exist is to contradict oneself. Nothing better symbolizes life than those news articles that contradict today what the newspaper said yesterday.

P.336 An expensive cigar smoked with one’s eyes closed - that’s all it takes to be rich.

P.340 Life would be unbearable if we were conscious of it. Fortunately we’re not. We live as unconsciously, as uselessly and as pointlessly as animals, and if we anticipate it through so many distractions, diversions and ways of forgetting that we can hardly say we think about it.

P.343 …I’d felt a great sigh of relief, a deeper breathing with different lungs.One of the strangest sensations afforded by the fortuity of encounters and absences is that of finding ourselves alone in a place normally full of people and noise, or in a place belonging to someone else. We suddenly have a feeling of absolute ownership, of vast and effortless dominion, and - as I said - of relief and serenity.

P.345 I don’t even have the consolation of pride. What can I, who am not my own creator, be proud of? And even if I did have something I could brag about, how much more I have to be ashamed of!

P.384 Where are the living?

P.407 To be a good dreamer, you have to be nothing but a dreamer.

P.408 Never think about what you’re going to do.Don’t do it./Live your life.Don’t be lived by it. Right or wrong, happy or sad be your own self. You can only do this by dreaming, because your real life, your human life, is the one that doesn’t belong to you but to others. You must replace your life with your dreaming, concentrating only on dreaming perfectly. In all the acts of your real life, from that of being born to that of dying, you don’t act - you’re acted; you don’t live - you’re merely lived.

P.411 Let us never forget that to dream is to explore ourselves.

P.420 ‘Your life,’ she said, ’has no friend or companion, so why does your life charm you?’

P.431 Death? But death is part of life….Do I survive myself? I keep on living.

P.433 But I swear that even there I’ve never dreamed of possessing you.

P.441 For I’m not just a dreamer, I’m exclusively a dreamer.

P.442 …and the little that I read in this genre annoys me like a blot of ink on a handwritten page.

P.450 …if I lose you knowing that to lose you is to find you?

P.459 …all the loves that absorb love itself.

P.461 Life is a child’s game in the sand…vanity and vexation of spirit…And in that single phrase of poor Job: My soul is weary of my life.

P.472 Nothing means anything….I hide behind the door, so that Reality won’t see me when it enters. I hide under the table, from where I can jump out and give out and give Possibility a scare.

P.481 I’ll lose something: my unpublished status. To change for the better, because change is bad, is always to change for the worse.

P.482 Life pains me little by little, by sips, in the cracks. All of this is printed in tiny letters in a book whose binding is falling apart.

P.486 My state of mind compels me to work hard, against my will, on The Book of Disquiet. But it’s all fragments, fragments, fragments.

P.487 whereas Caeiro writes bad Portuguese, Campos writes it reasonably well but with mistakes(…), and Reis writes better than I, but with a purism I find excessive…

P.499 What do I know? What do I seek?What do I feel? What would I ask for if I had to ask?

P.503 Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn’t. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.

P.509 Diogenes: Plutarch reports that when Alexander the Great was declared general of the Greeks, everyone came to congratulate him except Diogenes the Cynic. Alexander went with his entourage to Diogenes, whom he found lying in the sun. Distracted by the bustle of people, Diagenes looked up at Alexander, who asked him if he wanted anything. ‘Yes,’ answered the philosopher, ‘I would like you to stand a little out of my sun.’ Alexander impressed with this answer, went away saying that, if he weren’t Alexander, he would want to be Diogenes.

可以说这本书充满了哲思，我读的是企鹅现代经典中的英译本，它的作者Fernando Pessoa是葡萄牙作家，以其多个笔名、多重身份著称。这本《The Book of Disquiet》除了被翻译成《不安之书》，还有一个版本是作家韩少功翻译的《惶然录》。