The Book of Disquiet (1912-35, published 1982) by Fernando Pessoa

Pessoa was among Portugal's greatest poets ; he was also a world-class weirdo who shied away from publicity and wrote under dozens of different 'heteronyms', imaginary authors to whom he gave complete biographies and who all wrote in different styles, expressing different philosophies to his own. I've never read The Book of Disquiet from cover to cover, nor, I think, is it intended to be read that way : a kind of diary or very loose autobiography (written under the heteronym "Bernardo Soares"), it consists of 259 fragments, each an observation or mini-manifesto. Pessoa wrote it over 23 years, adding bits and pieces whenever he felt like it, though the tone is consistent throughout (I can just imagine him saying "Ohboy, I'm in that mood again," then rushing to his typewriter). It's unlike anything else I know ; and, with its unremittingly miserable, anti-social worldview, a perfect side-dish to existential angst in all its flavours.

(pp. 149-151)

Just as, whether we know it or not, we all have a metaphysics, so also, whether we like it or not, we all have a morality. I have a very simple morality - to do neither good nor evil to anyone. To do no evil because I not only recognize in others the same right I judge myself to have, which is not to be bothered by them, but also because I think there are enough natural evils in the world without my adding to them. In this world we're all travellers on the same ship that has set sail from one unknown port en route to another equally foreign to us ; we should treat each other therefore with the friendliness due to fellow travellers. And I choose to do no good because I don't know what good is, nor whether I really am doing good when I think I am. How am I to know what evils I may cause when I give alms, or if I attempt to educate or instruct? In case of doubt, I abstain. I believe, moreover, that to help or clarify is, in a way, to commit the evil of intervening in someone else's life. Kindness is a temperamental caprice and we do not have the right to make others the victims of our caprice however humane or tender-hearted. Favours are things imposed on others ; that's why I so thoroughly detest them.

If, for moral reasons, I choose to do no good, neither do I demand that anyone else should do good to me. What I hate most when I fall ill is obliging someone to look after me because it's something I would hate to do for someone else. I've never once visited a sick friend. Whenever I've been ill and people have visited me, I felt each visit to be an inconvenience, an insult, an unjustifiable violation of my chosen privacy. I don't like people giving me things ; they seem then to be obliging me to give them something too - to them or to others, it doesn't matter to whom.

I'm extremely sociable in an extremely negative manner. I'm inoffensiveness incarnate. But I'm no more than that, I don't want to be more than that, nor can I be more than that. I feel for everything that exists a visual tenderness, an intelligent affection, but nothing heartfelt. I have no faith in anything, no hope in anything, no charity for anything. I feel nothing but aversion and disgust for the sincere adherents of every kind of sincerity and for the mystics of every kind of mysticism or rather for the sincerities of all sincere people and for the mysticisms of all mystics. I feel an almost physical nausea when those mysticisms turn evangelical, when they try to convince another intelligence or another will to find the truth or change the world.

I consider myself fortunate no longer to have any relatives, for I am thus free of the obligation, which would inevitably weigh on me, of having to love someone. My only nostalgias are literary ones. My eyes fill with tears at the memory of my childhood but they are rhythmical tears in which some piece of prose is already in preparation. I remember it as something external to me and remember it through external things ; I remember only external things. It isn't the cosy warmth of provincial evenings that fills me with tender feelings for my childhood but the way the table was laid for tea, the shapes of the furniture placed around the house, people's faces and physical gestures. My nostalgia is for certain pictures of the past. That's why I feel as much tenderness for my own childhood as for someone else's : lost in some indefinite past, they are both purely visual phenomena that I perceive with my literary mind. I do feel tenderness, not because I remember, but because I see.

I've never loved anyone. What I have loved most have been sensations - the scenes recorded by my conscious vision, the impressions captured by attentive ears, the perfumes by which the humble things of the external world speak to me and tell me tales of the past (so easily evoked by smells) - that is, their gift to me of a reality and emotion more intense than the loaf baking in the depths of the bakery as it was on that far-off afternoon on my way back from the funeral of the uncle who so adored me and when all I felt was the vague tenderness of relief, about what I don't know.

That is my morality or my metaphysics or me myself : a passer-by in everything, even in my own soul. I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing except an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a sentient mirror fallen from the wall but still turned to reflect the diversity of the world. I don't know if this makes me happy or unhappy, and I don't much care.