This is a repeating event- Event 1 / 825 March 2025 12:00 pm
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Event Details
“In these random impressions, with no desire to be anything other than random, I indifferently narrate my factless autobiography, my lifeless history, and if in them I say nothing, its because I have nothing to say.”
The Book of Disquiet, the prose masterpiece by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, is unique among modernist literary texts.
Even to categorise this work, authored by Pessoa under the name of Bernardo Soares, is difficult. Not quite fiction, not quite memoir, it is an aphoristic, fragmented exploration of life through philosophical and metaphorical modes of thought. The fragments of text, themselves individual texts, ponder – sometimes deeply and artfully and sometimes despondently and abstrusely, but always imaginatively – with equal weight, the profound mysteries and the boring everydayness of life.
“It’s raining, raining, raining…
It’s raining constantly, plaintively…
My body sets my soul shivering with cold, not the cold that exists in space, but the cold of me being that space…”
These are the musings of a Lisbon bookkeeper who is preoccupied with the nature of existence and who regards the world as by turns fictive, profound, pointless, symbolic, sad, written as a sort of journal. Not composed as an organised text, never completed or arranged by Pessoa (who was the progenitor of numerous literary heteronyms) this book is ‘a fiction of itself’. This makes for one of the most unusual of Europe’s great modernist literary masterpieces. A mesmerising, fascinating text, The Book of Disquiet reflects on the enigmas of self.
“I’m a navigator engaged in unknowing myself… And behind all this, O sky my sky, I secretly constellate and have my infinity.”
JOINING DETAILS:
- Eight week study on Zoom led by Desma Lawrence
- Tuesdays, 12.00 – 2.00 pm (UK)
- 18 March – 6 May 2025
- Recommended edition: Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, edited and translated by Richard Zenith, Penguin Classics, ISBN: 9780241200131
- £240 for eight meetings, including notes and resources
