A Cold in the Soul: Reading the Book of Disquiet in Apartment 62

I don’t know why I picked up Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. But it would have required some monster of perfect well-being not to be attracted by the title alone, not to suspect that such a book might contain examples of his own admissions and evasions. The book can’t have been recommended to me, since no one I know had read it, which I always liked: it permitted me as I read Pessoa not only the lightly sinister pleasure of a minor vice, but that sensation of guilty singularity that attaches itself to any good vice as well. See, The Book of Disquiet (sitting by my bedside over almost a year as hundreds of glasses of water were drained and filled) really did function, more than anything else I’ve ever read, as a vice, or a small suffusing sin, or a chronic low-level illness—“like having a cold in the soul,” to borrow from Pessoa.

Anyone thus congested will want to stay at home—and if he goes out will catch a strange timbre in the voice he overhears as his own and feel a once-removed slipping in and out of his gestures even as he makes them. Yet I (who am one of those young and lucky, aspiring people in New York) often went out at night after having looked into The Book of Disquiet earlier on, and when I did, this breviary of loneliness and melancholy and failure seemed to introduce a flutter of hesitation into my actions, compromising my ready smile and tinting with hypocrisy all my usual desires. And what are those? The standard issue. It would be nice to have success, love, and money in the right degree. I have this image of a table surrounded by laughing friends, maybe including—I can’t quite see this—my future wife. It seems we all have done well for ourselves, and perhaps I have done just a little better than the rest.

So at times I have imagined that this favorite book of mine, The Book of Disquiet, has done more damage to my professional and social and romantico-sexual and general all-purpose human career than any other has. Here in the famously striving city I’d been infected by a book whose credo, if it has one, is that “Inaction is our consolation for everything, not acting our one great provider.” Pessoa lived alone (like me!). He never married (so far, so good), and is only known to have kissed a woman once (the parallel collapses). He rarely left the city of Lisbon, even for the weekend, (this part works, mutatis mutandis) and throughout his writing he...