After reading this, I think Pessoa is the bleakest, most depressing writer I've ever read. He doesn't even try to be that way which makes it even worse, but something about this middle aged man with no friends, no women, no future, a severe alcohol and smoking addiction and yet he still finds the energy to write, to accept his life and even see some beauty in it is just too much. I'm much more comfortable with a Dazai or a Cioran who at least look at despair and the void right in the eyes and get destroyed in the process. Pessoa just nods at all this and continues his life, knowing full well there is no hope.
It is not a literal autobiography, it reduces everything to two extremes to the point of absurdity to create an amazing and sobering sort of humor. It strips away the self delusion and presents everything with a sort of honesty (from its two perspectives) which is very difficult for most people to accept. At times it really seems like Pessoa was bipolar but bipolars are incapable of that sort of insight and introspection, especially if they self medicate with alcohol. In the most simple terms, it is Pessoa exploring how everything he hates about the world makes everything he loves about the world, possible. I have my third copy sitting right here besides me, wore out the previous two copies. One of my favorite books and I have kept a copy of it with me for 20 years now, rare I go a day without opening it up and reading a few chapters.
>>25556206He grew up in a world where you could buy 100% purity heroin and cocaine at the pharmacy and fuck 13 year olds in brothels, women were virgins at marriage and getting a wife was significantly easier than it is today.If these losers were born today they would despair a lot harder being complete incels. I can't take this depression seriously it's like someone in 1950 complaining about the economy.
>>25556252>t. I've never read Pessoa and am a khv
>>25556254Kys norman. OP makes Pessoa sound like yet another whiny retard that grew up at the end of the greatest time period in human history to be a man in. At least Cioran was born 2 decades later which means he completely missed out on the good times.For men, literally everything was better before the Jewish Century (20th) I could make you a list on all the things that got ruined but you should already know and you wouldn't care either since you're a dumb cuck.
>>25556263If you had read Pessoa you would not be appealing to how OP makes Pessoa sound. If it wasn't for "the jew" you wouldn't be a khv, you would literally rule the world, you would be "the jew."
Every soul worthy of itself desires to live life in the Extreme. To be satisfied with what one is given is for slaves. To ask for more is for children. To conquer more is for madmen, because every conquest is ..... To live life in the Extreme means to live it to the limit, but there are three ways of doing this, and it’s up to the superior soul to choose one of the ways. The first way to live life in the extreme is by possessing it to an extreme degree, by means of a Ulyssean journey through all experiential sensations, through all forms of externalized energy. But few are the people in all the ages of the world who can shut their eyes with a fatigue that’s the sum of all fatigues, who have possessed everything in every way. Indeed few can get life to yield to them completely, body and soul, making them so sure of its love that jealous thoughts become impossible. But this must surely be the desire of every superior, strong-willed soul. When this soul, however, realizes that it can never accomplish such a feat, that it lacks the strength to conquer all parts of the Whole, then there are two other roads it can follow. One is total renunciation, formal and complete abstention, transferring to the sensible sphere whatever cannot be wholly possessed in the sphere of activity and energy. Better to supremely not act than to act spottily, inadequately and in vain, like the superfluous, inane, vast majority of men. The other road is that of perfect equilibrium, the search for the Limit in Absolute Proportion, whereby the longing for the Extreme passes from the will and emotion to the Intelligence, such that one’s entire ambition is no longer to live all life or to feel all life but to organize all life, to consummate it in intelligent Harmony and Coordination. The longing to understand, which in noble souls often replaces the longing to act, belongs to the sphere of sensibility. To replace energy with the Intelligence, to break the link between will and emotion, stripping the material life’s gestures of any and all interest – this, if achieved, is worth more than life, which is so hard to possess completely and so sad when possessed only partially. The argonauts said that it wasn’t necessary to live, only to sail. We, argonauts of morbid sensibility, do well to say that it’s not necessary to live, only to feel.
If one day I become financially secure, so that I can freely write and publish, I know I’ll miss this precarious life in which I hardly write and don’t publish. I’ll miss it not only because it will be a life, however mediocre, that I’ll never have again, but also because every sort of life has a special quality and particular pleasure, and when we take up another life, even a better one, that particular pleasure loses its lustre, that special quality is less special, until they fade away, and there’s something missing. If one day I succeed in carrying the cross of my intention to the good Calvary, I’ll find another calvary on that good Calvary, and I’ll miss the time when I was futile, mediocre and imperfect. I will in some sense be less. I’m tired. I had a long day full of idiotic work in this almost deserted office. Two employees are out sick and the others aren’t here. I’m alone, except for the office boy in the back. I miss the future when I’ll be able to look back and miss all of this, however absurdly. I’m tempted to ask whatever gods there be to keep me here, as if in a strong-box, safe from life’s sorrows as well as its joys.
Money is beautiful, because it frees us. To want to die in Peking and not be able to is one of the things that weigh on me like a feeling of impending doom. The buyers of useless things are wiser than is commonly supposed – they buy little dreams. They become children in the act of acquisition. When people with money succumb to the charms of those useless little objects, they possess them with the joy of a child gathering sea shells on the beach – the image that best expresses the child’s happiness. He gathers shells on the beach! No two are ever alike for a child. He falls asleep with the two prettiest ones in his hand, and when they’re lost or taken from him (A crime! They’ve made off with outer bits of his soul! They’ve stolen pieces of his dream!), he weeps like a God robbed of a just-created universe.
>>25556206In general, I have decided not to read depressing and hopeless books. I've scratched off things like Kafka, No Longer Human and Blood Meridian, but this somewhat intrigued me.
We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life. A tedium that includes the expectation of nothing but more tedium; a regret, right now, for the regret I’ll have tomorrow for having felt regret today – huge confusions with no point and no truth, huge confusions … … where, curled up on a bench in a railway station, my contempt dozes in the cloak of my discouragement … … the world of dreamed images which are the sum of my knowledge as well as of my life … To heed the present moment isn’t a great or lasting concern of mine. I crave time in all its duration, and I want to be myself unconditionally.
>>25556314The Book of Disquiet is not depressing in the sense that Kafka, No Longer Human, and Blood Meridian are, and certainly not hopeless in any sense, it is just disquieting, which can be far more upsetting.
We worship perfection because we can’t have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect. We secretly hate paradise. Our yearnings are like those of the poor wretch who hopes for the countryside in heaven. Indeed, it’s not abstract ecstasies or marvels of the absolute that can enchant a feeling soul; it’s homesteads and hillsides, green islands in blue seas, wooded paths and restful hours spent on ancestral farms, even if we’ve never had these things. If there’s no land in heaven, then better there were no heaven. Better that everything be nothing and that the plotless novel come to an end. To achieve perfection would require a coldness foreign to man, and he would lose the human heart that makes him love perfection. In awe we worship the impulse to perfection of great artists. We love their approximation to perfection, but we love it because it is only an approximation.
>>25556233You get it. It’s a brilliant book. Not nearly as depressing as people think
>>25556365>Not nearly as depressing as people think a puddle of gasoline is pretty harmless without a spark
>>25556741Does not take a genius to avoid turning yourself into a human torch, even plotfags manage to avoid it.
>>25556786so your one sided reasoning is meant to show your resilience
>>25556206I don't think he was unhappy. Take his heteronyms seriously and he 'lived' many full lives.
>>25556966If you want to make it about me than all it shows is that my IQ is at least that of an average teen and I have mastered the art of not blowing myself up. But it wasn't about me, and was just pointing out the massive flaw in your reasoning. Might want to steer clear of gasoline.
>>25557085>shows is that my IQ is at least that of an average teen and I have mastered the art of not blowing myself up(meant to convey resilience)
