The Game of Disquiet

The Casa Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon celebrates the 40th anniversary of The Book of Disquiet with a game that allows readers to build a physical labyrinth from the pages.

(José Frade/EGEAC)

A few nights ago I woke up at 4 in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. There was a crazy—or maybe just angry—man yelling in the street, about how he was going to fuck somebody up. But he wasn’t the thing that had awoken me, because I only heard him after I’d already been lying in the dark for a few minutes, angry at myself for being awake  and trying to stir the will to check my phone, which I’d left charging at the other side of my hotel room. I was hoping it wasn’t 4 am, but of course it was. I could already tell by the quality of the darkness in the room, a kind of dark blue gleam like black water can have some times beneath a sky partially lit by city lights.

If you open Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet (in Portuguese, Livro do Desassossego) in a moment of insomnia, you are not likely to find consolation in lines such as “I’m dazed by a sarcastic terror of life, a despondency that exceeds the limits of my conscious being.” Or maybe you are. It’s like listening to the blues when you’re heartbroken. Or try this, one of my favorites:

“Whenever I’ve tried to free my life from a set of the circumstances that continuously oppress it, I’ve been instantly surrounded by other circumstances of the same order…I yank from my neck a hand that was choking me, and I see that my own hand is tied to a noose that fell around my neck when I freed it from the stranger’s hand. When I gingerly remove the noose, it’s with my own hands that I nearly strangle myself.”

A book consisting of several hundred pages of gems like this have made Fernando Pessoa the most famous Portuguese author of the 20th century. Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888, spent part of his childhood in the British-controlled South African town of Durban, and returned at age 17 to Lisbon. He spent the rest of his life there. It was a seemingly uneventful one: he never married, appears to have had only one romantic interest, and had an extremely boring job drafting and translating correspondence in foreign languages for local firms that did international business.

In Lisbon it’s hard to get away from his caricature: a dark-haired man in a black suit and hat with a mustache and circular glasses, peering at you deadpan from t-shirts, mugs, and advertisements trying to leverage his cultural cachet. Having been haunted by his figure on a recent trip, I decided to get to the heart of the matter and visit the Casa Fernando Pessoa, a museum located in the Campo de Ourique neighborhood, in the house where he spent the last 15 years of his life.

Here I learned that, under the featureless surface of Pessoa’s personal life, seethed a much more active inner life, or lives. As the Casa masterfully explains, on an entire floor dedicated to the subject, Pessoa considered himself home to a host of people (dozens, in fact) who themselves wrote and published, including a shepherd poet named Alberto Caeiro who died at age 26 of TB, a naval engineer named Álvaro de Campos, and a “semiheteronym”—because he resembled Pessoa so closely—named Bernardo Soares, a bachelor who worked as an assistant bookkeeper in a firm very much like the ones for which Pessoa freelanced. It is Soares, in fact, who is credited with writing most of the Book of Disquiet—they are his existential musings, conceived as he pencils numbers into his ledger, as he smokes in a cafe, as he prepares for sleep in the apartment where he lives alone. In one fragment of the book, Pessoa explains that he met Soares because they're both regulars at the same tavern. Soares is an aloof, enigmatic fellow whom Pessoa never quite manages to know. Nevertheless, Pessoa writes, “I remained just as much his friend, devoted to the end for which he’d drawn me to himself—the publication of this book.”

This flurry of internal psychological activity was reflected in a prolific oeuvre—after all, Pessoa was not just one man writing, but a veritable army. However, only a small fraction of Pessoa’s work was published during his lifetime. According to Clara Riso, director of the Casa Fernando Pessoa, there was a reason, one to which most writers can probably relate.

“He was a perfectionist,” she told me. “So he was every time postponing the printing and the issuing, because then somehow it would be crystallized.”

In fact, although he published twelve short excerpts in various periodicals during this lifetime, he put off the publication of the entirety of the Book of Disquiet for so long that, before he could make a selection of its contents, he died. (At age 47, cirrhosis of the liver. Although the Casa says little about it, he was an alcoholic.)

In the last year of his life, he did manage to organize the vast trove of writings (about 25000 pages) that he kept in a wooden trunk, setting aside about 300 fragments in an envelope marked “L. Do D,” and another 200 with indications they belonged to the same work.

It wasn’t until 1982 that a pair of editors attempted to wrangle these fragments into a book—even though there was very little indication from Pessoa himself about the order in which they should appear. Richard Zenith, in the introduction to his English language translation of the book, calls these fragments  “a jigsaw puzzle without a discernible picture or pattern. Perhaps this would be the best way to go: an edition of loose pieces, orderable according to each reader’s fancy, or according to how they happen to fall. Since a loose-leaf edition is impractical, and since every established order is the wrong order, the mere circumstance of publication entails a kind of original sin.”

When faced with how to approach an exhibition celebrating the book’s 40th anniversary, the Casa decided to embrace the inevitable wrongness of any iteration of the book.

“Pessoa did not make this book, it is a kind of nonexistent book or a virtual book,” Riso says. “Depending on your criteria, you will make your own Book of Disquiet.”

The museum worked with design agency atelier-do-ver to create Jogo do Desassossego (Game of Disquiet), a  physical embodiment that reflects the book’s essential nature as subjective, random, and eternally unfinished. A large plastic tabletop is fitted with plastic slots that form a large grid. Excerpts of the book are printed on clear plastic pages that can be flitted into the slots. As a visitor adds pages and decides on an order, a kind of rat maze is built, and thus allowing visitors to participate in the “game” of bringing the book into being. As the atelier-do-ver team, Cláudio Silva, Nuno Quá, and Susana Gonzalez, said in an email, “For us, the maze is a visual and formal metaphor of the book as translates the fragmentary nature of the paper sheets left by Fernando Pessoa—such as loose pieces of an unfinished game—that are still being assembled by many editors nowadays, although accepting that this ‘game’ does not have a solution, neither an end.”

The game also echoes the physical setting of the Book of Disquiet, says Riso, because Lisbon’s downtown is quite grid-like. “Bernardo Soares was walking in the streets of Lisbon, like wandering a labyrinth, the same happens here in this table,” she says. The labyrinth changes “each time a visitor comes and plays the game.”

The maze of ruminations reminds us of something else, too: the labyrinthine nature of thought—frequent dead ends, much rarer revelations. Chopping the book into sections of text that can be read in a minute or two is a good way to get past the imposing length of the tome, although sometimes the excerpts are so searingly honest that it feels a little profane reading them by daylight. For example, this cheerful observation: “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.” True, or most often true, but did you have to come out and say it?

(José Frade/EGEAC)

The gift shop on the ground floor of the Casa is filled with translations of the Book of Disquiet into any language that a random tourist might speak. But I could understand if most visitors, after handling actual pieces of Pessoa’s raw near-nihilism, might pass on taking it home with them.

I, however, did obtain a digital copy of the book, and, as the blueness of my room very gradually lightened on my recent night of insomnia, I read and kept reading.

On dark nights of the soul, it’s common to reach like a drowning person for self-help books or works of philosophy. A desperate Christian might open the Bible to a random page, praying for the word of God to give meaning or an exit to their crisis. If you were to perform bibliomancy on the Book of Disquiet, you would find yourself each time in the heart of the maze. Each excerpt makes a turn this way and that, leading you to what is both at once a dead end and a revelation. It’s a maze with no exits; it’s a maze that’s all exits. Rather than give you a pep talk, Pessoa would rather reassure you that your niggling sense of meaningless is not unfounded. He doesn’t try to cover the abyss at the bottom of everything: he tries to look at it, over and over again, without turning away.

To what end? Let’s return to the excerpt I quoted earlier:

“I’m dazed by a sarcastic terror of life, a despondency that exceeds the limits of my conscious being.” But this devastating thought is just the first in a series that reaches a hopeful conclusion: “I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought. I feel, in this moment, like a man who wakes up after a slumber full of real dreams, or like a man freed by an earthquake from the dim light of the prison he’d grown used to.”

Every revelation invites action. And something is to be done about this revelation, Pessoa is sure of it, but he’s not sure what—and never got around to it, I suppose. (A few lines later, he writes: “It was just a brief moment, and it’s already over.”) But I see him as a seeker on the path who didn’t make it, leaving behind a kind of friendly ghost, like Virgil in Dante’s Inferno, who haunts the pages of the Book of Disquiet, trying, over and over, to show us the way.