What is The Book of Disquiet?

In his Book of Disquiet, Pessoa is living in his dream world, but it’s more of a long bad fever than anything.

He despises real life, and wishes to only live through his head, it seems by fear of people and of how they perceive and judge him (among other nevroses). To escape what he sees as a narrow life and a boring job, he imagines situations, landscapes, characters.

Deeply unhappy, he lives at the merge of society. The only thing that links him to it, is his job, Pessoa is an accountant in a small business in the center of Lisboa. Otherwise, he imagines things in his chamber, alone, and he writes about it beautifully.

I don’t think that he really likes dreaming that much, even though he sometimes says that he does and that everybody should do the same. As a matter of fact he theorised how to dream and a way of living only through them, showing a hard determination to fulfill his visions.

A part that I loved

“Life for us is whatever we imagine it to be. To the peasant with his one field, that field is everything, it is an empire. To Caesar with his vast empire which still feels cramped, that empire is a field. The poor man has an empire, the great man only a field. The truth is that we possess nothing but our own sensations; it is on them, then, and not on what they perceive, that we must base the reality of our life.”