Book of Disquiet · 3. · I love the stillness of early summer evenings downtown

3.

I love the stillness of early summer evenings downtown, and especially the stillness made more still by contrast, on the streets that seethe with activity by day. Rua do Arsenal, Rua da Alfândega, the sad streets extending eastward from where the Rua da Alfândega ends, the entire stretch along the quiet docks – all of this comforts me with sadness when on these evenings I enter the solitude of their ensemble. I slip into an era prior to the one Iʾm living in; I enjoy feeling that Iʾm a contemporary of Cesário Verde, and that in me I have, not verses like his, but the identical substance of the verses that were his.

Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day theyʾre full of meaningless activity; by night theyʾre full of a meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things. There is an equal, abstract destiny for people and for things; both have equally indifferent designation in the algebra of the worldʾs mystery.

But thereʾs something else … In these languid and empty hours, a sadness felt by my entire being rises from my soul to my mind – a bitter awareness that everything is a sensation of mine and at the same time something external, something not in my power to change. Ah, how often my own dreams have risen up before me as things, not to replace reality but to declare themselves its equals, in so far as I scorn them and they exist apart from me, like the tram now turning the corner at the end of the street, or like the voice of an evening crier, crying I donʾt know what but with a sound that stands out – an Arabian chant like the sudden patter of a fountain – against the monotony of twilight!

Future married couples pass by, chatting seamstresses pass by, young men in a hurry for pleasure pass by, those who have retired from everything smoke on their habitual stroll, and at one or another doorway a shopkeeper stands like an idle vagabond, hardly noticing a thing. Army recruits – some of them brawny, others slight – slowly drift along in noisy and worse than noisy clusters. Occasionally someone quite ordinary goes by. Cars at that time of day are rare, and their noise is musical. In my heart thereʾs a peaceful anguish,

And my calm is made of resignation.

All of this passes, and none of it means anything to me. Itʾs all foreign to my fate, and even to fate as a whole. Itʾs just unconsciousness, circles on the surface when chance drops a stone, echoes of unknown voices – the collective mishmash of life.

PESSOA, Fernando, The Book of Disquiet, Edited and translated by Richard Zenith. London: Penguin Books, 2015, pp. 13-15.