Fernando Pessoa

Pessoa, the great writer on writing, The Book of Disquiet.

The masterpiece of the ordinariness of the writing life; as ordinary as the life of a clerk; neither proud or ashamed; not plagued by the urge to glorify.

"True experience consists of reducing one's contact with reality whilst at the same time intensifying one's analysis of that contact." (p.77, The Book of Disquiet).

The Book of Disquiet, a book you can pick up anywhere and get something out of. Pessoa's got good stuff, his stuff just sort of falls out of the book all by itself. I used to think of Joe Brainard's I Remember this way, but it seemed like kind of a stunt the last time I read it.

"Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life." (p. 257, The Book of Disquiet).

Pessoa, alive and writing when Joyce and Stein were writing, and Hemingway. Of them all, Pessoa's project is the most 'modernist'--he had at least 20 heteronyms. The Book of Disquiet was written under the name, Bernardo Soares.

"My life: a tragedy booed off the stage by the gods after only the first act. Friends: none. Just a few acquiantences who think they get on with me and would perhaps be sorry if I got knocked down by a train or it rained on the day of my funeral." (BOD, p. 152)

I can't think of a writer as funny, as uncompromsingly self-effacing, as dialed in to the contemporary urban myth that the city is the summa bonum of civilization. Maybe Beckett, but Beckett seems more invested in treating language as his personal whipping post, which ruins some of the fun. Pessoa's Blaise Pascal without the Christian dress code, writing poems while working 9-to-5 in an office in Lisbon, smoking cigarettes, daydreaming, staring out windows, sitting alone in the park and tossing breadcrumbs to us pigeons.

"The path up the hill leads to the windmill, but the effort expended in climbing it leads nowhere." (BOD, p. 238).