Name: A factless autobiography
Item: The Book of Disquiet
Author: mickey

The Book of Disquiet →

by Fernando Pessoa

A factless autobiography

mickey

Aug 27, 2025 11:45 AM

What foments at the bottom of our tedium? Beneath a bedrock of slow self-killing work, social pleasantry, and aching banality there is a void within us. There’s something that itches in a persistent way. It taps at the glass at the back of our waking minds and it sleepily reminds us that we will never be able to completely silence it. It is perhaps what makes us human, the ability to toil our whole lives, all the while squaring a tension that, if released, would cut us in two like a bridge suspension cable. At our core there is not the quiet that we expect of the dull, but something that softly yet shrilly announces its lack of silence.

How thrilling, yet terrifying and even embarrassing it is to read the poisonous words of Pessoa’s homunculus mind as he spends his entire life, his real life, in our human world adding figures as a clerk. By all accounts wasting what could be a fabulous existence filled with travel and writing and, well, anything other than wasting away at a desk job! He spends so much of this book thinking on that very waste and justifying the humdrum existence he would lead for another year or two after these journals were published.

So then these are his journals, published posthumously under the guise of fiction—a moniker only possible because of the threadbare line that Pessoa himself draws between reality and fiction. He understands himself to be written and he understands the social world to be so many lies, roles in a stage play from which only a truly mystical subset of humanity can emancipate themselves. It makes me sick reading the beautiful words that scaffold this man’s daily existence. How horrifying to look into this personal account that he calls “a factless autobiography” and compare it with the lazy reporter journaling that mortals like myself fill up moleskines with.

Pessoa says that to write is to forget, and that in forgetting who he is he erases his own ability to be, but ultimately that in that unbeing he awakens. Certainly the myth of this humble clerk with an impossible-to-know beautiful soul was born of this insomniac forgetting of a daily life. Maybe it’s impossible to know someone other than posthumously. How fun to be brought along a tour of all those who knew all and truly lived but renounced it as a rat race. Does Pessoa join the ranks of Simeon the Stylite, Septimus Severus, or Jason and the Argonauts because he subscribes to the same understanding of the world that took them a lifetime of action to achieve? Well that depends if you think that literature alone is what makes life real. It would probably seem to an unfeeling outside observer that most of us live as if we knew that life was far less real than the art we use to depict it.