For a long time, I haven't existed. I am extremely calm. No one can distinguish me from who I am. I felt myself breath just now as if I'd done something new, something late in coming to me. I begin to be conscious of being conscious. Perhaps tomorrow I will wake up to myself and agin take up up the course of my existence. I don't if by doing so I will be happier or sadder. I know nothing. I raise my /strolling/ head and I see that over toward the Castle hill, the sunset taking place in the opposite directions burning in dozen of windows with a high reverberation of cold fire. Around those eyes of hard flame the entire hill has a end-of-day smoothness. At least I can feel sad and be aware that in this sadness of mine - seen with hearing - is mixed the sudden sound of the trolly passing by, the incidental voices of some young people chatting, the forgotten whisper of the living city.      For a long time, I haven't been myself.

in «The Book of Disquiet»

 Digital Art

People say that ennui is a malady of the inert or that it only attacks those with nothing to do. But this illness of the soul is more subtle: it attacks who have a tendency toward it and forgives even less those who work or pretend to work (which, in this instance, is the same thing) than the truly inert.

    There is nothing worse than the contrast between the natural splendor of interior life, with its natural Indies and its unknown lands, and the sordidness, even if it truly is not sordid, of the dayliness of life. The ennui of the brave is the worse of all.

    Ennui is not the illness of the boredom of not having anything to do, but the more serious illness of feeling that it's not worthwhile doing anything. And being that way, the more there is to do, the more ennui there is to feel.

    How many times do I raise my head from the account book where I am writing and where I work with my head empty of the entire world! I'd be better off inert, without doing anything, without having to do anything, because that ennui even if it's real, at least I'd enjoy it. In my present ennui there is no rest or nobility or well-being in which there might be ill-being: there is an enormous extinguishing of all made gestures, not a virtual fatigue of unmade gestures.

in "The Book of Disquiet"

[9.15.1931]

We never know if that part of the day that ends ends with us in unless bitterness or if what we are is false in the twilight and that there is nothing more that the huge silence without wild ducks that falls on the lake where reeds raise their rigidity that collapses. We know nothing, not even the memory remais of the stories of our childhood, algae, not even the caress of future skies hesitates, a breeze in which imprecision opens slowly into stars. The votive lamp flickers uncertainly in the temple in which now no one enters, the ponds on deserted estates stagnate in the sun, no one knows the name carved long ago into the tree, and the previleges of the unknown were blown, like badly torn paper, along the roads filled with a high wind into the chances of obstacles that stopped them. Others will look out of the same window that others have; those that forgot the evil shadow, nostalgic for the sun they didn't have, now sleep; and I myself who dare without gestures shall end without remorse among soaking reeds muddied by the nearby river and by soft fatigue, under grand autumns in the afternoon, in impossible borderlands. And through it all, like a hiss of naked anguished, I shall feel my soul through the daydreaming - deep, pure howl, useless in the darkness of the world.

from «Book of Disquiet» translated by Alfred Mac Adam,
Exact Change, Boston, 1998

B. Soares Work index►