During those hours when the landscape forms a halo around Life, and dream is simply a matter of dreaming oneself, I created, O my love, in the silence of my disquiet, this strange book like a series of arches opening up at the end of some abandoned avenue.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

To write is to live. To dream is to find yourself. This is why Fernando Pessoa, one of the greatest authors and dreamers of all time, immortalized his words in The Book of Disquiet. Pessoa’s eloquent and lyrical language allowed him to express his raw and most genuine thoughts on the meaning of life.

It’s raining, raining, raining…

It’s raining constantly, plaintively…

My body sets my soul shivering with cold, not the cold that exists in space,

but the cold of me being that space…

“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.“

On Life

A tenuous pane of glass stands between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.

Life gets in the way of being able to express life. If I were to experience great love, I would never be able to describe it.

Our life had no inside. We were entirely outside and other. We did not know ourselves, as if we had simply appeared to our souls after a journey through dreams…

A child gives no more value to gold than to glass. And is gold really worth so much more? The child finds the passions, rages, and fears that he sees on adult faces vaguely absurd. And is it not true that all our fears, loathings and loves are entirely absurd and vain?

Live your life. Do not be lived by it. In truth and in error, in sickness and health, be your own self. You can only achieve this by dreaming, because your real life, your human life, does not belong to you, but to others. Therefore, replace life with dreaming and take care to dream perfectly. In all your real-life actions, from the day you are born until the day you die, it is not you performing those actions; you do not live, you are merely lived.

On Dreams

Vague dreams, confusing lights, perplexing landscapes — that is what remains in my soul after all my journeying. 

To dream is to find yourself. Remember, the art of dreaming is not the art of directing your dreams. To direct is to act. The true dreamer surrenders himself to himself, allows himself to be possessed by himself.

Otherwise, I don’t dream, I don’t live. I dream real life. All ships are dream ships as long as we are capable of dreaming them. What kills the dreamer is not living while he dreams; what wounds the man of action is not dreaming while he lives. I blended into one happy color the beauty of the world and the reality of life. 

The absurd saves us, despite the tedium, from that state of soul that begins with the sweet fury of dreaming.

I wake in order to know that I exist.

On Love

Let us create, O Only-Mine, you because you exist and me because I see that you exist, an art quite different from any other art.

Your gaze has about it a suggestion of music played on board a ship, in the mysterious middle of a river with forests on the opposite shore.

Perhaps by dreaming you, I am creating a real you, but in another reality; perhaps you will be mine there, in that other purer world, where we will love each other but never touch, with a different kind of embrace and other more essential ways of possessing one another?
Perhaps you existed already, and I did not create you, but merely saw you with a different way of seeing, interior and pure, in another, more perfect world? Perhaps me dreaming you was simply finding you, loving you was simply seeing you, perhaps my scorn for the flesh and my feelings of revulsion were only the obscure desire with which, before I knew you, I was waiting for you, and the vague hope that, even without knowing you, I loved you.

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