In the Quiet: Reflections on Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet

There’s no concise way to respond to a book like The Book of Disquiet. It invites wandering and welcomes uncertainty—so this reflection does the same. The Book of Disquiet can feel slippery and confusing at first, especially because it doesn’t follow a traditional narrative. It’s more like a mosaic of moods, thoughts, and philosophical musings than a story.

A Book Without a Plot

At its core, The Book of Disquiet is not a novel in the traditional sense. There’s no clear storyline, no conventional characters interacting over time, no beginning-middle-end arc. Instead, it’s a collection of fragmented reflections, like diary entries or philosophical sketches. Each piece—sometimes a paragraph, sometimes a few pages—stands on its own, though themes echo across them.

The introduction calls it a “photograph made out of words” because it captures moments of thought, feeling, and perception—like snapshots of a soul. These aren’t scenes of external action, but moments of internal existence: doubt, beauty, longing, melancholy, boredom, dreaminess.

The Voice Behind the Book: Bernardo Soares

Pessoa, the author, had a unique habit: he wrote using heteronyms—not just pen names, but entirely invented personas, each with their own style, philosophy, and voice.

The Book of Disquiet is written by Bernardo Soares, one of these heteronyms. Soares is described by Pessoa as a “semi-heteronym”, meaning he’s close to Pessoa in temperament and outlook, but still a fictional creation. Soares is a modest bookkeeper in Lisbon, a solitary figure, who writes these thoughts as a way of coping with his inner life and alienation.

So, even though the thoughts often reflect Pessoa’s own, we’re meant to read them as filtered through the character of Soares.

Fragmentation is the Point

The book isn’t incomplete because Pessoa didn’t finish it—it’s fragmented because disorder is part of its nature. The structure mirrors the inner life it depicts: scattered, introspective, nonlinear. This isn’t a polished autobiography, but more like the contents of someone’s private journal: meandering, contradictory, personal.

As the introduction suggests, the disquiet in the title refers to this very sense of unrest and unresolvable tension within the narrator’s thoughts. The book becomes a literary form of mental wandering.

The introduction may stress that the book is something you experience slowly, not something you consume cover to cover in one go. Many readers dip in and out of it, like reading someone’s inner monologue over time. Think of it more as a companion than a novel.

Because of this, The Book of Disquiet resists interpretation. It often contradicts itself. That’s part of the charm—it reflects the inconsistency of human thought and emotion.

What Is a Heteronym?

A heteronym is not just a pseudonym (or pen name). While a pseudonym is just a name an author uses instead of their own, a heteronym is a fully developed character with their own biography, worldview, writing style, and personality.

Fernando Pessoa didn’t just sign different names to his works—he created entire fictional authors, each with:

• A unique voice

• A distinct literary style

• Their own philosophical beliefs

• Often a backstory and even fictional relationships with other heteronyms

He treated these heteronyms as if they were real people, and they sometimes even “wrote” about each other or critiqued each other’s work.

Why Did Pessoa Use Heteronyms?

Pessoa believed that the self is not singular—that a person contains many versions of themselves, sometimes contradictory. Instead of forcing all those voices into one “Pessoa,” he split them into characters, allowing each to speak with purity and freedom.

It was a way of exploring the multiplicity of identity. He once wrote:

“To create, I’ve destroyed myself… I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.”

So rather than limiting himself to one voice, he let each “inner persona” become its own author.

Observations

As I continue reading The Book of Disquiet, I feel compelled to gather my thoughts now—before the book’s quite density overtakes me. There’s something elusive about how it moves: fragment to fragment, mood to mood. I want to hold on to the clarity I have in these early pages.

The book opens, fittingly, with a kind of birth—not just of the narrator, but of a consciousness caught between worlds. He’s born into an era where belief in God is fading, but faith in humanity hasn’t yet collapsed. That liminal space struck me. It’s more than historical or philosophical—it feels existentially personal. This quiet contradiction infuses everything he observes, casting a melancholic hue over even the most mundane reflections. There’s something both beautiful and broken in how he bears that tension: between a lost God and a still-hopeful mankind.

And then, as the book often does, it shifts—drifting into a meditation on place. He compares his life to the stillness of Lisbon’s streets. Not the city itself, but its quiet inertia. It’s the feeling of simply existing. That’s how reading this book feels too: like wandering slowly through a city with no destination. And then comes a metaphor that lingered—life as a roadside inn. We stop here briefly, waiting for the coach that will carry us into the abyss. It’s unlike other metaphors for life. Not dramatic, not romanticised—just quietly devastating. A still life, painted with existential awareness. We are all temporary guests, waiting.

As I moved further in, the tone deepens. The narrator confesses that he was destined to be nothing—not for lack of potential, but out of indifference to action. For him, to dream is enough. To feel is sufficient. There’s something comforting and tragic in that belief. He’s tired before doing anything. His soul too worn for ambition. Action, to him, is vulgar compared to the interior richness of thought.

By the sixth entry, he turns to memory and identity—how time renders the self unknowable. Our past, he says, is not what was, but what we remember it to be—distorted by moods we no longer inhabit. That line stopped me. It felt true in the most disorienting way. We are unreliable narrators of our own lives.

Reading this feels strangely like companionship. Like I’m not alone in the absurdity of feeling too much and doing too little. I sense the book will grow denser, more philosophical, more obscure—but also more revealing. So I’ll keep writing these fragments. Like the book, they are my way of holding on.

This book slows me down—not because it drags, but because it demands to be lingered with. It doesn’t let me rush through. It makes me stop, look inward, and ask: who even thinks to write like this? And the wildest part? All of this—the spirals of thought, the aching introspection—it’s only the first chapter.

I might need to turn this into a full commentary. I can’t help it. How do you stay neutral when the narrator starts musing about his workspace and suddenly wonders why his boss lives so fully in his thoughts—only to realise: his boss is life. Monotonous, necessary, imperious, inscrutable life. That quiet epiphany—how effortlessly he leaps from the mundane to the existential—is the book’s true magic.

There’s a haunting moment when he writes about Rua dos Douradores, his street. He says it contains the meaning of everything—and the answer to all riddles. Except, of course, the riddle of why riddles exist. That one, he says, can never be answered. I just sat with that line. It felt like poetry edged with surrender.

I keep underlining every other sentence. Maybe it’s because I haven’t read anything like this before. Or maybe it’s because I’m at a point in life where I’m craving disruption—perspectives that expand or unsettle me. That’s what the classics offer: not just stories, but quiet detonations.

I know if I read this book at a different time in my life, different lines would call out to me. That’s the beauty of layered writing—it changes as you do. But already, it feels like a rediscovery. A return to literature with new eyes.

Some More Thoughts

To understand this book, I think we have to read it not as a factless autobiography, but as a window into a mind—its beliefs, contradictions, and inner weather. It teaches, not by lesson, but by atmosphere. In one entry, he writes something like: a roof over my head, enough to eat, a little free time to dream and write—what more could I ask from the gods or expect from destiny? That stopped me. In a world obsessed with the extraordinary, it’s a gentle reminder of the power of the ordinary. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t dream big—but maybe, sometimes, gratitude is revolutionary.

And then there’s the way he writes about words themselves. “Nothing survives of what I thought and felt except, obscurely, a useless desire to cry.” The elegance of that line made me fall in love with writing again. He speaks of the magic of language—its inner reverberations, its splintered meanings, the resonance of sound alone. He says: “The magic power of words in isolation, or joined together on the basis of sound, with inner reverberations and divergent meanings even as they converge, the splendour of phrases inserted between the meanings of other phrases, the virulence of vestiges, the hope of the woods, and the absolute peacefulness of the ponds on the farms of my childhood of ruses … And so, within the high walls of absurd audacity, in the rows of trees and in the startled tremors of what withers, someone other than me would hear from sad lips the confession denied to more insistent entreaties.” I could feel the weight behind every word.

One line hit particularly hard: I had woken up early, but I took a long time getting ready to exist. It’s the kind of thing that makes you stop. No matter who you are, this book offers something that speaks directly to your quietest places. It’s not just relatable—it’s a refuge.

The literature-lover in me lit up at lines like: It’s a nice day—but to say it is difficult. So instead, he chooses to preserve it—floridly, lyrically, in memory. “Sprinkling new flowers and stars over the fields and skies of the fleeting outer world.” It’s the act of writing as preservation—as reverence. My heart fluttered.

Even his anxiety, when described, is poetic. The half-full bottle of wine, the imagined companions—every symbol weighted. I’m beginning to feel that beneath the chaos, there’s a quiet order. Something deeper guiding these fragments.

Themes

At its core, The Book of Disquiet is a meditation on the inner life: solitude, identity, dreams, and the rift between self and world.

A central theme is alienation—not just from others, but from the self. Soares doesn’t see himself as whole, but as a collection of impressions. Each entry is like a glimpse into a different self, a different mood. The form matches the feeling: fragmented, elusive, deeply subjective.

Another recurring thread is disillusionment—with life, with action, with the idea of purpose. He sees meaning not in achievement but in observation, in dreaming. He believes the imagined world holds more truth than the real. That detachment—melancholic, romantic, absurd—runs through everything.

There is no narrative arc. Instead, there’s a psychological landscape—a map of a soul that has retreated from the world, not out of fear, but because it sees more clearly from the margins. The book doesn’t want to be read. It wants to be wandered through—like a dream, or your own quiet thoughts.

If the fragments feel disjointed, that’s the point. But when you step back, you’re witnessing a consciousness trying to make peace with the impossibility of peace. That’s the disquiet of it all.

He writes that his ambition is to be a dreamer. To create a false world and live in it. He confesses that he only dares to write in fragments. That line explains the structure: fragmentation isn’t style—it’s survival. A necessity born from inner resistance.

“By thinking so much, I became echo and abyss. By delving within, I made myself into many.” That floored me. It’s a direct echo of the heteronyms—the many selves Pessoa wrote from. Through introspection, he fractures. And in those fractures, something essential shines through.

Even his creative fatigue is stunning. He describes it as standing slack-jawed, while his brain lies idle behind his vision. The paralysis of thought. The exhaustion of feeling. I’ve been there. Most writers have. And that’s why this book endures—because it touches something elemental, something timeless.

If I zoom out, here’s what I see: a man who works an assistant bookkeeper working at a fabric warehouse in Lisbon. Nothing extraordinary. And yet, in that quiet life, he holds galaxies. He muses on life, on art, on being itself—with a complexity that humbles me. No one is ordinary. This book doesn’t preach that—it proves it.

He writes about dull days, the weight of routine. About stepping outside of dreams into the hard light of waking life—and hating it. If dreaming were a profession, he’d be thriving. Wouldn’t we all?

I could write about this book forever. Every line he unspools seems to tangle with something inside me. This is what a character sketch looks like when done right. It’s not just marvellous—it’s revelatory.

In the Disquiet Anthology section, there are even notes on how to structure the fragments—whether they should be given titles, or arranged differently. They date from the 1910s. It’s touching, almost heartbreaking, to imagine that if I revisit this book years from now, I’ll find new meanings. Different threads. That’s what makes this book infinite. It evolves with you.

And for what it’s worth—this is my first full-length classic after dabbling in shorter ones. What a beginning.

Conclusion

Reading The Book of Disquiet feels less like finishing a book and more like stepping out of a long, quiet conversation with your own shadow. There’s no final page that offers resolution—just the slow dawning that you’ve been changed by proximity. This isn’t a story you close; it’s a mood that lingers, an interior weather that follows you back into the world.

Pessoa, through Soares, doesn’t give answers. He gives atmospheres. His gift is that he names what usually slips past us—the ache of ordinary days, the beauty in stillness, the melancholy of thought itself. In a culture obsessed with clarity and speed, The Book of Disquiet offers something radical: ambiguity, introspection, slowness. It doesn’t ask to be understood—it asks to be felt.

As I put the book down, I don’t feel closure. I feel recognition. And maybe that’s more lasting. Pessoa reminds us that to be human is to be fragmented, unsure, endlessly becoming. If disquiet is the cost of consciousness, then maybe it’s also the proof of it.

This book doesn’t live on my shelf now—it lives in the quiet moments between doing and being. In the questions that don’t demand answers. In the part of me that lingers, long after the final line.