The Case Against Travel
It turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best.
By Agnes CallardJune 24, 2023
Illustration by María Medem
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What is the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make? My nominee would be “I love to travel.” This tells you very little about a person, because nearly everyone likes to travel; and yet people say it, because, for some reason, they pride themselves both on having travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so.
The opposition team is small but articulate.
G. K. Chesterton wrote that “travel narrows the mind.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel “a fool’s paradise.”
Socrates and Immanuel Kant—arguably the two greatest philosophers of all time—voted with their feet, rarely leaving their respective home towns of Athens and Königsberg.
But the greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer
Fernando Pessoa, whose wonderful “Book of Disquiet” crackles with outrage:
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The Book of Disquiet Paperback – 30 May 2002
by Fernando Pessoa (Author), Richard Zenith (Translator)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 906 ratings
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Prime Savings Get $10 off when you spend $150 with Zip. Enter code ZIPPRIMEDAY at checkout. TermsA modernist masterwork that has now taken on a similar iconic status to Ulysses, The Trial or In Search of Lost Time, Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquietis edited and translated with an introduction by Richard Zenith in Penguin Modern Classics.
'Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn't exist,' - so claimed Alvaro de Campos, one of the 'heteronyms', fully-realised substitute personalities invented by Fernando Pessoa to spare himself the trouble of living real life. In this extraordinary book, the putative 'factless autobiography' of an accountant named Bernardo Soares, Fernando Pessoa explores and dismantles the nature of memory, identity, time and narrative, creating one of the greatest - but also the strangest - modernist texts. An assembly of sometimes-linked fragments, The Book of Disquiet is a mesmerising, haunting 'novel' without parallel in any other culture.
This edition includes notes on the reconstruction of the text, appendices containing material omitted from the final version and letters which Pessoa intended to incorporate into the text. This edition also includes a table of the 'heteronyms' used by Pessoa in his writing.
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) was born in Lisbon and brought up in Durban, South Africa. A prolific writer, ascribing his work to a variety of personas or 'heteronyms', Pessoa published little in his lifetime. Although acknowledged as an intellectual and a poet, his literary genius went largely unrecognised until after his death.
If you enjoyed The Book of Disquiet, you might like Finnegan's Wake, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.
'One of the twentieth century's greatest literary talents ... This superb edition of The Book of Disquiet is ... a masterpiece'
John Lanchester, Daily Telegraph
'Must rank as the supreme assault on authorship in modern European literature'
John Gray, New Statesman
'Portugal's greatest modern poet ... deals with the only important question in the world, not less important because it is unanswerable: What am I?'
Anthony Burgess, Observer
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Review
"I can't tell which of the three English-language editions of The Book of Disquiet I've read . . . most accurately conveys the style and spirit of Pessoa, but judging the English alone, Zenith's translation is most compelling. . . . I want Pessoa to be as great as the version Zenith presents." --Chris Power, New Statesman
"A Modernist touchstone . . . no one has explored alternative selves with Pessoa's mixture of determination and abandon . . . In a time which celebrates fame, success, stupidity, convenience and noise, here is the perfect antidote, a hymn of praise to obscurity, failure, intelligence, difficulty, and silence." --The Daily Telegraph
"His prose masterpiece . . . Richard Zenith has done an heroic job in producing the best English-language version we are likely to see for a long time, if ever." --The Guardian
"The Book of Disquiet was left in a trunk which might never have been opened. The gods must be thanked that it was. I love this strange work of fiction and I love the inventive, hard-drinking, modest man who wrote it in obscurity." --Independent
"Fascinating, even gripping stuff . . . a strangely addictive pleasure." --Sunday Times
"Must rank as the supreme assault on authorship in modern European literature . . . readers of Zenith's edition will find it supersedes all others in its delicacy of style, rigorous scholarship and sympathy for Pessoa's fractured sensibility . . . the self-revelation of a disoriented and half-disintegrated soul that is all the more compelling because the author himself is an invention . . . Long before postmodernism became an academic industry, Pessoa lived deconstruction." --New Statesman
"Extraordinary . . . a haunting mosaic of dreams, autobiographical vignettes, shards of literary theory and criticism and maxims."--The Observer
"Pessoa's rapid prose, snatched in flight and restlessly suggestive, remains haunting, often startling, like the touch of a vibrating wire, elusive and persistent like the poetry . . . there is nobody like him."--The New York Review of Books
"This superb edition of The Book of Disquiet is . . . a masterpiece." --The Daily Telegraph
"I plan to use this book every year in my course at Yale. Thanks for making it available."--K. David Jackson, Yale University
About the Author
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was born in Lisbon and brought up in Durban, South Africa. He returned to Lisbon in 1905. A prolific writer, ascribing his work to a variety of personas or heteronyms, Pessoa published little in his lifetime and supported himself by working as a commercial translator. Although acknowledged as an intellectual and a poet, his literary genius went largely unrecognised until after his death
Product details
Publisher : Penguin Classics (30 May 2002)
Language : English
Paperback : 544 pages
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From other countries
Ghada B
5.0 out of 5 stars Five StarsReviewed in Canada on 18 July 2017
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One of the most profound books I've ever read
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SK
3.0 out of 5 stars Scattered philosophical thoughtsReviewed in the Netherlands on 26 June 2024
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It’s a nice read and great ideas conveyed with no structure. But if you are looking for something structured and concrete, this is not your place.
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Alexandra
5.0 out of 5 stars Great bookReviewed in Germany on 10 December 2021
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Dilip D
5.0 out of 5 stars GoodReviewed in India on 12 October 2023
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Worth reading.
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Wordsworth
5.0 out of 5 stars Disquieting Semi-Fiction of GeniusReviewed in the United States on 29 December 2012
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"B of D" is a work of pure genius written in gloriously lyrical, existential prose: it wants to be poetry and, at times, it is.
Pessoa is a profoundly introspective and honest writer who defined existential themes based upon his frank study of his own life and dreams: it's possible that Pessoa is the most honest writer who ever lived. He is highly self-critical, self-effacing and suffers from the "disquiet" of his simple life as a bookkeeper in Lisbon. He wrote "B of D" in that richly germinal literary era in Europe of Proust and Joyce.
He composed 481 fragments about the absurdity of life by which he means the inability of man to understand his own existence.
"Each of us is a speck of dust that the wind lifts up and then drops."
Pessoa's disquieting themes eventually grew into the philosophical worldview claimed by the existentialists but he was an existentialist before many of them. Pessoa writes with the passion of Nietzsche. He is Camus before Camus. He has Kafka's rich sense of the absurd. He experiences daily Sartre's nausea.
I devoured every word of "B of D" by Pessoa who had the misfortune to remain largely undiscovered and unread until long after his death. His work is existential in the genre of Camus or Sartre ("I think, therefore, I am a mustache.") He is dark, at times, but his introspection is oceanic in its breadth, depth and turbulent existential Angst.
His writing has been described as "semi-fiction" and "anti-literature" by his translator. Great writers inevitably challenge the logic of traditional syntax as well as the genres in which they write to transform their genres by the genius of their innovative literary styles which become legacies in themselves.
Pessoa writes in fragments which are neither fiction nor poetry but are autobiographical and as such show his disconnect both with life and his own art -- there is no real flow between one fragment and the next like life itself in his existential worldview. He considered his life "an intermission with band music."
He also wrote in heteronyms under several noms de plume as if to say he couldn't really even attest to his own single identity as a writer. His fragments are deep, consuming, intellectual dives into his own everyday life. Normally, autobiography is a sign of an immature writer, which Pessoa clearly is not. He writes about his dull job as an accountant among Lisbon's streets and his sightings while smoking at outdoor cafes as well as about thunderstorms, solitude, dreams, the absurdity and futility of life, art, sex, JJ Rousseau and his work.
My only criticism of Pessoa comes from his odd observations and poor advice about sex. His translator, Richard Zenith, believes it was possible that Pessoa died a virgin. I make it a practice never ever to take advice on sex from priests, nuns and lifelong virgins.
Richard Zenith's translation is truly luminous and he brings rich nuance into the discourse of every line. Like my copy of "The Recognitions" by William Gaddis, I have underlined fragments on nearly every page because it is so deeply relevant, honest and compelling in its pure intellectual grandeur.
Here are a few favorite passages which stand out for me from "B of D":
"Irony is the first sign that our consciousness has become conscious and it passes through two stages: the one represented by Socrates, when he says, "All I know is that I know nothing' and the other represented by Sanches, when he says, 'I don't even know if I know nothing.'"
"No one understands anyone else... However much one soul strives to now another, he can know only what is told him by a word -- a shapeless shadow on the ground of his understanding... I love expressions because I know nothing of what they express."
"I don't know the meaning of this journey I was forced to make, between one and another night, in the company of the whole universe... We achieve nothing. Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, 'Look at me move.'"
"The only attitude worthy of a superior man is to persist in an activity he recognizes is useless, to observe a discipline he knows is sterile, and to apply certain norms of philosophical and metaphysical thought that he considers utterly inconsequential."
"All life is a dream. No one knows what he's doing, no one knows what he wants, no one knows what he knows. We sleep our lives, eternal children of Destiny. That's why, whenever this sensation rules my thoughts, I feel an enormous tenderness that encompasses the whole of childish humanity, the whole of sleeping society, everyone, everything. It's an immediate humanitarianism, without aims or conclusions, that overwhelms me right now. I feel a tenderness as if I were seeing with the eyes of a god. I see everyone as if moved by the compassion of the world's only conscious being. Poor hapless men, poor hapless humanity! What are they all doing here?"
He worked uselessly every business day for a brute capitalist and recognized by night that his writing was utterly hopelessly, inscrutably and irretrievably futile. The miracle, and the sense of this should not be lost upon you, is that every day he still writes anyway like Van Gogh painting despite making only one sale in his lifetime.
I recognized Pessoa instantly from the first few fragments of his life in "B of D": I am Pessoa. And he is also you.
"Book of Disquiet" is life changing. I can't remember ever having been so disappointed to see a book come to an end: it's that good. I implore you to read this immortal literary work of genius by Pessoa. It may be absurd, and even futile, to do so but sometimes the best answer to both is simply to be just as absurd.
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Rory Hitchens
5.0 out of 5 stars A Holy ManuscriptReviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 April 2024
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This has got to be the absurdist’s Holy Bible, and the fact that text is missing only makes it more of a masterpiece. It’s dreamy, and just like a dream it’s meandering, but a dream often holds an undercurrent which is both profound and hard to pinpoint. That’s this book right here. Fantastic.
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ghostfinder
5.0 out of 5 stars 著者の意図はどこら辺にあるのだろうReviewed in Japan on 1 July 2019
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英語版を読んで思ったのは、これは散文詩に近いのだなということだった。日本語版に接した折には、日々の思いを書き連ねたメモの集積、くらいに感じていたので、新鮮だった
ポルトガル語の原書の趣は、たぶん英語の方がよく写しえているのだろう。日本語版を軽く見ているわけではない。英語版だと調子に任せて読み流してしまい、意味を追わない章がいくつもあったが、日本語版だとしっかり理解しようとする。ただあまり重要と思えない部分もあって、それは短く編集された日本語の版の方は省かれているわけだが、英語だと一種のヴァースとして読め、内容が薄いとは感じない
詠嘆調で書かれた部分など、本当に突き詰めた思考なのか、ペンの走るに任せたところがありはしないかと考えると、文学的工夫のない身辺雑記の集成ととらえる方が、すなわち非文学的である方が価値が高いと感じる人もあるだろう。もちろんポルトガル語で読まなければ何とも言えないわけだが、英語版の方が文学的ではある
作品の出来については日本語版の方にたくさんの賞賛が寄せられており、今更私が付け加えることはない
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Bartolo
5.0 out of 5 stars A Portugese "Unquiet Grave," sometimes, but a lot moreReviewed in the United States on 4 April 2021
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Pessoa adopts one of his fabled personae—an assistant bookkeeper in a colorless office in Lisbon, in this case--as a launch pad for observations about the neighborhood and the city, and for apercus about art, life, and everything else. Often contrarian and eccentric, they are almost always provocative. So I made my way very slowly through this dense diary/journal, chewing over passages and following mental tangents inspired by Pessoa. The best illustration might be some of the shorter passages themselves. These were culled from a mere 10 pages toward the end, though I flagged hundreds along the way. This was a unique reading experience, one of the monuments of my literary life.
I killed my will by analyzing it. If only I could return to my childhood before analysis, even if it would have to be before I had a will!
I’d like to be in the country to be able to like being in the city. I like being in the city in any case, but I’d like it twice over if I were in the country.
It often happens that I don’t know myself, which is typical of those who know themselves.
Having seen how lucidly and logically certain madmen justify their lunatic ideas to themselves and to others, I can never again be sure of the lucidness of my lucidity.
I have never been able to lose myself in a book; as I’m reading, the commentary of my intellect or imagination has always hindered the narrative flow.
Pride all by itself, unaccompanied by vanity, manifests itself in timid behavior.
There’s no happiness without knowledge. But the knowledge of happiness brings unhappiness, because to know that you’re happy is to realize that you’re experiencing a happy moment and will soon have to leave it behind.
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GS Seda
5.0 out of 5 stars I have not read anything like this before and consider this to be quite a ...Reviewed in India on 21 February 2018
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Once in a rarest while there comes a delightfully chaotic book that enchants as much as it frustrates, that heals as much as it scorches, and that sooths as much as it disturbs. Reading such a book in which thoughts, consciousness, and perceptions appear as fragments that do not combine to form a coherent whole, one is often left wondering how to make sense of it all. How should one come to grips with its determined melancholy, its breathtaking audacity, and its insistence that inaction, despair, and renunciation are the sine qua non of life?
“The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa is one such modern masterpiece that I read last week. The book is an aggregation of disparate diary entries that are abstract, dense, and at times, eccentric. For its entire four hundred plus pages it offers a philosophy of a melancholic life, a philosophy of dreaming, and a philosophy of art. I have not read anything like this before and consider this to be quite a unique reading experience.
The book is a congeries - a fragmentary collection of angst-ridden aphorisms, reflections, and musings in the form of diary entries found in a trunk after Pessoa’s death. In passage after passage that are at once lyrical and haunting, he bares his brooding soul while lying awake through insomniac nights when incessant rain falls on the rooftops of his beloved Lisbon where he lives in a cheap, rented room with cracked walls owned by a loathsome landlady.
“Each drop of rain is my failed life weeping in nature. There’s something of my disquiet in the endless drizzle, then shower, then drizzle, then shower, through which the day’s sorrow uselessly pours itself out over the earth. It rains and keeps raining. My soul is damp from hearing it.” [p 128]
Pessoa was a compulsive writer who penned his thoughts relentlessly, day and night, on whatever he could lay his hands upon – “…in notebooks, on loose sheets, on the backs of envelops, on paper scraps, and the margins of his own earlier texts.” To add to the confusion, Pessoa wrote under different names that he chose to call “heteronyms” – fictional alter egos with their own distinct biographies, writing styles, personalities, political attitudes, and individual pet peeves. These jottings, largely hand written and mostly undated, presented a challenge to the publishers who took years to compile them together into a book structure.
The book records his meandering thoughts in which he constantly floats through gossamer boundaries that separate his real world from his dreams, his inaction from his thoughts, and his ambition from his weariness.
“The dream that promises us the impossible denies us access to it from the start, but the dream that promises the possible interferes with our normal life, relying on it for its fulfillment. The one kind of dream lives by itself, independently, while the other is contingent on what may or may not happen. That’s why I love impossible landscapes and the vast empty stretches of plains I’ll never see. [p 143]
Pessoa’s art consisted of poetry, prose, plays, philosophy, criticism, translations, linguistic theory, political writings, and horoscopes and assorted other texts that he wrote through more than four dozen invented heteronyms. Actually, he has credited “The Book of Disquiet” to Bernardo Soares, one such heteronym who is a bookkeeper by profession. Pessoa, as Soares, writes:
“Perhaps my destiny is to remain forever a bookkeeper, with poetry or literature as a butterfly that alights on my head, making me look ridiculous to the extent it looks beautiful. [p 25] For Pessoa, literature is “the most agreeable way of ignoring life” because it “retreats from life by turning it into a slumber.” In a beautiful passage this is how he further explores literature:
“To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colors with a durability not found in cellular life.” [p 30]
Pessoa wrote poetry and prose both and in an insightful passage explains the difference between the two:
“I consider poetry to be an intermediate stage between music and prose. Like music, poetry is bound by rhythmic laws, and even when these are not the strict laws of meter, they still exist as checks, constraints, automatic mechanisms of repression and censure. In prose we speak freely. We can incorporate musical rhythms, and still think. We can incorporate poetic rhythms, and yet remain outside them. An occasional poetic rhythm won’t disturb prose, but an occasional prose rhythm makes poetry fall down.” [P 199]
After reading a few pages a day, I would often find myself adrift with thoughts on renunciation or solitude or tedium because, Pessoa ensnares you, seduces you, and grips you with his flights of imagination that are mesmerizing. When he talks about giving things up it is not because he doesn’t what them, but because he does. Can there be a more intriguing Gordian knot? Consider this:
“Nothing satisfies me, nothing consoles me, everything—whether or not it has ever existed—satiates me. I neither want my soul nor wish to renounce it. I desire what I do not desire and renounce what I do not have. I can be neither nothing nor everything: I’m just the bridge between what I do not have and what I do not want.” [p 203]
I read the book in dribs and drabs, savoring its flavor, enjoying the voluntary siege to which I surrendered myself. The majestic splendor of Pessoa’s prose often left me heady. Despite the dark and somber tone, there are luminous passages that brim with life. Here is one:
“Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I’d languished. I gave birth to my definitive being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.” [p 23]
Although he was a prolific writer, Pessoa published merely four books during his lifetime. He left behind more than 25,000 manuscripts and typed pages that are still being deciphered and catalogued by experts. Perhaps he felt there was something noble in not being published because in a rather prescient manner, this is what he writes about an unpublished writer:
“The only noble destiny for a writer who publishes is to be denied a celebrity he deserves. But the truly noble destiny belongs to the writer who doesn’t publish. Not who doesn’t write, for then he wouldn’t be a writer. I mean the writer in whose nature it is to write, but whose spiritual temperament prevents him from showing what he writes.” [p 187]
Despite Pessoa’s assertion about noble virtues of a non-published writer, I am glad that Penguin has been updating its various editions from time to time as more and more material is getting deciphered. The literary world would have been a poorer place without this effort.
I cannot but highly recommend this book that chronicles the life of one of the greatest flaneurs as he walked and worried through the streets of Lisbon assembling and disassembling his own eclectic mind.
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Stiven Skyrah
5.0 out of 5 stars Vivid descriptions, evocative language, and refined reflectionsReviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 July 2020
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Fernando Pessoa, in order to express various philosophical and poetic moods, constructed a series of what he termed “heteronyms.” The heteronym, although similar to the mask or persona, differs in that each one is equipped with a name, a personality, a biography, and a physical description, as well as a distinct writing style. Although Pessoa made use of more than five dozen heteronyms in the course of his thirty-five years, the best known are Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and Bernardo Soares. Of these four, his greatest creation--and perhaps the heteronym closest to Pessoa's self--is Bernardo Soares, the "author" of The Book of Disquiet.
The Book of Disquiet, if not unique, is close to it. It is a little like a novel, often like a collection of prose poems, and often like a series of aphorisms and philosophical reflections. The heteryonum that is Soares enables Pessoa to communicate a disciplined, definite vision of the world, necessarily limited in scope, but intensified and concentrated. In this sense, it resembles Roman and English satire, its authorial mask as carefully crafted and resonant as those of Horace and Juvenal, Pope and Swift. Soares, however, takes no interest in vice, let alone the reform of humankind; in fact, he seems to care little about humanity in general, or people in particular.
It is here that the novelistic aspect of this work becomes interesting. Soares is a shy, isolated man, a clerk at a Lisbon commercial firm who adds up columns of figures, and seems to do little else. Although he mourns his colleagues when they pass away, he never seems to communicate with them when they are alive; the closest he seems to get to fellowship are his encounters with the waiter in the little cafe where he eats his nightly dinner and consumes his nightly bottle of wine. At first, we feel sorry for him, for we feel his great isolation and are moved by his great passion and profound love for beauty which he can only express through his journal.
Slowly, however, we begin to see that this isolation is a personal and artistic choice, a way of refining his art and his being . If he cares about human beings at all, it is only because they are useful adjuncts to his own magnificent loneliness, because they resonate as discrete elements of the poet's imagination, much as a certain play of light on a Lisbon street may reflect one particular color of the canvas that is the poet's consciousness. Perhaps this is why the book “The Book of Disquiet” reminds me of most is The Chants of Maldoror, that uncompromising paean to the magnificent isolation of evil.
There is of course a great difference. Maldoror could only have been produced by a very young man hiding beneath a very old mask. His persona is a posture of isolation through which he begins to know himself. The Book of Disquiet, on the other hand, is the work of someone who knows himself well, and cares only about reaching a kind of existential purity: a clarity of view, a refinement of mood, the isolation of particular beauties that resonate more deeply and linger longer than the others.
Soares is a monk of the poetic mind, for whom aloneness is a vocation. Its fruit, this memorable book, is rare and delicious, filled with vivid descriptions, evocative language, and refined reflections.
41 people found this helpfulReport
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