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Paradox dalam Kesadaran Diri: Kisah Fernando Pessoa

The Terrible Paradox of Self-Awareness | Fernando Pessoa

Sometimes the story behind a work of art is just as fascinating as the work itself.
Sometimes its origin is part of its content.

The story of twentieth-century writer Fernando Pessoa and his masterwork, The Book of Disquiet, is one of those cases—where the story behind it sounds like a work of fiction itself.

Pessoa was born in 1888 in Lisbon, Portugal. At the early age of just five years old, he was exposed to loss and impermanence when his father died of tuberculosis, and then the following year his younger brother died. Not long after, his mother remarried, and his family moved to South Africa, also taking from Fernando the landscape of his childhood.

While living in South Africa, Pessoa became fluent in English and developed an appreciation for English literature. When he turned seventeen, he returned to Lisbon by himself, where he would spend the rest of his life and dedicate most of his time to writing.

However, by the time he died in 1935 at the age of forty-seven, he had only published a few books that went mostly unnoticed, and he essentially wrote in complete obscurity, unknown by anyone.

But yet, he seemingly died knowing that he was a great literary figure—or at the very least, that he would likely become one. And in an almost unsettling, prophetic way, he was right.

After his death, Pessoa’s work—the manuscript for The Book of Disquiet, along with tens of thousands of other manuscript pages that are still to this day being edited—remained tucked away in a wooden trunk, unknown by anyone. It wasn’t until 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa died—eerily the exact same age as Pessoa when he died—that The Book of Disquiet was found and published.

This book would go on to become what is widely regarded as one of the most unique and important literary works of the twentieth century. Inside the book is a lifetime’s worth of Pessoa’s reflections and musings—about reality and dreaming, about tedium and selfhood, about the absurdity of being and the futility of doing, about the simultaneous complexity and simplicity of life, about the contradiction and paradox at the core of everything.

The book is made up of a collection of fragmented vignettes written in a style somewhere between diary entries and poetry. There is no real linear order to the book, and it can arguably be experienced just as well backwards as forwards. Even more interesting, Pessoa does not claim to be the author of any of it.

Rather, it is credited to a man named Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper from Lisbon, Portugal, as well as possibly a man named Vicente Guedes.

Guedes and Soares, however, aren’t real. They are characters Pessoa created to create the book.

Found throughout the massive collection of all of Pessoa’s manuscript pages are various pseudonyms—fictitious authors to whom he attributed different pages and collections. These authors aren’t just different pennames, though. They are distinct characters with unique writing styles, personalities, views, and backstories.

Pessoa referred to these author-characters as heteronyms, and there are around eighty that he wrote under throughout his lifetime.

Thus, The Book of Disquiet is not exactly a nonfiction book from an anonymous author, but nor is it really a novel about a fictional character or story. It is somewhere in between.

Because of this, it is often described as the weirdest autobiography ever written. Pessoa himself described it as a factless autobiography, or an autobiography of someone who never existed.

The book’s unique structure and style are, in many ways, essential to supporting its themes. The use of heteronyms reinforces a key philosophical idea that runs throughout the work: the fragmented and illusory nature of the self.

With incredible accuracy and poignancy that feels cathartic to read, Pessoa frequently describes the inherent alienation, disorientation, and loneliness associated with being a person.

He wrote:

I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me. I'm always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trapdoor, through infinite space... in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool. And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre that exists only because every circle has one.

For Pessoa, self-understanding—or perhaps the attempt to understand the self—is a free-fall down a rabbit hole with a landing that kills you.

And the impossibility of understanding and communicating one’s internal experiences while on this freefall lends itself to a lifetime of disquiet and disorientation.

Throughout The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa often discusses themes of tedium, futility, and meaninglessness. For him, everything is a sort of delusion. Life is a sequence of dreams.

“I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life,” Pessoa wrote.

For Pessoa, there is no real point in doing or achieving anything. Reality, as we experience it, is as deluded and false—and as fleetingly meaningful—as the dreams we had last night, now dissolved upon waking, never to be remembered or thought of again.

“If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.”

This recognition of the futility of action, combined with an advocacy for retreating into a dream world, reinforces another major theme of the book: contradiction and paradox.

After all, why write about the pointlessness of doing anything and the impossibility of ever adequately saying anything, while doing something and saying things? Perhaps, however, this does not speak to the incoherence of Pessoa, but rather, speaks to what Pessoa might believe is useful in paradox.

In medicine, certain preventative and preparation treatments contain forms of the bacteria or virus that causes the disease the treatment is used to prevent. Likewise, arguably, both creating and consuming good literature and good art expose you to the virus of being, so you can hopefully develop enough immunity to survive. Perhaps paradoxically then, the driving force that compelled Pessoa to create and write and do was the awareness that creating and writing and doing is pointless.

It is also relevant to note that The Book of Disquiet was left unfinished. With this, it is almost as if the book mirrors Pessoa’s philosophical conception of existence. Trapped inside a trunk, only truly known after Pessoa’s death, once it could no longer be changed by him, interpreted only through a fragmented collection of vignettes, written by someone who never existed, finished by time not by intention; the book itself seems to be an almost perfect metaphor for a person. It is unsettling to consider all of this, and then realize that the word “Pessoa,” his birth name, translates in English into “person.”

If that’s not enough, perhaps the most confounding aspect of The Book of Disquiet’s story is that it contains passages that prophesize its fate. In it, Pessoa wrote:

It sometimes occurs to me, with sad delight, that if one day (in a future I won’t be part of) the sentences I write are read and admired, then at last I’ll have my own kin, people who ‘understand’ me, my true family in which to be born and loved. But far from being born into it, I’ll have already died long ago. I’ll be understood only in effigy, when affection can no longer compensate for the indifference that was the dead man’s lot in life.
Perhaps one day they’ll understand that I fulfilled, like no one else, my instinctive duty to interpret a portion of our century; and when they’ve understood that, they’ll write that in my time I was misunderstood, that the people around me were unfortunately indifferent and insensitive to my work, and that it was a pity this happened to me. And whoever writes this will fail to understand my literary counterpart in that future time, just as my contemporaries don’t understand me. Because men learn only what would be of use to their great-grandparents. The right way to live is something we can teach only the dead.

And of course, all of this came true. It’s happening right now with these words. We are currently participating in Pessoa’s fortune told by himself a century ago.

One can only wonder, was this a masterfully constructed plan by a genius creative mind? Was it chance? Was it both? Or was it something else? Whatever the case may be, the story of The Book of Disquiet seems to have almost become a part of its artistic creation. It elicits an almost mystical, spiritual quality. It feels like a religious book for atheists. A manual for nihilists. It can and probably will devastate most of those who read it. But it will also help comfort and remind one to not take oneself or life too seriously. Sometimes, exposure to the ailment is part of the treatment.