There’s nothing in life that’s less real for having been well described. Small-minded critics point out that such-and-such poem, with it’s protracted cadences, in the end says merely that it’s a nice day. But to say it’s a nice day is difficult, and the nice day itself passes on. It’s up to us to conserve the nice day in a wordy, florid memory, sprinkling new flowers and new stars over the fields and skies of the empty, fleeting outer world.

Text 27, The Book of Disquiet

This is a strange little book; little meditations, observations, and rhapsodies on everything under the sun, as written and gathered by Senhor Soares, who may (or may not) be one of the personality/heteronyms closest to Pessoa himself. Soares is an accountant at a small firm whose days are filled a quiet routine that is gilded on all sides by his observations and occasional fantasies. Text 27 continues:

Everything is what we are, and everything will be, for those who come after us in the diversity of time, what we will have intensely imagined - what we, that is, by embodying our imagination, will have actually been. The grand, tarnished panorama of History amounts, as I see it, to a flow of interpretations, a confused consensus of unreliable eyewitness accounts. The novelist is all of us, and we narrate whenever we see, because seeing is complex like everything.

The texts seem to have been something of a lifetime project. Gathered and arranged more or less, you get the feeling that you’re reading a sort of diary or commonplace book, except that the gathered thoughts are his own, and by his I’m still not entirely sure if we mean Soares or Pessoa, and maybe it doesn’t matter since they’re one and the same person. The writer is clearly someone who finds himself in his own head an awful lot, a state probably familiar to a lot of us. Anyway, his observations of daily life are beautiful and bite sized. You can dip in and out at will without losing the thread, because there really isn’t one. Just a big of threads, along with random buttons, shiny rocks, random ticket stubs, a half-chewed pencil, a tiny ceramic dog - everyday treasure of the sort that surrounds us every day.