Landscapes are repetitions... . Only landscapes that don't exist and books I'll never read aren't tedious.
Fernando Pessoa, Livro do Desassossego
I have related elsewhere how I took one book with me to Greenland. The Book of Disquiet, by the Portuguese modernist poet and writer, Fernando Pessoa.
Why I brought this book, I do not remember. I read it in snatches and fragments, here and there, in between walking, and looking at icebergs, and talking to ravens. I carried it in my rucksack in Nuuk, where I should have been observing local life, taking in the scene; but don't recall reading it there. I carried it alongside the runway in Narsarsuaq, and pulled it out and read a few snatches on a bench in among the tumbleweed, on one of the longest afternoons of my life. I picked it and put it down and forgot about; and somehow or other it got read.
But the book itself is anyway a jumble of torn fragments, assembled at a venture by various editors; so no harm done.
...
Most of Pessoa's work went unpublished in his lifetime; but when he died he left a great travelling trunk, full of unpublished writing.
In it were 25,426 items. Richard Zenith, not only Pessoa’s biographer and translator but also his editor, describes this galumphing repository as “a large trunk full of poetry, prose, plays, philosophy, criticism, translations, linguistic theory, political writings, astrological charts and assorted other texts, variously typed, handwritten or illegibly scrawled in Portuguese, English and French. He wrote in notebooks, on loose sheets, on the backs of letters, advertisements and flyers, on stationery from the firms he worked for and from the cafés he frequented, on envelopes, on paper scraps, and in the margins of his own earlier texts.”
There is a photograph of the trunk, open and groaning with papers, like a looted sarcophagus in the study of an Egyptologist. It stands in front of Pessoa's bookshelves. The papers were subsequently acquired by the National Libary of Portugal. They did not want the trunk, evidently, which passed into private hands.
The Book of Disquiet was pulled from this trunk in around five hundred unsorted pieces and scraps, and somehow assembled by various editors, and published in competing editions and translations.
But why a trunk? Walter Benjamin, whose ever-ongoing Arcades Project accumulated a vast number of sheafs of paper, at least sorted them roughly into labelled and alphabetised folders, convolutes. Pessoa chucked in his life’s work anyhow.
And the trunk is an odd object, associated with travel, but so heavy, so elephantine, you can barely pick it up and move it around. A trunk says, before anything else, go nowhere. Prepare to travel. But go nowhere. Stay in place. I am too heavy to move. Where do you think you are going?
Sure enough, Pessoa never went anywhere. He was educated in South Africa, but once he returned to Lisbon, he barely left the few streets among which he lived, worked, and, for the most part, frequented cafes.
But Pessoa’s life in Lisbon, for all that he never fulfilled any of his grand ambitions to travel, was marked by numerous small moves. He was, within the confines of a few streets, itinerant. He lived in rented rooms and apartments, and with various relatives. And so he had his trunk. Perhaps it was the trunk his family had taken out to Durban. Perhaps he dragged it behind him along the street as his moved between more or less temporary residences. Although more likely (being a small man, and at heart an idle aristocrat) he paid someone a few reis or escudos to move it for him.
...
The bookmark I used in the Book of Disquiet, appropriately, was a postcard of Moriz Jung's Wiener Cafe: Der Litterat, which I bought in Salzburg in 1992 (I wouldn't remember such a detail, but when I opened the book just now to find a quotation, this was the card that fell out).
I say appropriately, but I probably just snatched it from a box of postcards I have accumulated over the years. Next cab off the rank. But it turned out to be appropriate, because Pessoa was a cafe-dweller par excellence. He mostly favoured the cafes where Lisbon writers assembled in the first decades of the twentieth century—from 1908-1920, he oscillated between the two branches of the Café a Brazileira, a ten-minute walk from each other (although he preferred the original, in Chiado, which had a more literary clientele); then, after 1914, he added the venerable the Café Martinho on Praça do Rossio to his roster.
Lisbon cafe life at this time was exclusively male. Literary men would gather, read the newspaper, conduct business, or set their ink bottle and feather in front of them and scowl over their floppy neckties. But for the most part, they would just congregate. Writing is solitary work, but there exists at most times, in most places of any size, a literary circle. Writers, too, are sad and social animals, need company, affirmation.
Do I therefore sit in the café in Nuuk, glowering over my over-priced cappuccino and making notes in my notebook, or reading ostentatiously from the Livro do Desassossego? I do not. I just like to sit and drink coffee. I came to Greenland late in the season, in September, and already by my last days the wind has got up sharply, a storm centre is approaching, is going to skirt Cape Farewell and chase me back to Iceland in a shuddering plane. I am mostly just keen to get home, I worry about transit, connections. I am, a little rawly, just myself; I am a yawning trunk-load of desassossego.
...
Disquiet comes in many forms.
On my second night in Greenland I am woken in the early hours of the morning by two Inuit, a married couple in their 60s, I suppose, who mistake my little chalet at Igaliku for their own. They are very drunk. They have been attending an end-of-season party for the pilots of the Greenlandic ferry service, the Disko Line. I do not know if he or she is the pilot, or if they both run their own routes. The woman sits and smiles and sways on the bench on the porch of the chalet; the man tries to make me understand by signs that I am in their bed. I am not in their bed. I somehow make him understand, also by signs, that his must be one of the other half-dozen or so identical chalets, and off they totter, in great good drunken humour. I return to bed, and (I imagine) read a few pages of Pessoa.
The next morning, walking in the hills above Igaliku, I find myself locking eyes with a human skull. Hard to bury a body in these frozen climes. Cover them in slabs of rock, keep the ravens off.
On the following night, prompted by a lively old Dane I meet at breakfast, I stay up late enough to watch the aurora borealis shimmer over the Greenlandic ice sheet. Turn around and the Milky Way stretches to the southern horizon. It is very cold.
I've always felt that to perform an action implied a disturbance, a repercussion in the outer universe; I've always had the impression that any movement I might make would unsettle the stars and rock the skies.
Fernando Pessoa, Livro do Desassossego
