All the absurdity, all the nothingness, all the verbalized ignorance of their lives

From birth to death, man is the slave of the same external dimension that rules animals. Throughout his life he doesn’t live, he vegetatively thrives, with greater intensity and complexity than an animal. He’s guided by norms without knowing that they guide him or even that they exist, and all his ideas, feelings and acts are unconscious – not because there’s no consciousness in them but because there aren’t two consciousnesses.

Flashes of awareness that we live an illusion – that, and no more, is what distinguishes the greatest of men.

With a wandering mind I consider the common history of common men. I see how in everything they are slaves of a subconscious temperament, of extraneous circumstances, and of the social and anti-social impulses in which, with which and over which they clash like petty objects.

How often I’ve heard people say the same old phrase that symbolizes all the absurdity, all the nothingness, all the verbalized ignorance of their lives. It’s the phrase they use in reference to any material pleasure: ‘This is what we take away from life…’ Take where? take how? take why? It would be sad to wake them out of their darkness with questions like that… Only a materialist can utter such a phrase, because everyone who utters such a phrase is, whether he knows it or not, a materialist. What does he plan to take from life, and how? Where will he take his pork chops and red wine and lady friend? To what heaven that he doesn’t believe in?

To what earth, where he’ll take only the rottenness that was the latent essence of his whole life? I can think of no phrase that’s more tragic, or that reveals more about human humanity. That’s what plants would say if they could know that they enjoy the sun. That’s what animals would say about their somnambulant pleasures, were their power of self-expression not inferior to man’s. And perhaps even I, while writing these words with a vague impression that they might endure, imagine that my memory of having written them is what I ‘take away from life’. And just as a common corpse is lowered into the common ground, so the equally useless corpse of the prose I wrote while waiting will be lowered into common oblivion. A man’s pork chops, his wine, his lady friend – who am I to make fun of them?

Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet
Translation Richard Zenith