The Book of Disquiet

“The image of myself I saw in mirrors is the same one I hold against the bosom of my soul. I could never be anything but frail and hunched over, even in my thoughts. […] To love myself is to feel sorry for myself. Perhaps one day, towards the end of the future, someone will write a poem about me, and I’ll begin to reign in my kingdom.”

The image of Soares’s reflection repeating in mirrors serves as a metaphor for his fractured sense of self. The paradoxical phrase “towards the end of the future” suggests that his kingdom—the kingdom of the imagination—is incompatible with reality. The longed-for event—his accession to the throne—will happen only in a time that cannot exist.

“We’re all slaves of external circumstances. A sunny day transports us from a café on a narrow side street to wide-open fields; an overcast sky in the country makes us close up, taking shelter as best we can in the house without doors of our own self; the onset of night, even in the midst of daytime activities, enlarges—like a slowly opening fan—our awareness that we ought to rest.”

The time Soares spends in public spaces helps him understand the interconnection between his internal and external realities. Everything he sees and observes—the cafés, streets, and sky—offers a portal into his imaginary dream worlds. He can travel in time and space in his mind. His tactile surroundings offer gateways to alternate realities beyond his present circumstances. The moment contributes to the novel’s theme of Imagination as a Source of Meaning.

“But the horror that’s destroying me today is less noble and more corrosive. It’s a longing to be free of wanting to have thoughts, a desire to never have been anything, a conscious despair in every cell of my body and soul. It’s the sudden feeling of being imprisoned in an infinite cell. Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything?”

Soares’s use of language conveys his despairing state of mind. The metaphor of the infinite cell evokes the despair arising from an inescapable entrapment. Soares feels overwhelmed by his The Alienating Nature of Modern Urban Society but unable to alter his circumstances. He feels stuck in his solitude but incapable of liberating himself. No matter where he goes or what he does he feels like a prisoner; modern society alienates and limits him.

“I write because I don’t know, and I use whatever abstract and lofty term for Truth a given emotion requires. If the emotion is clear and decisive, then I naturally speak of the gods, thereby framing it in a consciousness of the world’s multiplicity.”

Soares’s writing practice is a vital facet of his identity. He writes to fill his time, to experience new consciousnesses, and to explore new landscapes. Writing helps him formulate ideas, truths, and emotions. The passage implies that the human consciousness is the origin of truth and reality.

“After I’ve slept many dreams, I go out to the street with eyes wide open but still with the aura and assurance of my dreams. And I’m astonished by my automatism, which prevents others from really knowing me. For I go through daily life still holding the hand of my astral nursemaid; my steps are in perfect accord with the obscure designs of my sleeping mind. And I walk in the right direction; I don’t stagger; I react well; I exist.”

The interplay between Soares’s dreaming and waking lives underscores the novel’s theme of Identity as a Product of the Imagination. Soares moves between his imaginary worlds and his tangible city environs. He is perpetually trying to reconcile these competing worlds so as to understand himself in a holistic way. In this passage, the city aligns with “the designs of his sleeping mind,” suggesting that his conscious self is a mere extension of the self that dreams.

“Sleep! To fall asleep! To have peace! To be an abstract consciousness that’s conscious only of breathing peacefully, without a world, without heavens, without a soul—a dead sea of emotion reflecting an absence of stars!”

Soares’s use of apostrophe effects a desperate tone. Soares calls out to sleep itself as if it were a living entity. His use of exclamation marks conveys his intense longing to escape his waking reality. Without “a world, heavens, a soul, or a sea of emotion,” Soares feels that he would have ultimate spiritual freedom. His internal and external worlds are in conflict in this passage—augmenting his ennui.

“Who am I to myself? Just one of my sensations. My heart drains out helplessly, like a broken bucket. Think? Feel? How everything wearies when it’s defined!”

Soares’s self-interrogation furthers the novel’s theme of Identity as a Product of the Imagination. He is asking himself who he is and what it means to be alive. He is unsure if his ability to think and feel amounts to a definite existence. At the same time, he is bored by the idea that he must fabricate a solid, holistic identity.

“It’s one of those days when the monotony of everything oppresses me like being thrown into jail. The monotony of everything is merely the monotony of myself, however. Each face, even if seen just yesterday, is different today, because today isn’t yesterday. Each day is the day it is, and there was never another one like it in the world.”

Soares’s reflections on his circumstances convey the novel’s theme of The Alienating Nature of Modern Urban Life. Soares is oppressed by the predictability of his daily life. He compares his circumstances to “being thrown into jail”—a metaphor that evokes notions of entrapment, enslavement, and powerlessness. Soares longs for newness and exploration, but his modern urban society limits his ability to dream and explore at his leisure.

“And so I drag myself to do what I don’t want to and to dream what I can’t have, my life…, as meaningless as a broken clock. My hazy but constant sensibility and my long but conscious dream which together form my privilege of a life in the shadows.”

Soares employs a melancholic tone to enact his despairing search for meaning and purpose. Soares often tries to escape into his dreams to alleviate his frustration with waking life. However, even his own mind feels like “a meaningless broken clock”—a metaphor that evokes notions of repetition and futility.

“So many times, so many, like now, it has oppressed me to feel myself feel—to feel anguish just because it’s a feeling, restlessness because I’m here, nostalgia for something I’ve never known, the sunset of all emotions, myself yellowing, subdued to grey sadness in my external self-awareness.”

Soares’s use of repetition affects a redundant tone. Soares repeats the words and phrases “so many,” “feel,” and “feeling.” His stream of consciousness is elliptical. He is moving over and over the same thoughts, which enacts his internal, emotional entrapment. Soares is struggling to make sense of his interiority to no avail.

“I’m lost if I find myself; I doubt what I discover; I don’t have what I’ve obtained. I sleep as if I were taking a walk, but I’m awake. I wake up as if I’d been sleeping, and I don’t belong to me. Life, in its essence, is one big insomnia, and all that we think or do occurs in a lucid stupor.”

Soares is perpetually caught between his waking and dreaming lives, his imagination and his reality. The repetitions of “wake” and “sleep” and “walk” enact his repetitive state of being and thinking, suggesting that waking life is comprised of a series of semi-conscious mental and physical habits akin to sleepwalking. Even when he is engaging with reality, he feels trapped in these loops of philosophical thought.

“Tedium…I work hard. […] But sometimes right in the middle of my work, or in the middle of the rest which, according to the same moralists, I deserve and ought to enjoy, my soul overflows with a bitter inertia, and I’m tired, not of working or of resting, but of me.”

Soares objects to the capitalist “moralism” that divides human experience into blocks of productive work and of “deserved” rest. He finds neither purpose in work nor renewal in rest, and he concludes that what exhausts him is himself.

“Sympathy leads to paralysis. The man of action regards the external world as composed exclusively of inert matter—either intrinsically inert, like a stone he walks on or kicks out of his path, or inert like a human being who couldn’t resist him and thus might as well be a stone as a man since, like a stone, he was walked on or kicked out of the way.”

Soares embraces inactivity as a gateway to dreaming, feeling, and understanding others. At the same time, he acknowledges that sympathizing with every passerby does preclude him from making change or engaging with reality. His relative inertia throughout the novel is a symptom of his alienation and frustrated search for self.

“To kill our dream life would be to kill ourselves, to mutilate our soul. Dreaming is the one thing we have that’s really ours, invulnerably and inalterably ours.”

Soares’s musings on his own interiority contribute to the novel’s theme of Imagination as a Source of Meaning. Soares employs an assertive tone in this passage, declaring that dreaming is fundamental to human survival. Without dreams, the individual wouldn’t be able to withstand waking life, as imagination is the terrain in which individuals are free to make meaning on their own terms from the chaos of experience. 

“We cannot love, son. Love is the most carnal of illusions. Listen: to love is to possess. And what does a lover possess? The body? To possess it we would have to incorporate it, to eat it, to make its substance our own. […] Do we possess the soul? Listen carefully: no, we don’t.”

Like his philosophical predecessor Friedrich Nietzsche, Soares holds that love is an illusion because no one can truly possess another person. Soares’s contempt for both platonic and romantic love ironically conveys his longing for companionship. He lives a life of solitude and often feels frustrated by his inability to overcome his social anxiety; he thus writes off love altogether.

“I’m tired of the street, but no, I’m not tired of it—the street is all of life. There’s the tavern opposite, which I can see if I look over my right shoulder, and there are the piled-up crates, which I can see by looking over my left shoulder; and in the middle, which I can only see if I turn around completely, there’s the steady sound of the shoemaker’s hammer […] Tired of the street? Only thinking makes me tired.”

Soares has a fraught relationship with his urban environs. On the one hand, Soares feels “tired of the street” and overwhelmed by its constant noise and activity. On the other hand, Soares admits that the street provides him endless stimulation, excitement, and inspiration—particularly for his dreaming and writing lives. His contradictory regard for the city conveys the contradictory nature of urban life in general; the city promises community but often augments city dwellers’ alienation.

“And leaning on the windowsill to enjoy the day, gazing at the variegated mass of the whole city, just one thought fills my soul: that I profoundly wish to die, to cease, to see no more light shining on this city or any city, to think no more, to feel no more, to leave behind the march of time and the sun like a piece of wrapping paper, to remove like a heavy suit—next to the big bed—the involuntary effort of being.”

The image of Soares standing at his window and looking out over the city reiterates the novel’s theme of The Alienating Nature of Modern Urban Life. From his window, Soares can look and see “the whole city.” However, he is separated from it. His suicidal ideation in this passage appears to be inspired by his alienated circumstances. He wants to escape the city and time itself. The passage has an elliptical, meandering style that enacts Soares’s despairing state of mind.

“Everything that exists perhaps exists because something else exists. Nothing is, everything coexists—perhaps that’s how it really is. I feel I wouldn’t exist right now […] if that lamp weren’t shining somewhere over there, a useless lighthouse with a specious advantage of height. I feel this because I feel nothing. I think this because this is nothing.”

The image of Soares lying on the bed and looking at the lamp in his room captures his propensity for inactivity. Although he is immobilized in this scene, Soares’s physical positioning does not inhibit his mental acuity. By remaining inert, he is able to lose himself in philosophical thought.

“Tomorrow I too—I this soul that feels and thinks, this universe I am for myself—yes, tomorrow I too will be the one who no longer walks these streets, whom others will vaguely evoke with a ‘What’s become of him?’. And everything I’ve done, everything I’ve felt and everything I’ve lived will amount merely to one less passer-by on the everyday streets of some city or other.”

Part 1 ends on a melancholy note that conveys The Alienating Nature of Modern Urban Life. After visiting the barbershop and learning that his regular barber has died, Soares realizes the fragility of his own life. He has hoped to make sense of himself and solidify his name in the literary world throughout the novel, but these efforts have proved unsuccessful. He is facing his own mortality and the fact that his death, like the barber’s, will go largely unnoticed—thus underscoring the brevity and meaninglessness of all human life.

“I decided to abstain from everything, to go forward in nothing, to reduce action to a minimum, to make it hard for people and events to find me, to perfect the art of abstinence, and to take abdication to unprecedented heights. That’s how badly life terrifies and tortures me.”

To withstand The Alienating Nature of Modern Urban Life, Soares embraces inactivity. He refuses to abide by societal expectations regarding socialization, accomplishment, and success. He is thus embracing existential philosophies by resisting the status quo. Life “terrifies and tortures” him because it is nothing more than a fabricated template he is meant to follow.

“Material life is either pure dream or a mere ensemble of atoms, obvious to our rational conclusion and our emotional motivations. And so the essence of life is an illusion, an appearance, which is either pure being or non-being, and the illusion or appearance that it’s nothing must belong to non-being—life is death.”

Soares’s musings on life and death contribute to the novel’s theme of Imagination as a Source of Meaning. Soares resists the notion that life can be defined in simple terms. Instead, he posits that human existence is nothing more than a self-created illusion. Dreams offer an easier way to process reality than science.

“What does it mean to possess? We don’t know. So how is it possible to possess anything? You will say that we don’t know what life is, and yet we live…But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is—is that living?”

Soares’s use of questions enacts an interrogative tone. Although Soares often employs an assertive voice and declarative sentence structures, he is not averse to questioning himself. His ability to doubt, probe, and explore enacts his philosophical penchant. He wants to make sense of life, even if the feat is impossible.

“Do I really know what it means to dream, such that I can know what it means to call you my dream? How do I know that you’re not a part of me, perhaps the real and essential part? And how do I know it’s not I who am the dream and you the reality, I who am your dream instead of you being mine?”

Soares employs the second person direct address to enact his intimacy with his dreams. He speaks directly to his so-called Lady of Dreams, because he spends so much time dreaming that his imaginary worlds are more real to him than his waking life. His dreams are “a part of him, both real and essential.” His dreams thus comprise his amorphous selfhood.