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Since every step I took in life brought me into horrifying contact with the New, and since every new person I met was a new living fragment of the unknown that I placed on my desk for my frightful daily meditation, 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 make a decision, to finalize something, to emerge from the realm of doubt and obscurity – these are things that seem to me like catastrophes or universal cataclysms.
Life, as I know it, is cataclysms and apocalypses. With each passing day I feel that much more incompetent even to trace gestures or to conceive myself in clearly real situations.
With each passing day the presence of others – which my soul always receives like a rude surprise – becomes more painful and distressing. To talk with people makes my skin crawl. If they show an interest in me, I run. If they look at me, I shudder.
I’m forever on the defensive. I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful – only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, published for the first time 50 years after his death. Pessoa died in 1935.