But I get distracted,' says Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet, 'and start doing something.' 'My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing it should inhibit me from even beginning. He is a superb example of that paradoxical creative indolence that prefers nothing so much as doing nothing, but still ends up doing rather a lot. That said, it is a particularly good way to get round the problem of blockage, a problem one suspects Pessoa might have suffered from more than he did had he not discovered such a ruse. As far as Pessoa was concerned, his personae were distinct characters whose work he would create or defend with a perfectly straight face, but one imagines he had to have a certain amount of intellectual cheek to pull it off. These are more than modernist fun and games, and slightly less than escape plans for a sensibility at odds with itself. Did Pessoa ever entertain the notion of writing Crosse a letter telling him to get a move on? Crosse was meant to translate them into English but never got round to it. One, Thomas Crosse, wrote an introduction to an edition of Caeiro's Complete Poems. Most of these were, like Pessoa, Portuguese, such as Alberto Caeiro, the pseudo-rural shepherd, a kind of modernist John Clare ('I've never kept sheep, / But it's as if I did', begins his first poem) but some were English or French. Soares was one of many personae adopted by Pessoa in the interests of varying the voices of his poetry and prose. According to him, it was written by - among others - Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon. Not that Pessoa is to be too closely identified as the author of The Book of Disquiet.

Of course, much hinges on whether you are prepared to include yourself among Pessoa's 'we' but Pessoa's world-weary metropolitanism should at least raise a sympathetic echo. The expression of 20th-century unease has rarely been more exactly defined. Taking nothing seriously and recognising our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge there, exploring them like large unknown countries.' Impassive to the solemnity of any and all worlds, indifferent to the divine, and disdainers of what is human, we uselessly surrender ourselves to pointless sensation, cultivated in a refined Epicureanism, as befits our cerebral nerves.

'Not knowing nor able to know what religious life is, since faith isn't acquired through reason, and unable to have faith in or even react to the abstract notion of man, we're left with the aesthetic contemplation of life as our reason for having a soul.

The book of disquiet richard zenith