A poster boy for social anxiety

The other day a New Yorker cartoon popped up on my Instagram feed: a bug with a smiling face and six legs up in the air is lying on its back on a bed. The caption said — “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he was stoked to realise he now had a reason to bail on brunch.”

While that cartoon refers to one iconic work of literature, my mind went to another —Bernardo Soares, the narrator of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book Of Disquiet. Bernardo would have loved this cartoon. He would have approved of its sentiment, the increasing disaffection with socialising that is now the subject of countless memes and Insta reels. In fact, if the Insta and TikTok corporate office humour and social anxiety influencers were to ever discover The Book Of Disquiet, they would find a rich stream of material to mine.

Pessoa is considered one of the founders of modernism in Portuguese literature and The Book Of Disquiet is his greatest work. He hardly published anything in his lifetime — his fame is entirely posthumous. Upon his death at the age of 47 in 1935, a vast trove of writing was found in a trunk in his house in Lisbon. What we have as The Book Of Disquiet is the work of different editors who assembled various pieces found in that trunk using Pessoa’s own vague intentions for the finished work to make something that is (almost) a cohesive narrative.

Pessoa’s biggest subject was solitude and how living a life of mundanity is more liberating than if one were to become notable or famous or gain power. Bernardo, whom Pessoa referred to as his heteronym (not quite a pseudonym and not quite an alter ego, but an alternate identity) says this early on in the book: “Because I am nothing, I can imagine myself to be anything. If I were somebody, I wouldn’t be able to.” Bernardo works as a clerk in an office in Lisbon. His life is restricted to going to the office, sitting at his desk, doing interminable amounts of paperwork and then heading home where he lives alone. He reads and writes and avoids social contact as much as possible:

“The idea of any social obligation — going to a funeral, discussing something with someone at the office, going to meet someone (whether known or unknown) at the station — the mere idea blocks that whole day’s thoughts and sometimes I even worry about it the night before and sleep badly because of it.”

Once again, as you read his words, you think of how perfect a poster boy Pessoa/Bernardo is for our age of social anxiety. “Yet the reality, when it comes, is utterly insignificant, and certainly doesn’t justify so much fuss, yet it happens again and again and I never learn.” The memes and reels practically make themselves.

The Book Of Disquiet is not a conventional work of literature with a plot and heroes and antagonists, composed as it was from disparate fragments that were not quite finished and for which Pessoa himself didn’t have any defined structure. In this way, the book resembles both the monotony and occasional unpredictability of life. It would be easy to cast it aside as the work of an eccentric loner — except that in reading Pessoa/Bernardo’s words we can find ourselves there, in his contentment and his struggles, in his epiphanies about art and changing seasons and the power of writing and literature.

(The author is a writer and communications professional. When she’s not reading, writing or watching cat videos, she can be found on Instagram @saudha_k where she posts about reading, writing, and cats.)

That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — it takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great.