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Fernando Pessoa's Lisbon of Disquiet
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June 1, 2010 |
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In my backpack lived a copy of The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. In three hundred-and-fifty pages of unrelated aphorisms, Pessoa describes the inner life of an assistant accountant in Lisbon. Nothing ever happens. A train trip to nearby Cascais is about as action-packed as the book ever gets, but there is a powerful, subversive energy in the accountant's unwillingness to participate in life. Lisbon is his universe, and he has no desire to walk anywhere other than the streets of his home town. Maybe if I visited Pessoa's Lisbon I could cure of my travel addiction, I thought, immediately realizing the irony.
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