On portraits of self

Who am I? This may be the most fundamental and mysterious question of all, yet we rarely approach it with the rigor it demands. We tend to seek simple answers that suggest a single, core identity enduring across a lifetime. But in The Book of Disquiet, we meet a mind that approaches this question from many shifting, often contradictory perspectives.

To understand these perspectives, we should first consider the book's unusual structure. The work is attributed to Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper in Lisbon, but Soares is a creation of Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa describes Soares not as a full heteronym with a completely distinct biography, but as a “semi-heteronym.” He calls Soares a “me-ishly extraneous character” who is “a mere mutilation” of himself. Soares is a fragment of his creator expanded into a complete character, who in turn fragments himself even further in his search for self-knowledge.

Each fragmentation can be viewed as a portrait—a moment frozen in time to capture one angle of an ever-changing self. We see Soares as the symphony of a secret orchestra, an empty stage for other actors, and a bridge suspended between what he lacks and what he doesn't want. He observes his own existence from a distance, often finding his former self as unrecognizable as a stranger.

This museum of fragmented identity forces us to face our own limited understanding of selfhood. How does Soares navigate his conflicting selves? And what can his search for the truth of his existence tell us about our own?

In what follows, we'll examine nine portraits of identity that emerge from his writings. We begin with three portraits that explore unity and multiplicity.

The symphony

My soul is a secret orchestra, but I don’t know what instruments – strings, harps, cymbals, drums – strum and bang inside me. I only know myself as the symphony.

In passage 310, Soares presents a striking musical metaphor to describe his sense of self. He compares his soul—the source and essence of his being—to an orchestra: an ensemble of instruments that mysteriously come together to create the symphony he knows himself as.

Yet this soul remains an inaccessible and hidden secret. The image has an eerie quality—an orchestra playing in an empty hall. There is no public audience to applaud and Soares himself isn't even the listener. This raises a curious paradox: if the orchestra plays without his permission and for no audience, in what sense is this soul really his? It seems to belong only to itself.

He identifies himself as the symphony, the product and result of this orchestra, not its composer or conductor. He is the music being played, not the one creating or playing it. This music is not entirely harmonious. He describes the instruments as strumming and banging inside him, suggesting that his life resembles a violent, uncontrolled collision of sounds rather than a calm, polished composition.

Perhaps he's pointing to the unconscious processes that govern all our lives. We like to believe we're in charge, that we make our lives happen, when really life is happening through us and to us. We all experience moments when emotions surge without permission, when thoughts arrive uninvited, when we act in ways that surprise and confuse us. The orchestra plays on, and we—the conscious “I”—arrive late, finding the music already in progress.

If we are merely the symphony, then self-knowledge isn't about mastering the instruments. It's about learning to inhabit the music with grace. If we cannot command the orchestra, we must let ourselves be the symphony, allowing the melody to resonate through us as life unfolds.

The Siamese twins

I’m two, and both keep their distance – Siamese twins that aren’t attached.

Passage 10 shows Soares mapping a fundamental split in his consciousness. He describes an internal life prone to “violent and consuming impulses” that never take root, creating perpetual “restlessness.” This restlessness stems from a divided identity: his soul views itself with the impatience one might feel toward a “bothersome child.” By framing his consciousness in this way, Soares establishes a duality between an impulsive, sensitive child and a cold, annoyed observer. No parent is mentioned, implying that there is no nurturing authority in his interior world, only a clinical observer who lacks sympathy for the observed.

This divide manifests most clearly in his interactions with others. Soares records the world with high-definition precision while remaining entirely absent from the meaning of the moment. He can describe the “slightest facial movements” or the way a person “listened with his eyes,” yet he cannot remember a single word that was said. This inability to get a “sense of what was said” appears to stem from a kind of cognitive overcrowding. Soares focuses so intensely on the physical details of the interaction while also “dreaming all the while” that he has no capacity left for understanding the words he is hearing or even saying.

He identifies this state as being “two,” specifically “Siamese twins that aren't attached.” The image is deliberately paradoxical. Usually, Siamese twins represent the ultimate form of physical entanglement, but Soares's twins are joined by their distance. They share the same origin and body, yet they exhibit different attention mechanisms. They are locked together in mutual exclusion. One twin acts, feels, and dreams, while the other passively records the “photographic words.”

Even if we soften the clinical level of dissociation Soares describes, the split self is recognizable in modern life. We live in an era that encourages us to be photographic observers—documenting our meals, our travels, our entire lives as they happen. We often find ourselves hearing without listening, more focused on how our experiences look from the outside than how they feel on the inside. Like Soares, we can become trapped in a cycle of superficial interest in everything without genuine engagement in anything.

The empty stage

I’m the father, mother, sons, cousins, the maid and the maid’s cousin […] I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

In passage 299, Soares describes the tiring and “vast journey” he finds himself on even when he travels to Cascais, a mere thirty minutes from Lisbon. A trip that would leave no impression on most feels to him like having “travelled through the urban and rural landscapes of four or five countries.” This is because Soares does not simply observe. He imagines himself living in each house he passes, becoming each of the inhabitants “all together and all at once.”

This intensity yields a “harvest of great joys, great boredoms, and countless false nostalgias.” That last phrase is haunting: Soares mourns lives he never lived and homes he never entered. His radical empathy becomes a kind of self-destruction. He's so permeable that every cottage he passes dilutes his identity. His “special talent” for creating and animating various personalities has left no room for himself. Even his dreams are outsourced—as soon as one begins, he creates a character to dream it for him. He has “externalized himself on the inside,” turning his most private sanctuary into a public square. Without Soares’s description of this internal externalization, this would remain an invisible tragedy. It's a public square only he can visit—an internal crowd in which he remains, paradoxically, alone.

All that remains is an “empty stage” made of floorboards with hollow space beneath, useful only when someone else stands on it. He becomes a venue for the noise and drama of other lives, while remaining as silent and inanimate as the wood beneath the feet of the actors. His own life is non-existent. It has become mere infrastructure for the existence of others.

We may lack Soares's imaginative excess, but we all carry the capacity to exhaust ourselves through the various roles required of us. The pressure to be the expected version of a child, employee, or partner can have a similar effect of crowding out our inner self. We can find ourselves exhausted, not from the journey of our own lives, but from maintaining the stage for a cast of characters we didn't choose to play. We risk becoming empty venues, distanced from our own lives through the roles we adopt to navigate them.

The next three portraits shift from division to its consequence: paralysis.

The ruins

I’m the ruins of buildings that were never more than ruins, whose builder, halfway through, got tired of thinking about what he was building.

Soares challenges conventional wisdom in passage 61, turning inaction from vice into virtue. He claims it is “noble to be timid” and “sublime to be inept at living,” framing withdrawal as a “heraldic” mark of high status. By identifying himself as an unfinished ruin, Soares signals that his life is incomplete not because it was destroyed by external tragedy, but because he chose to abandon it.

The builder in this metaphor—who we might read as Soares's analytical mind—stops not for lack of skill, but because he gets “tired of thinking.” This tiredness becomes a badge of honor. It suggests an architect concerned only with vision, for whom construction is an unappealing chore. Once the mental blueprint is complete, the actual building becomes unnecessary. To Soares, completion is common and ignoble. Only the unfinished remains in the “sublime” realm of potential. He is a “well of gestures” never traced and words never formed—a trove of what could be but never fully is.

Soares then uses his “false disdain and feeble hatred” for the happy to build a plinth for his true masterpiece: a “unique and haughty” statue of Tedium. By elevating his boredom and inaction into a monument, he ensures that the ruins are not seen as an incomplete mistake, but as the intended result of a mind that refuses to participate in an ordinary reality.

Consider how we handle our own unrealized ideas. We don't typically celebrate inaction with Soares-like pride, but we often comfort ourselves by imagining our unconceived project is perfect precisely because it remains in our heads, protected from the inevitable compromises of reality. This kind of self-compassion has its place, but Soares serves as a warning of what happens when we take it to the extreme. We risk turning our lives into a strange gallery of statues representing what we never did.

The bridge

I want what I don’t want and renounce what I don’t have. I can’t be nothing nor be everything: I’m the bridge between what I don’t have and what I don’t want.

Passage 232 reveals Soares caught between two contradictory, mutually exclusive truths. He weighs the solid and stable “reality of life” against the noble but fleeting “fictions of literature and art.” To choose one is to lose the other. The wise man, he argues, must “follow one or the other,” or rise above both in a “personal nirvana.”

He observes three paths to happiness, each requiring the renunciation of personality. There is the rustic, who lives by the “instinct of cats,” asking for nothing more than what life spontaneously provides, unaware that more is possible. There is the reader, who abandons his own life for the life of imagination, delighting in the spectacle of others’ lives. Finally, there is the ascetic, who renounces life itself. For these three, happiness comes from simplifying the self until it disappears.

Soares, however, cannot let go. He is trapped by a desire for a “totality” he knows is impossible and a reality he finds unsatisfactory. “I don’t want to have my soul and don’t want to renounce it,” he admits. This leaves him as “the bridge between what I don’t have and what I don’t want.” By identifying as the bridge itself rather than as a traveler crossing it, Soares defines his identity as a state of permanent suspension, not a journey. He is suspended between a dream world that has already jaded him and a reality he never fully desired. He is the something that remains when one refuses to be “nothing” yet recognizes they cannot be “everything.”

We might wonder if Soares is presenting a false dichotomy. Must we choose between being “nothing” through instinct or renunciation or “everything” through imagination to be happy? Soares views the something in the middle—the persistent, unrenounced personality—as undesirable and even unwise. But perhaps the tragedy of the bridge lies in seeing it merely as a means to some other end. Instead of spending our lives trying to be on one side or the other, could we find happiness in the betweenness?

The animal in a basket

…I feel like some sort of animal that’s being carried in a basket under a curved arm between two suburban train stations.

In passage 57, Soares offers a description of the human condition that is as absurd as it is vivid. He describes himself not as an identifiable creature with a clear nature, but as “some sort of animal”—a living organism trapped in a basket. By stripping away a specific identity, Soares focuses on the raw experience of being a passenger in a life he does not control. He is cargo in transit, defined by the boundaries of the basket and the force carrying him.

The basket itself represents life's limitations. Its “white rods and strips” form a structure that cannot be escaped. Soares notes that while he can squirm and lift the lids slightly, the “sunburned arm of the maid” resting on the hinges renders any effort useless, like the “tired wings of a butterfly.” It is a vision of limited, delicate agency: enough to feel the boundaries but not enough to break them.

Soares only has partial knowledge of what carries him. He can see the fine hairs on the maid's arm and the texture of her skin, but he never sees her face or knows her intent. He is governed by a reality that is intimately close, resting its weight directly upon him, yet fundamentally mysterious. He knows he is moving between stations, but he has no say in the destination.

Eventually, Soares stops squirming. He describes a “breezy coolness” passing through the basket, leading him into a “sleep” of acceptance. This is not surrender from exhaustion but an acknowledgment of his conditions. By ceasing his “stupid” struggle against the hinges, he finds an unexpected “calm” within the basket.

Could we find a similar dignity within our own confines? While we tend to think of ourselves as the controllers of our destiny, we are constantly moved by vast, unseen systems—social, economic, biological, cosmological—that we only partially see and understand even less. Soares suggests that instead of fruitlessly fighting what we cannot change, we can maintain a sharp curiosity about our immediate environment. We may not see the face of what carries us, but we can still witness and even enjoy the calming breeze when it passes through.

The portraits so far assume a self that can become trapped. In the final portraits, Soares confronts something more radical: the possibility that the self is an illusion.

The borderless soul

Does anyone know the borders of his soul, that he can say ‘I am I’?

Soares explores possession as the test for identity in passage 364. He opens with a series of questions that dismantle our most basic assumptions. Do we truly possess our bodies or souls? His answer is emphatic: “We are phantoms made of lies,” exposing the illusion at the heart of existence.

He imagines the soul as a borderless country—which is to say, not a country at all. To define something, we usually need to know its edges. A table is where the wood ends and the air begins. But Soares asks if anyone knows the border of their soul. We move through the world like solid, separate units with clear boundaries—this is me, that is you. But are we really? Each of us exists in constant interaction with the world, dynamically exchanging thoughts, emotions, and energy.

Yet Soares grasps for one thing he might claim as his own: his capacity to feel. “But I know that I'm the one who feels what I feel.” If someone else inhabited the same body, they would experience different sensations. Even this reveals our limits—we are tenants, not owners, of bodies we didn't make and can't fully control.

Soares validates this lack of ownership with a visceral image: eating. He argues that we truly possess something only when we eat it, incorporating it into our “substance.” But we cannot eat, digest, and metabolize our souls. By this measure, we cannot say “I am I” because we cannot claim the things that make us, material or immaterial. Without the power to possess, there is no stable identity. We are simply a collection of sensations passing through a body we barely know and a mind we barely understand.

The stranger

…what am I confronting when I read myself as if reading a stranger? On what shore am I standing if I see myself in the depths?

In passages 213 and 214, Soares discovers old writings that “reveal an expressive power” and “demonstrate a fluency” his present self struggles to replicate. This encounter produces not mournful nostalgia but existential horror: he is reading the work of “an absolute other, an extraneous self” he fails to recognize.

The shock has two sources. First, he discovers that qualities he believed were recent developments—special care with language, expressive precision—were already present in this past self. His narrative of gradual progress promptly collapses. He hasn't been steadily improving but has moved sideways, or perhaps even regressed. But the deeper horror goes beyond questions of progress. Soares describes himself as a spectator ”watching a play” where both setting and actor are himself, yet entirely unfamiliar. He stands on the “shore” looking at himself submerged in the “depths,” separated by a gap so wide it undermines the idea of a continuous identity. Yet the past stranger, despite his unrecognizable features, is “terrifyingly I.”

This terror reveals the fragility of temporal identity. Memory, Soares discovers, serves two functions: it records events that happened (memory of facts), and it preserves our subjective participation in those events (memory of experience). He has the first but has lost the second. He possesses old writings proving the past self existed, but the experiential connection is gone.

Soares wonders about a “less vertical” form of anamnesis—not remembering a pre-existence before birth, as in Platonic philosophy, but encountering past selves from this life that feel as alien as past lives would. If the “I” who wrote those pages is as foreign to him as a different person, then “I” becomes merely a linguistic convenience—a label for strangers who occupied the same body.

We often assume our past selves are simply earlier versions of who we are now. But Soares reminds us that continuity may be a comforting fiction. When we stumble upon old journals or photographs, we sometimes encounter not a younger version of ourselves but someone genuinely foreign—someone whose thoughts, feelings, and capabilities seem utterly disconnected from our present experience. Only our memory of experience, however vague, makes the strangeness bearable.

The nothing

…I, what’s truly I, am the centre that exists only in the geometry of the abyss: I’m the nothing around which everything spins.

Soares experiences a sudden “inner flash” of existential dread in passage 262. The constructed city representing his identity dissolves into a “barren plain.” This isn't a slow decay but an immediate realization that he is “absolutely no one.” In this new world, only the periphery remains. He becomes the “suburbs of a non-existent town” and a “long-winded commentary on a book never written.”

As he grapples with this realization, his metaphors darken. He describes his soul as a “black whirlpool, a vast vertigo circling a void”—a phrase that moves from color to sensation to abstraction, mirroring the very dissolution it describes. He defines the “I” as a “centre that exists only in the geometry of the abyss.” In geometry, a center is needed to draw a circle. Yet the point itself has no parts—no dimension, area, or substance. This may be Soares's most profound insight: the “I” is a “nothing,” a no-thing, around which the world of “houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and syllables of voices” spins.

This dissolution of the self as a concrete object is naturally terrifying. While certain philosophical schools frame the non-self as a path to liberation, Soares experiences it as “an aimless, infinitudinous, empty descent.” His sensation of vertigo is the reaction of a mind that has stared too closely at the depths of its own existence, or non-existence. The final, sudden mention of his mother suggests his reaction might be psychological as much as philosophical. Without a maternal figure to anchor him, he is left as a “well without walls.”

We often fear the loss of our center, but perhaps the real danger lies in becoming so caught up in one image of the self that we bring the “spinning” to a standstill. Soares reminds us that while the center may be a void, it is the movement around it—our thoughts, sensations, emotions, and especially our relationships—that makes life worth living. To acknowledge the “nothing” at the center is a radical act of self-awareness. But it is the courage to keep spinning around that void with the support of others that saves us from the “croaking madness of the dead universe.”

Soares's fragmentary approach to identity reveals a central tension: it offers penetrating honesty about the mechanics of consciousness, but it also generates the very disquiet expressed in the book's title. By breaking himself into parts—symphony, twins, stage, ruins, bridge, animal, borderless soul, stranger, nothing—Soares achieves analytical precision. But this precision comes at a cost: the felt sense of being a dynamic, living whole.

The nine portraits trace a path from fragmentation to paralysis to complete dissolution. While Soares has a tendency to become trapped in each individual fragment, as readers we can perceive a deeper unity that eludes him. His writings move from one image to the next like the creature described by Pessoan scholar Richard Zenith in a recent interview: a serpent that weaves through all realities but never stops at any one.

This captures what the portraits collectively reveal: the self is not nine separate portraits in a display room. It is the experience of walking through the museum, observing, comparing, and remaining perpetually in motion. The “I” is not any single metaphor, not even the sum of all metaphors, but rather the movement between them—the ongoing process of self-examination itself. What persists is a consciousness capable of observing itself from multiple angles, generating images to capture different states, and remaining wary of any single rendering.

Our challenge, then, is to figure out how we might use fragmentary self-reflection as a tool for illumination without becoming trapped and disquieted by any single conception of who we are.