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Introduction: The Man Who Watches Himself Live

Fernando Pessoa's Livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet) presents one of modern literature's most unusual figures: Bernardo Soares, a modest assistant bookkeeper whose apparently insignificant existence becomes the material for an immense meditation on consciousness, solitude, boredom, desire, memory, identity, and the difficulty of living. Soares does not pursue conventional forms of success. He does not aspire to wealth, political influence, social prestige, heroic achievement, or even sustained romantic fulfillment. He works, observes, walks through Lisbon, returns to the office, and writes. His world is deliberately narrow. Yet from that narrowness emerges a consciousness of extraordinary breadth.

This paradox has made Bernardo Soares an enduringly fascinating figure. He appears to possess everything necessary for reflection and almost everything necessary for suffering. He sees the world with unusual precision, but his perception rarely develops into sustained participation. He observes other people rather than becoming deeply involved with them; he examines emotions rather than simply surrendering to them; he converts ordinary places into psychological landscapes; and he transforms everyday experience into literary meditation. His life is therefore not empty in any simple sense. It is saturated with thought. The deeper problem is that thought increasingly seems to substitute for living.

This essay, my 594th blog post on this blog, proposes that Erich Fromm offers a particularly productive framework for understanding this paradox. Freud can help illuminate the psychic consequences of loss, repression, and sublimation; Lacan can clarify the instability of the subject and the impossibility of complete self-coincidence; Nietzsche can illuminate the crisis of inherited values and the problem of nihilism. Yet Fromm makes it possible to ask a question that moves beyond individual pathology: What kind of society produces a human being who can think so profoundly about existence while becoming increasingly incapable of participating fully in it?}

The question is particularly important because Pessoa scholarship has repeatedly situated Livro do Desassossego within problems larger than Bernardo's individual psychology. Adorno (2022), for example, reads boredom in the work as a symptom of modernity and associates it with a loss of meaning. Raabe (2014) emphasizes the work's interrogation of identity and alterity, while Giménez (2016) places its prose within the material and urban experience of modernity. Ferraria (2016), meanwhile, draws attention to the relationship Soares constructs between external perception and internal emotion. Stoker (2013) demonstrates that the very textual construction of Livro do Desassossego is inseparable from questions of modernism, fragmentation, memory, and editorial instability. These approaches suggest that Bernardo should not be read merely as an isolated melancholy personality. He is also a literary representation of a historically situated form of consciousness.

The argument developed here is therefore deliberately Frommian but not reductively psychological. Bernardo Soares can be understood as a cultural symptom: a person whose profound sensitivity reveals the alienating structures of modern existence. His tragedy is not that he possesses no life. It is that he experiences his life increasingly from the outside. He becomes, above all, the man who watches himself live.

From the Psychological Individual to the Cultural Symptom

One of the most important contributions of Erich Fromm's humanistic psychoanalysis is his insistence that individual psychology cannot be separated from social conditions. Human beings are not shaped exclusively by unconscious drives or private histories; they are also formed by the economic, cultural, interpersonal, and ideological structures in which they exist (Fromm, 1947, 1955). Mental health, accordingly, cannot be defined simply as successful adaptation to whatever society happens to consider normal.

This distinction is crucial for reading Bernardo Soares. Bernardo is, in a conventional sense, functional. He works. He fulfills his responsibilities. He maintains routines. He inhabits a recognizable social role. He is not presented as someone incapable of performing the basic functions expected of him. Yet his interior life is profoundly estranged from the world in which that functionality takes place.

To comprehend Bernardo Soares, Fromm's concept of alienation provides a useful vocabulary for this contradiction. In The Sane Society, Fromm (1955) argues that modern social arrangements can produce individuals who experience themselves as separated from their own capacities, from other people, and from meaningful participation in the world. What appears socially normal may therefore conceal a deeper condition of human impoverishment.

This insight changes how Bernardo's withdrawal should be interpreted. His isolation is not simply a personal defect. It emerges within a world of commercial transactions, repetitive work, anonymous encounters, social roles, and externally defined measures of usefulness. His occupation as a bookkeeper places him inside a system of economic rationality, but it does not necessarily connect him with a sense of purpose.

Adorno's (2022) analysis of boredom becomes particularly useful here. She interprets boredom in Livro do Desassossego not merely as a private emotional state but as a symptom of modernity's crisis of meaning. Bernardo's tédio therefore becomes more than melancholy. It is the affective expression of a world in which conventional activities continue even when their existential significance has become uncertain. The problem is not that nothing happens. The problem is that what happens does not necessarily feel meaningful. Bernardo is therefore not simply bored with life. He is confronted with the question of whether the available forms of life deserve to be lived. And that is a very different problem.

Modernity, Fragmentation, and the Unstable Self

Pessoa scholarship reinforces the importance of reading Bernardo as a modern subject rather than simply as a psychologically unusual or impaired  individual. Raabe (2014) argues that Livro do Desassossego participates in Pessoa's sustained questioning of modern identity and alterity. The heteronymic system itself makes stable identity problematic. The subject is not necessarily one coherent interior entity but something divided, multiplied, and mediated through language.

This becomes particularly important in the case of Bernardo Soares because his status as a semi-heteronym already destabilizes the relationship between author and character. Casa Fernando Pessoa explains that Pessoa described Bernardo as a semi-heteronym, a "simple mutilation" of himself, and that the later texts attributed to Soares acquire a diaristic and confessional character. The character is therefore neither simply Pessoa nor entirely separate from him.

The instability of identity is consequently not merely one of Bernardo's themes. It is embedded in the formal construction of the work. Stoker (2013) is particularly important in this regard. His study of Livro do Desassossego demonstrates how difficult it is to establish the work as a stable textual object because Pessoa's manuscripts, attributions, and editorial arrangements do not yield a simple, definitive book. The work's fragmentation is therefore simultaneously thematic, psychological, and material.

This observation strengthens the Frommian interpretation. Alienation is not represented only through Bernardo's thoughts; it is reproduced in the very form of the work. The reader encounters fragments rather than a completed narrative, impressions rather than a conventional plot, consciousness rather than a stable sequence of events.

Bernardo's life is not narrated as a progression toward resolution

This is why Livro do Desassossego can be understood as the literary form of an unlived life: its fragments resist the conventional expectation that life should develop toward completion.

Fromm's Alienated Human Being

Fromm's theory becomes especially powerful when we consider Bernardo's relationship with activity. For Fromm (1955), productive activity is not reducible to economic productivity. Human beings become more fully themselves when they engage their capacities creatively and meaningfully. Alienation occurs when activity becomes something external to the self, something performed without genuine participation.

Bernardo's professional life embodies precisely this contradiction. He works, but his work does not constitute the center of his identity. His office provides structure, repetition, and economic necessity, but his deepest activity occurs elsewhere, in observation and writing. His employment belongs to the world of necessity; his consciousness attempts to escape it.

Yet his writing creates another paradox. Literature becomes his productive activity, but literature itself is generated from alienation. This means that Bernardo's creativity is both resistance to and product of his condition where he transforms his alienation into language, converts boredom into reflection, converts routine into aesthetic experience, and turns loneliness into prose.

This is one of the reasons that diagnosing him simply as "unhealthy" would be inadequate. His withdrawal has pathological dimensions, but it also produces an extraordinary form of creative perception. His inability to participate normally becomes the condition through which he can describe the experience of modern non-participation. The artist and the alienated individual therefore become difficult to separate.

Having, Being, and the Third Position of Observing

Fromm's distinction between "having" and "being" offers perhaps the most original way of approaching Bernardo. In To Have or to Be?, Fromm (1976) contrasts an orientation toward possession, acquisition, and control with an orientation toward active existence, presence, experience, and participation. Bernardo clearly resists the orientation toward having. He does not define himself through wealth, does not pursue status, is not obsessed with possessions, and has little interest in conventional achievement.

But this does not automatically mean that he has achieved the orientation of being. Instead, Bernardo seems to inhabit a third position: observing. This is the conceptual contribution I would place at the center of a Frommian reading of Livro do Desassossego. In other words, Bernardo does not simply have; he does not fully be. Bernardo observes, watches other people living, viewes himself feeling, witnesses how Lisbon changing, tracks his own thoughts, beholds desire without necessarily acting upon it, and watches the world from the threshold of participation.

This position explains the strange vitality of the book. Bernardo is extraordinarily alive at the level of consciousness and extraordinarily absent at the level of participation. He is present enough to perceive everything and distant enough to remain untouched by almost everything. Fromm's distinction therefore allows us to identify the central tension of Bernardo's existence: he rejects possession without achieving presence. His consciousness is active, but his life is comparatively passive. He thinks intensely, but he acts little. He feels deeply, but he often converts feeling into reflection before it can become relationship. And he possesses an enormous interior world, but that interiority does not necessarily produce the relatedness Fromm regards as essential to human flourishing.

Outer Perception and Inner Emotion

This is where Ferraria's (2016) scholarship becomes especially important. Her analysis of Bernardo focuses on the relationship between external perception and internal emotion. Soares does not simply describe the external world as an objective environment. The external world becomes inseparable from his emotional and perceptual state. This explains why Lisbon matters so much. The city is not merely where Bernardo lives; it is where Bernardo's consciousness becomes visible. Giménez (2016) similarly situates Livro do Desassossego in relation to the materiality of modern urban experience, placing Pessoa's Lisbon alongside broader European modernity. The city becomes a space of movement, commerce, visual stimulation, anonymity, and fragmented perception.

Bernardo's famous relationship with Rua dos Douradores should therefore not be reduced to sentimental attachment to a particular address. Casa Fernando Pessoa identifies the street as both the place where Bernardo lives and works and the physical environment that repeatedly generates his reflections. It describes his perception of Lisbon as a kind of personal cartography in which the external landscape becomes inseparable from his states of mind.

Bernardo himself gives the street an almost metaphysical significance:

"Sim, esta Rua dos Douradores compreende para mim todo o sentido das coisas, a solução de todos os enigmas..."

The statement is revealing because the street becomes the opposite of transcendence. Bernardo does not need a distant sacred landscape. His metaphysics occurs within the ordinary. This is precisely what makes the urban setting so important to the Frommian interpretation. The alienated subject does not necessarily escape modernity. He inhabits it more intensely.

Rua dos Douradores and the Gilded Surface

The name Douradores offers another interpretive possibility. A dourador is a person who gilds surfaces, applying gold to an object without necessarily transforming its underlying substance. We should be cautious here: nothing requires us to assume that Pessoa deliberately constructed the street name as a symbolic key. The connection is best treated as an interpretive hypothesis rather than authorial intention.

Nevertheless, the metaphor is remarkably productive because gilding changes appearance. It creates value at the level of surface and makes something ordinary appear precious. The metaphor corresponds strikingly with Bernardo's relationship to modern existence since modern society presents itself through surfaces: professional identities, social conventions, economic roles, manners, ambitions, respectable routines.

Bernardo sees through many of these surfaces. He recognizes their artificiality. Yet he also becomes a gilder, takes the ordinary street and makes it luminous through language, takes boredom and makes it beautiful, takes loneliness and gives it form, takes the meaningless routine of a commercial office and transforms it into literature.

This produces an extraordinary paradox: Bernardo both exposes and performs gilding. The world gilds reality socially. Bernardo gilds reality aesthetically. The difference is that social gilding can conceal alienation, whereas literary gilding can reveal it. This is where literature becomes ethically significant. Pessoa does not simply decorate Bernardo's suffering. He makes its structure perceptible.

Love, Relatedness, and the Problem of the Other

Fromm's The Art of Loving offers another essential dimension to the interpretation. For Fromm (1956), love is not merely an emotion that happens to an individual. It involves care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. Mature love requires the capacity to recognize another person as an independent subject rather than merely as an extension of one's own desire.

Bernardo's reflections on love repeatedly expose the difficulty of such reciprocity. One of the most striking formulations attributed to him states:

"Nunca amamos ninguém. Amamos, tão-somente, a ideia que fazemos de alguém."

The statement is devastating because it reduces romantic experience to the projection of one's own concept onto another person. The beloved becomes less a person than an idea. And Fromm allows us to see why this matters. To love an idea is safer than loving another person because an idea can be controlled, does not contradict us, cannot leave us unexpectedly, and cannot demand reciprocity. But a real person can.

Bernardo's intellectualization of love can therefore be understood as a defense against vulnerability. His problem is not that he lacks emotional sensitivity. It may be precisely that he possesses too much sensitivity without sufficient capacity for relational risk. Ferraria's (2016) distinction between external perception and internal emotion helps illuminate this pattern present in this character; Bernardo continually converts external encounters into internal experience. The world enters him, but it does not necessarily lead him outward toward other people.

This is where Fromm's notion of relatedness becomes decisive. Bernardo knows humanity, but he does not necessarily participate in humanity. Bernard can analyze people without becoming intimate with them. He can also imagine love without surrendering to its demands and can recognize suffering without necessarily allowing another person to transform his existence. His loneliness therefore cannot be explained merely by the absence of companionship. It is a problem of relatedness.

Literature as Sublimation, Compensation, and Creation

Freud would help us understand Bernardo's literary activity as a form of sublimation: psychic energy that cannot find direct expression is transformed into cultural production. That insight remains useful. But Fromm allows us to go further by asking whether Bernardo's writing is productive in the humanistic sense.

The answer is complicated. It clearly is productive insofar as Bernardo transforms experience into something meaningful. His writing is not merely repetitive suffering. He creates, but the writing also compensates for what it cannot replace. Literature can give him expression without giving him companionship, can also give him beauty without giving him intimacy, can give him a voice without giving him social belonging. And it can make his existence meaningful without necessarily making his existence more participatory.

Thus, literature occupies an ambiguous position between liberation and compensation. This ambiguity should not be treated as a weakness of Pessoa's work. It is precisely the point. Bernardo's writing is both the evidence of his alienation and his most powerful response to it. He is alienated, but not silent. He is isolated, but not creatively empty. He is unable to live conventionally, but he can transform conventional life into an object of extraordinary perception. Fromm's notion of productive activity therefore allows us to avoid romanticizing Bernardo's suffering while still recognizing the creative power that emerges from it.

Nietzsche: The Failure of Self-Overcoming

Nietzsche (1974) provides a useful counterpoint to Fromm because Bernardo confronts a problem central to Nietzsche's philosophy: what happens when inherited systems of meaning lose their authority? Bernardo does not appear convinced by conventional social ambitions. He distrusts the promises of achievement and success. He does not find salvation in ordinary forms of progress. In this sense, he belongs to the modern crisis of value that Nietzsche analyzed. Yet Bernardo does not respond to the crisis in a Nietzschean manner.

Nietzsche's response to nihilism ultimately demands transformation, self-overcoming, and the creation of values. Bernardo instead remains fascinated by the absence of sufficient values. He sees the problem, but he does not overcome it. He writes about the void, but he does not fill it. This distinction makes Fromm more useful as the principal framework. Nietzsche helps explain Bernardo's confrontation with meaninglessness; Fromm helps explain why the response to meaninglessness becomes paralysis rather than productive transformation. Bernardo lacks neither intelligence nor imagination. What he lacks is existential integration. His consciousness outruns his capacity to act.

Lacan: The Fragmented Subject

Lacan (1977) offers another complementary perspective. Bernardo's uncertainty about identity is consistent with a conception of subjectivity in which the self is never completely transparent to itself. Pessoa's famous formulation, "Não sei quem sou, que alma tenho," could almost serve as an epigraph for the fragmented modern subject. Raabe (2014) demonstrates how questions of identity and alterity occupy a central place in Livro do Desassossego. Pessoa's heteronymic practice makes fragmentation not merely a psychological theme but a principle of literary creation.

From a Lacanian perspective, Bernardo's problem is therefore not simply that he has failed to discover a stable inner self. The modern subject may never possess such complete unity. Yet again, Fromm adds something essential. The question is not only whether Bernardo possesses a coherent self. The question is whether his fragmented self can enter into meaningful relationships with other human beings. Lacan helps explain the instability. Fromm helps us ask what kind of life might nevertheless be possible within that instability.

Is Bernardo Unhealthy, or Is the World Unhealthy?

This question brings us to the heart of the Frommian interpretation. Bernardo's suffering can certainly be read psychologically. His excessive introspection, withdrawal, loneliness, and inability to act may resemble symptoms of psychological distress. But Fromm's (1955) The Sane Society asks us to reverse the diagnostic gaze.

What if the individual who appears maladjusted is responding rationally to an irrational social environment? This does not mean that every form of alienation is healthy. Bernardo suffers, and his isolation hurts. His inability to participate limits him, and his consciousness does not liberate him completely. But his refusal to embrace conventional success may also reveal something about the conventions themselves. He does not become rich nor seek power. He does not build a conventional career and does not pursue the social rewards that modernity places before him.

Fromm would therefore force us to distinguish between adaptation and health. A person can adapt successfully to an unhealthy society. Conversely, a person who cannot adapt completely may perceive truths that adaptation suppresses. Bernardo occupies precisely this uncomfortable position. He is not a triumphant rebel, nor is he a healthy outsider. He is a suffering consciousness whose maladjustment gives him extraordinary critical perception. This is what makes him culturally significant.

The Unlived Life

The concept of the "unlived life" can now be understood as more than a poetic description of Bernardo's melancholy. His tragedy is not that he lacks experience because he experiences intensely. His tragedy is that experience is continually converted into observation. And for this reason, he does not merely experience the world; he experiences himself experiencing the world.

The additional layer of consciousness creates distance. An afternoon becomes an object of reflection. A person becomes an object of interpretation. A street becomes a metaphysical landscape. A feeling becomes a sentence. A possible relationship becomes an idea. A life becomes a book. This is the central paradox of Livro do Desassossego.

The book is extraordinarily alive because Bernardo is unable to live without transforming life into consciousness. He saves experience by writing it. But he may also lose experience by writing it. That is why the concept of observation is so important. Bernardo's third mode, neither having nor fully being, allows him to remain permanently close to existence without entirely entering it. He becomes the spectator of his own life.

From Rua dos Douradores to the Contemporary Self

The extraordinary contemporary relevance of Livro do Desassossego lies here. Bernardo's world is not our world. His office, streets, technologies, and social conditions belong to another historical period. Yet the structure of his consciousness remains recognizable. Modern individuals increasingly document their experiences, observe themselves, curate identities, monitor productivity, interpret emotions, and perform versions of themselves before others.

The contemporary individual can therefore inhabit Bernardo's third position on an enormous scale. We can observe ourselves living, can photograph the experience rather than inhabit it, and can narrate ourselves rather than encounter ourselves. Additionally, we can turn relationships into representations, can turn emotion into content, can turn identity into performance, and we can become spectators of our own existence.

Fromm's distinction between having and being becomes especially relevant in such a world. The pressure to possess, perform, accumulate, and demonstrate success can coexist with profound alienation. The contemporary individual may have more opportunities for communication while remaining uncertain about genuine relatedness. Bernardo's tragedy thus becomes a warning. The problem is not simply excessive introspection. The deeper problem is the substitution of observation for participation.

Conclusion: Fromm, Pessoa, and the Possibility of Being

Erich Fromm offers an unusually fertile way of reading Bernardo Soares because he allows us to move beyond the temptation to diagnose him. Freud can help explain psychic transformation and sublimation. Lacan can illuminate the fragmented subject. Nietzsche can clarify the crisis of inherited values and the problem of nihilism. But Fromm allows these dimensions to converge around a larger question: What conditions make it possible for a human being not merely to function, but to live?

This question transforms our understanding of Bernardo. He is not simply a melancholy clerk, or he is not simply an existentialist. Is he simply a fragmented modern subject? Is he a human being caught between consciousness and participation. His rejection of conventional possession does not automatically lead to authentic being. Instead, he occupies an intermediate position that we might call observing. He watches the world, watches others, watches himself, and transforms what he sees into language. This is both his weakness and his genius. His alienation prevents him from fully participating in life, but that same alienation allows him to perceive dimensions of modern existence that ordinary adaptation conceals.

The metaphor of Rua dos Douradores therefore becomes especially suggestive. The street of the gilders can be understood as a symbolic landscape of modernity: a world of surfaces, commercial activity, roles, appearances, and transactions. Bernardo sees through those surfaces. Yet he also becomes a literary gilder, transforming the ordinary into something luminous through language. The world gilds life socially. Bernardo gilds it aesthetically. And perhaps the distinction is that his literary gilding does not hide the wound beneath the surface. It makes the wound visible.

This is ultimately why Livro do Desassossego remains so unsettling. Bernardo does not simply tell us that the world is bad. He shows us how difficult it becomes to live when consciousness sees too much, when conventional meanings no longer convince us, and when reflection becomes easier than participation.

His tragedy is not that he cannot find meaning. It is that he can imagine so many forms of meaning that commitment to any one of them becomes almost impossible. He can imagine love without fully risking love, can imagine freedom without fully exercising it, can imagine a different life without fully entering one, and can imagine himself endlessly. But imagination is not yet existence.

Fromm would therefore leave us with a question that extends beyond Bernardo Soares and reaches directly into contemporary life:

What does it mean to be human when a society teaches us how to function, possess, perform, and observe, but not necessarily how to live?

Pessoa's answer is not theoretical. It is Bernardo. And Bernardo's answer is the book itself. He cannot quite live the life he imagines. But he can make us understand what it feels like not to live it.

References

Adorno, K. (2022). Tédio e modernidade no Livro do desassossego, de Fernando Pessoa. Interseções: Revista de Estudos Interdisciplinares, 24(2), 253–278. https://doi.org/10.12957/irei.2022.70836

Ferraria, A. (2016). Bernardo Soares: Desassossego e eternidade. Revista Desassossego, 8(15), 165–177. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2175-3180.v8i15p165-177

Fromm, E. (1947). Man for himself: An inquiry into the psychology of ethics. Rinehart.

Fromm, E. (1955). The sane society. Rinehart.

Fromm, E. (1956). The art of loving. Harper & Brothers.

Fromm, E. (1976). To have or to be? Harper & Row.

Giménez, D. (2016). Materialidade e modernidade no Livro do Desassossego. Terra Roxa e Outras Terras: Revista de Estudos Literários, 32, 8–22. https://doi.org/10.5433/1678-2054.2016v32p8

Lacan, J. (1977). Écrits: A selection (A. Sheridan, Trans.). W. W. Norton.

Nietzsche, F. (1974). The gay science: With a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs (W. Kaufmann, Trans. & Ed.). Vintage Books.

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Stoker, M. (2013). Challenging modernism: Fernando Pessoa and the Book of Disquiet [Doctoral dissertation, Utrecht University]. Utrecht University.