Jeff Carreira: I was hoping you would start by introducing yourself to our readers. I know that you are a scholar specializing in the work of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa and that you are the editor of a beautiful new edition of Pessoa's masterwork The Book of Disquiet. Is there more that you can tell us about yourself?

Jeronimo Pizarro: I wrote my master's thesis on Pessoa in Lisbon and later did my PhD thesis on Pessoa's writings on genius and madness. For about five years, I read every book I could find about Pessoa. I wanted to understand why Pessoa had written so much about mental health and why he was so concerned with madness. Eventually, I went to the National Library of Portugal and I found out that less than half of what Pessoa wrote has actually been published. As part of my thesis work, I published over 600 written fragments of Pessoa's on topics such as hysteria, neurasthenia, depression and decadence.

Jeff Carreira: You are also the editor of a recent edition of Pessoa's masterwork The Book of Disquiet. The earliest edition of that book wasn't published until nearly 50 years after Pessoa's death. Can you tell us a little bit about why the book went unpublished for so long?

Jeronimo Pizarro: During the years of the Portuguese dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, the book that Fernando Pessoa was known by was one called Message, a book of poems about Portuguese history that was published a year before Pessoa's death. That book had won a government award and was the book that Pessoa was known for until The Book of Disquiet was published in 1982 and became internationally recognized throughout Europe, England and the United States. The Book of Disquiet is written in a unique style of poetic prose. Pessoa was writing it during the same time period that Franz Kafka was writing and The Book of Disquiet addresses some of the same existentialist themes that literature was occupied with throughout the 20th century. It is a book about many things.

It seems to be a concrete story, but it's also a dream. Originally, it was envisioned to be just a short book about decadence, but it expanded in scope to become a book about Lisbon, and about a particular worker in Lisbon, and perhaps about Pessoa himself. We can?t be entirely sure what Pessoa wanted to portray in the book, but all of these things and more seem to be included.

Jeff Carreira: I adore The Book of Disquiet. I don?t know why, but I just enjoy spending time with it.

Jeronimo Pizarro: Do you feel like you love and hate the book, or is it absolute love? Because upon my first reading I had very contradictory feelings.

Jeff Carreira: I had that at first too, but today it's all love. The book puts me in a mood of sadness, that particular kind of nostalgic longing that the Portuguese speak of as ‘saudades', but it also propels me into a deep contemplation of the meaning of existence. Of course, I'm interested in spiritual awakening, and I see Pessoa as an as an awakened soul in the early decades of 20th century Lisbon. He described a powerful experience of emptiness in my favorite passage from The Book of Disquiet:

“And I, I myself, am the center that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it. I am the nothing around which all this spins. I exist so that it can spin. I am a center that exists only because every circle has one.”

I love that passage.

Jeronimo Pizarro: It is a very beautiful passage. And I agree there is some nostalgia and sadness in The Book of Disquiet, but it's not sadness for sadness' sake. It is important to remember that Pessoa himself did not see ‘saudades' as a defining characteristic of the Portuguese people. The sadness in The Book of Disquiet is not pessimistic. It is not based in a belief that life is terrible and difficult. There is a spiritual dimension to the book because Pessoa knows that there are higher dimensions to his being. He knows his larger self, and his sadness comes from the sense of limitation he feels in his current form. I think that Pessoa knows all humans have reason to feel nostalgic about life because life is so fleeting and we are so small, doing small things every day. We see only a tiny part of the entire universe. Even in our dreams, we don't see the whole. So, I think Pessoa touches on a universal longing for wholeness in his writing. He was not interested in just the Portuguese identity.

He was fascinated by our human identity. Some of The Book of Disquiet was written after Pessoa met Aleister Crowley in the 1930?s, and at that time, he was reading and writing a lot about spiritual initiation and the occult. There is as much unpublished written work of Pessoa on these esoteric subjects than there is in The Book of Disquiet, maybe more, and most of it is written in English.

Jeff Carreira: I'm very curious about Pessoa's spiritual writings and I don't know that any of it has been published in English.

Jeronimo Pizarro: No, not a thing. It's urgent and it's absurd, there are more than 10,000 documents written in English that have not yet been published, and maybe 3,000 are esoteric and may be classified as spiritual writings. They don't even need to be translated. And most of his spiritual writings on Esotericism, Theosophy, Hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, Occultism, and the practice of automatic writing, are in English. I would love to see these writings published in a good English edition.

Jeff Carreira: Fernando Pessoa today is largely considered to be the most important Portuguese writer of the 20th century and The Book of Disquiet is largely thought of as being his most important work. The issue I'm interviewing you for is about the transformative power of fiction. The Book of Disquiet defies the traditional label of fiction. Can you speak about that?

Jeronimo Pizarro: Many of the greatest writers of the 20th century were redefining fiction. Kafka was doing that, Jorge Luis Borges was doing that, and Pessoa was doing that also. In his writing, Pessoa is showing us that there are many layers of reading. He is more or less telling us that everything is, in a sense, fiction. You will never know exactly who you are, what your identity is, or what the ‘I' is. It's almost a dialog with Freud. Pessoa knows that any identity is, or could be, a fiction.

He knows that he has more than one identity. He constructed at least a hundred and thirty-six fictional identities that he wrote through. So, for someone living in the middle of so many fictional creations with such a complex way of understanding reality and identity, he felt that we could not be so dogmatic about either reality or identity. Pessoa was writing after Nietzsche and he was discussing the death of God and the death of so many of life's certainties. And this was happening at the start of a century that was redefining truth and fiction, in powerful new ways. He, like many of the existentialist writers of the time, felt that it was more interesting and more valuable to write about what we were not certain about rather than what we were. Pessoa was a true master of fiction, and our modern understanding of fiction and literature is in large part due to him and other writers of that time.

Jeff Carreira: Before we finish with this discussion, I would like to ask you to speak about Pessoa?s exploration of identity because that seems to be such an important part of his work.

Jeronimo Pizarro: Pessoa wrote as many different identities or personalities. He began creating those when he was six years old. He referred to his three main identities (Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Alvaro de Campos) as heteronyms to differentiate them from pseudonyms. He did not see himself as one author writing under different names. Each heteronym was a different character with a unique history and style of writing. He continued to create new authors and write under them for many years. The first parts of The Book of Disquiet were were written by Fernando Pessoa himself. Five or six years later, the authorship shifted to a semi- heteronym named Vincente Guedes, and later, it shifted again to a third personality, Bernardo Soares. In many ways, Pessoa was just another personality, not very different than Guedes or Soares. Pessoa was always trying to distance himself from himself. He was partially himself, but only partially, and sometimes he was not himself at all. Pessoa lived his life continually being people other than himself, which meant he had to rediscover who he was and find new voices. He was not interested in writing in a single style so that he'd remain always recognizable. He wanted to write as many people. For him, identity was not something constant and clear. It was something that was created every day. That's a very different relationship to identity.

And I think it's very modern. Now, in the age of the internet and social media, we are constantly playing with identity. It's always in flux. It can change. It's a play. It's a game.

Jeff Carreira: I have one final question. Why do you think people should care about an early 20th century writer from a small country like Portugal? What makes Fernando Pessoa so important today?

Jeronimo Pizarro: This is a big question and I won?t be able to finish with it here, but, I think Pessoa is important today because his writing creates a sense of disquiet. When you read The Book of Disquiet, you become disquiet. It unsettles you. It troubles you in productive ways that force you to reconsider what life is all about. Pessoa was a master of fiction, a master of literary creation. He was one of the last of the universalist writers. He did not believe that an author should reveal their one and only true self. For him, it was through literature that we could live many lives and have many experiences.

Reading and writing allowed us to constantly move through very different emotions. He did not want to be limited to just one understanding of himself and one understanding of reality. He wanted to travel through different philosophies, into different understandings of life. He was an author who understood clearly the power of fiction.