Books to give you hope: The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
theguardian.com
Books to give you hope: The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
This is how we should approach life’s hardships, finding possibility where we can: the prospect of flourishing despite infirmity, of finding one’s way through loneliness, failure, grief, confronting the injustice and absurdity of the world. The question is not whether we should hope, but what we should hope for.
Kieran Setiya • What’s the Use of Hope?
Sontag points to literature’s essential allure — the comfort of appeasing our anxiety about life’s infinite possibility, about all the roads not taken and all the immensities not imagined that could have led to a better destination than our present one. A story, instead, offers the comforting finitude of both time and possibility:
Maria Popova • Susan Sontag on Storytelling, What It Means to Be a Good Human Being, and Her Advice to Writers
Pessoa recognizes that, more than a biological impediment, all those unsolved disquietudes and subtle estrangements from ourselves that keep the eyelids from closing the curtain on the day are emissaries of our existential angst. Wrestling with his own, he writes:
I’m going to life’s bed wide awake, unaccompanied and without peace, in the ebb and... See more