"Some say that without hope life is impossible, others that with hope it’s empty. For me, since I’ve stopped hoping or not hoping, life is simply an external picture that includes me and that I look at, like a show without a plot, made only to please the eyes – an incoherent dance, a rustling of leaves in the wind, clouds in which the sunlight changes colour, ancient streets that wind every which way around the city."

"To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation."

Six months ago, I decided to marry two of my reading resolutions together - to read 'harder' books and to read more slowly - by taking Pessoa's Book of Disquiet one short section a day, for as long as it takes. Turns out, that was six months to the day for the main text, and another two weeks for the scattered parts at the end.
Pessoa's prose - and Zenith's translation - is extraordinary. For the first month or two, I was spellbound by how effortlessly expressive Pessoa had made Soares, his narrator/avatar/persona. Soares battles depression and surrenders to ennui, always perfectly articulating a human condition "It was an occasion to be happy. But something weighed on me, some inscrutable yearning, an indefinable and perhaps even noble desire. Perhaps it was just taking me a long time to feel alive. And when I leaned out my high window, looking down at the street I couldn’t see, I suddenly felt like one of those damp rags used for house-cleaning that are taken to the window to dry but are forgotten, balled up, on the sill where they slowly leave a stain."
Despite the narrator's loneliness, isolation and listlessness acceptance of a job that bores him, in a city that bores him, the prose is playful, experimental, with moments of startling description "In this large downtown square, the soberly multicoloured flow of people passes by, changes course, forms pools, divides into streams, converges into brooks." and meditations on faith "he inscrutability of the universe is quite enough for us to think about; to want to actually understand it is to be less than human, since to be human is to realize it can’t be understood. I’m handed faith like a sealed package on a strange-looking platter and am expected to accept it without opening it. I’m handed science, like a knife on a plate, to cut the folios of a book whose pages are blank. I’m handed doubt, like dust inside a box – but why give me a box if all it contains is dust?"
After a while, I must confess to getting fed up with Pessoa and Soares a bit - possibly the tendency to romanticise the narrator's paralysis, to justify passivity through affected world-weariness, to regard the only valid suffering as that of the soul when there is little experience of that of the body.  The assumption of personas also enables Pessoa to disavow intent, to play with words and emotions, to describe internal states without having to take responsibility for the impact of the presented ideas. The sexism is occasional but also irritating, especially when a drift towards misogyny mostly appears for effect.
However, possibly I am a born book devourer and simply chafed against having the same voice in my life for so long. 
"We weary of everything, said the scholiast, except understanding. Let us understand, let us keep understanding, and let us make ghostly flowers out of this understanding, shrewdly entwining them into wreaths and garlands which are also doomed to wilt."
Soares/Pessoa's greatest triumph, perhaps, however is the incisive mediations on the act of writing, the selfishness and the selflessness and the sheer exhilaration of it "Beset by lucid and free associations of ideas, images and words, I say what I imagine I’m feeling as much as what I’m really feeling, and I’m unable to distinguish between the suggestions of my soul and the fruits born of images that fell from my soul to the ground, nor do I know whether the sound of a discordant word or the rhythm of an incidental phrase might not be diverting me from the already hazy point, from the already stowed sensation, thereby absolving me from thinking and saying, like long voyages designed to distract us. And all of this, which even as I’m telling it should stir in me a sense of futility, failure and anguish, gives me only wings of gold."
Even as I write this review, I am drawn back in to this luminous prose, and to Pessoa's biting honesty about how unreal everything outside our own imagination feels, and consequently how writing can be all that is real.
Pessoa is resigned to the contradictions in the reader/writer relationship - I found myself acutely aware that he may have decided, after all, not to have a readership (the book was published posthumously). But I find it hard to accept that he did not want that form of connection, disjointed as it is. That he does not yearn (there is a lot of yearning here) for something that lives outside his own intellect, that grounds him in community.
I will certainly miss Pessoa in my life - not so much I want a re-read the whole thing again for a year or five - but I will miss him. I had days where I couldn't get enough, where I would read the words aloud for the sheer pleasure of it, days where I wanted to hurl the kindle through the window rather than read another passage of beautiful sighs, days where I wanted to stay with Pessoa, days where I wanted to lead him into the sun. Rather a lot where I wanted to slap him. But it always felt a kinship over the sheer soulslicing of his observations, the sense of an inner suffering, superior bookkeeper.
"And I offer you this book because I know it is beautiful and useless. It teaches nothing, inspires no faith, and stirs no feeling. A mere stream that flows towards an abyss of ashes scattered by the wind, neither helping nor harming the soil..... I put my whole soul into making it, but without thinking about it as I made it, for I thought only of me, who am sad, and of you, who aren’t anyone."