In a rare excursion out of Lisbon, Bernardo Soares took the train to Cascais, a coastal town 30 kilometers to the west of Lisbon, to pay a property tax for his boss for a house he owns in Estoril. Both Cascais and Estoril are wealthy towns, that along with Sintra, form the Portuguese Riviera.

Writing about the turn his anticipated pleasure in the trip took, after not having experienced “the forever changing views of the wide river and its Atlantic estuary” but instead losing himself in “abstract contemplations”, Soares wrote:

“But on actually going out there, I lost myself in abstract contemplations, seeing but not seeing the riverscapes I’d looked forward to seeing, while on the way back I lost myself in mentally nailing down those sensations. I wouldn’t be able to describe the slightest detail of the trip, the slightest scrap of what there was to see. What I got out of it are these pages, the fruit of contradiction and forgetting.”

He concludes:

“The train slows down, we’re at Cais do Sodré station. I’ve arrived at Lisbon, but not at a conclusion.”

From Text 16, Richard Zenith’s translation of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet