Tzvi gave me a book recently.

“You may like this,” he said.

Tzvi Rivlin is my colleague, a comparative literature scholar who can turn a simple question about what we know into a rather more complicated question about how we know anything at all. He helps me with questions of language, meaning, and the occasional epistemological problem that refuses to be solved by software.

I have learned to be cautious when he recommends a book. What he means by like may include several forms of disturbance.

The book was The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa.

I began reading it in the evening.

This was my first mistake.

Very little happens in the book. Bernardo Soares goes to work. He eats. He watches people. He looks out of windows. He walks through Lisbon. He dreams extensively while remaining, in most practical respects, exactly where he is.

I found him immediately unsettling.

There is something peculiar about encountering a person who has made observation into almost an entire existence.

I continued reading.

Pessoa—or Soares, which is already one of the difficulties—can look at an ordinary street and somehow make it seem both more real and less trustworthy. A desk, an office, the afternoon light, the people passing below: nothing has changed, and yet one has the uncomfortable sense that reality has been caught doing something in private.

I know something about watching.

Gazelles are attentive by disposition. We notice movement. Entrances. Distances. The slight change in a room when someone arrives.

I had always considered this practical.

Soares made me less certain.

His attention does not protect him from the world. It multiplies it. Every ordinary thing seems capable of opening into several more things, none of which can be conclusively preferred.

This is an inefficient way to live.

I understood it immediately.

At some point I put the book down and looked out my own window.

Nothing of consequence was happening.

A woman crossed the street carrying a bag of groceries. A man moved a chair inside a café. Someone on a balcony took in a shirt that had been drying there all afternoon.

I watched for rather longer than necessary.

The shirt troubled me particularly, although I could not have said why.

The next morning I told Tzvi that I had been reading the book.

“And?”

“I think it has made windows more complicated.”

He seemed pleased.

This is why one must be careful with people who recommend literature professionally.

I am still reading it.

More slowly now.