If Kafkaesque is, why can't Pessoan be?

I will be the first to admit that I am one of the least well-read poets
you will come across. And no, that doesn't refer to any genre
in particular; I am as bad about reading poetry as I am about
reading fiction. Maybe because I just don't have the time I
used to have. Or because when I have time, I would rather
write than read. Or this, and that. Ad infinitum.

But it wasn't always so. I still remember my days as a
struggling copywriter in a small, one bedroom flat (does
anyone make them still here in Hyderabad?) at a quaintly
named locality called Golkonda X Roads (near / in Gandhinagar
and nowhere near Golkonda fort) when my daily diet used
to be of books bought cheaply at Sunday Market (Abids) or
carefully (selected, weighed, half-read and then) bought at
Walden or (highly recommended and) lent by this or
that "intellectual" or "radical" friend.

For, I used to have quite a few of "intellectual" / "radical"
friends, mostly left-leaning and socialist / naxalite in
terms of ideology who used to frequent my place as a BYOB
destination for conversations dealing with anything and
everything under the sky and for sessions where rum-loosened
tongues would be raised in unrestrained singing. And while
they would bring down the roof with ballads like "Long March" and
poems by Sri Sri and other notables, I would pitch in with
soulful and sombre (or so I would like to believe) renditions
of "Dil hoon hoon kare..." and "Aa chal ke tujhe, main le
ke chaloon..."

Those were the days... when it was routine on my part to
finish a book a day. Or even two at times. And my reading
list was eclectic (as befitting a bright-MBA-turned-copywriter
who was willing to read any author at least once, and
picking up books at Rs.2 and Rs.3 each).

I confess to have continued reading the odd Nick Carter,
the little more occasional Harold Robbins, the frequent
Louis L'amour and a bit more frequenter Alistair Maclean -- in
keeping with my post-adolescent reading list (in addition to
all that a bright MBA would consider hot -- like Stephen Covey,
Jack Trout, etc.), but it was around this time that I read
voraciously of authors like Marquez, Naipaul, Krishnamurti (Jiddu),
Gibran (Khalil), Michener, Neruda, Raja Rao and others I sadly
don't remember.

And it was also around this time that I read Kafka for the
first time and probably had a brush with Pessoa too. I say
"probably" because while I continued to read Kafka off and on,
I don't remember having read anything by Fernando Pessoa in those
days or the days that followed (when I had the luxury of having
another well-read intellectual friend in my life -- one far more
prettier than the left-leaning radicals -- and was gifted both
amazing conversations and books), I somehow feel I
must have read him back then too.

Why? You may ask. Because on many days and most evenings,
especially those when there were no singing sessions, my setting
was spartan, bookish, labouriously slow (I used to maintain a diary
and also used to write poetry then) and Pessoan. When entire
days would go to recording the lengthy demise of a cigarette pack
or in putting down 8-10 lines onto a page in the form of a poem. Or
to sitting in a chair in the narrow balcony and observing the cows
and buffaloes in the sprawling khatal 5-6 floors below. Observing the
highlights -- being milked and washed down -- of a bovine life
comprising of the continual mooing for food and the mucking up
of respective pens / stakeouts.

Maybe most of those observings and most of the relative inertia
and ennui that I let brew in me -- in a one bedroom flat with
narrow windows to the world -- was because of my disconnect --
as a struggling copywriter -- with what was my immediate world
back then. Or maybe it was when I started developing a 'writer's
disquiet", but I somehow still feel I must have read a bit of
Pessoa those days. I mean, I am sure somewhere something Pessoan
must have contributed to making me "angsty".

Hell, I have nothing much to show in terms of writing from those
days, but (immaterial of whether I did read Pessoa or not) I do
consider those days as a formative phases in my life, when I probably
let my identity and location as a writer take root in me.

And in all probability, the credit for that could be a Pessoan
(or some other) page of writing with power (and brutal frankness)
as moving as that in the words below --

"I envy -- but I'm not sure that I envy -- those for whom a
biography can be written, or who could write their own. In these
random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I
indifferently narrate my factless autobiography, my lifeless
history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing,
it's because I have nothing to say.

What is there to confess that's worthwhile or useful? What has
happened to us has happened to everyone or only to us; if
to everyone, this it's no novelty, and if only to us, then
it won't be understood. If I write what I feel, it's to reduce
the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because
everything is unimportant. I make landscapes out of what I feel.
I make holidays out of my sensations. I can easily understand
women who embroider out of sorrow or who crochet because life
exists. My elderly aunt would play solitaire throughout the endless
evening. These confessions of what I feel are my solitaire. I don't
interrupt them like those who read cards to tell the future. I don't
probe them, because in solitaire the cards don't have any special
significance. I unwind myself like a multicoloured skein, or I make
string figures of myself, like those woven on spread fingers and
passed from child to child. I take care only that my thumb not miss
its loop. Then I turn over my hand and the figure changes. And I
start over.

To live is to crochet according to a pattern we were given. But
while doing it the mind is at liberty, and all enchanted princes can
stroll in their parks between one and another plunge of the hooked
ivory needle. Needlework of things...Intervals...Nothing...

Besides, what can I expect from myself? My sensations in all their
horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling...A sharp mind
that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep
me entertained...A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like
a living child...Yes, crochet... "

page 10-11, "The Book of Disquiet", Fernando Pessoa (translated
from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith).

Yes, I strongly recommend some Pessoan reading, or maybe again
I don't, this is deep and disturbingly "angsty" reading.

And yes, Pessoan certainly deserves to be a "word", I honestly don't
what it could "mean"; especially these days when every word has to
or is expected to have a literal meaning. Is there a singular meaning
for angst or disquiet?