ABSTRACT
Without beginning or end, in its absolute fragmentariness, the Book of Disquiet is a form of infinite writing. Any point of entry will do because as much as the text pulls the reader into itself, threatening never to release her or him, it eschews any form of progress, either in terms of the individual narrator, or his surrounding society, or of History, and much less even of the text itself. At first sight there is nothing much to be said about Emily Dickinson and Fernando Pessoa. Except that there is everything to be said, starting from their relentless pursuit of paradox, their uncompromising questioning of form, poetical or otherwise, and their search for infinity. An encounter between Emily Dickinson and Fernando Pessoa was never possible in the way that an encounter between Pessoa and Walter Benjamin, given other circumstances, could very well have taken place.
