I’m reading Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet from cover to cover. It wasn’t written that way, but Richard Zenith’s choices cluster thematically. It’s a book that teaches you how to read it as you go.

Text 22 ends, God Is the Fact That We Exist and That’s Not All. Recently spending time with Chesterton’s Orthodoxy immediately conjured up a dialogue between Pessoa and Chesterton.

Chesterton would have seized on this with delight, then turned it inside out. For Chesterton the not all points upward; existence is a gift, and the giver exceeds the gift. The world astonishes because it did not have to be, and behind that not having to be stands a will that willed it. The not all is gratitude discovering its object.

Pessoa appears to mean something quite different. His not all points nowhere. Existence is divine but divinity has neither face, will, nor intention. The astonishment remains; the giver vanishes. God is the surplus that existence cannot contain, spilling past every formulation, including this one.

Perhaps they agree over a final coffee that existence is not self-explanatory. They would have had nothing else to say to each other.