The Book of Disquiet (10 page)

But what was I thinking about before I got lost in seeing? I don’t know. Effort? Will? Life? A huge onslaught of light reveals a now almost entirely blue sky. But there is no peace – ah, there will never be! – at the bottom of my heart, an old well in a corner of the farm that was sold, a dust-coated memory of childhood shut up in the attic of someone else’s house. I have no peace, nor even – alas! – the desire to have it…

Only as a lack of personal hygiene can I understand my wallowing in this flat, invariable life I lead, this dust or filth stuck on the surface of never changing.*

We should wash our destiny the way we wash our body, and change life the way we change clothes – not to preserve life, as when we eat and sleep, but out of objective respect for ourselves, which is what personal hygiene is all about.

There are many people whose lack of hygiene is not a chosen condition but a shrugging of the intellect’s shoulders. And there are many whose dullness and sameness of life is not what they wanted for their life, nor the result of not having wanted any life, but just a dulling of their own self-awareness, a spontaneous irony of the intellect.

There are pigs repelled by their own filth that don’t draw away from it because the feeling of repulsion is so strong it paralyses, as when a frightened man freezes instead of fleeing the danger. There are pigs like me that wallow in their destiny, not drawing away from the banality of daily life because they’re enthralled by their own impotence. They’re like birds captivated by the thought of the snake, like flies that hover around branches without seeing a thing, until they’re within the sticky reach of the chameleon’s tongue.

In a similar sort of way, I promenade my conscious unconsciousness
along my tree branch of the usual. I promenade my destiny that goes forward, though I don’t go anywhere, and my time that advances, though I stay put. And the only thing that alleviates my monotony are these brief commentaries I make with respect to it. I’m grateful that my cell has windows inside the bars, and on the dust of the necessary that covers the panes I write my name in capital letters, my daily signature on my covenant with death.

With death? No, not even with death. Whoever lives like me doesn’t die: he terminates, wilts, devegetates. The place where he was remains without him being there; the street where he walked remains without him being seen on it; the house where he lived is inhabited by not-him. That’s all, and we call it nothing; but not even this tragedy of negation can be staged to applause, for we don’t even know for sure if it’s nothing, we, these vegetable manifestations of both truth and life, dust on both the outside and the inside of the panes, grandchildren of Destiny and stepchildren of God, who married Eternal Night when she was widowed by the Chaos that fathered us.

To depart from the Rua dos Douradores for the Impossible… To leave my desk for the Unknown… But with this journey intersected by Reason – the Great Book that says we existed.

The abstract intelligence produces a fatigue that’s the worst of all fatigues. It doesn’t weigh on us like bodily fatigue, nor disconcert like the fatigue of emotional experience. It’s the weight of our consciousness of the world, a shortness of breath in our soul.

Then, as if they were wind-blown clouds, all of the ideas in which we’ve felt life and all the ambitions and plans on which we’ve based our hopes for the future tear apart and scatter like ashes of fog, tatters of what wasn’t nor could ever be. And behind this disastrous rout, the black and implacable solitude of the desolate starry sky appears.

The mystery of life distresses and frightens us in many ways. Sometimes it comes upon us like a formless phantom, and the soul trembles
with the worst of fears – that of the monstrous incarnation of non-being. At other times it’s behind us, visible only as long as we don’t turn around to look at it, and it’s the truth in its profound horror of our never being able to know it.

But the horror that’s destroying me today is less noble and more corrosive. It’s a longing to be free of wanting to have thoughts, a desire to never have been anything, a conscious despair in every cell of my body and soul. It’s the sudden feeling of being imprisoned in an infinite cell. Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything?

And then I feel an overwhelming, absurd desire for a kind of Satanism before Satan, a desire that one day – a day without time or substance – an escape leading outside of God will be discovered, and our deepest selves will somehow cease participating in being and non-being.

There’s a sleepiness of our conscious attention that I can’t explain but that often attacks me, if something so hazy can be said to attack. I’ll be walking down a street as if I were sitting down, and my attention, although alert to everything, will have the inertia of a body completely at rest. I would be incapable of deliberately stepping aside for an approaching passer-by. I would be incapable of responding with words, or even with thoughts inside my mind, to a question asked me by a random stranger who happened to cross paths with my random presence. I would be incapable of having a desire, a hope, or anything at all representing a movement of my general will or even – if I may so speak – of the partial will belonging to each of my component parts. I would be incapable of thinking, of feeling, of wanting. And I walk, I roam, I keep going. Nothing in my movements (I notice by what others don’t notice) transmits my state of stagnation to the observable plane. And this spiritless state, which would be natural and therefore comfortable in someone lying down or reclining, is singularly uncomfortable, even painful, in a man walking down the street.

It’s like being intoxicated with inertia, drunk but with no enjoyment
in the drinking or in the drunkenness. It’s a sickness with no hope of recovery. It’s a lively death.

To live a dispassionate and cultured life in the open air of ideas, reading, dreaming and thinking of writing – a life so slow it constantly verges on tedium, but pondered enough never to find itself there. To live this life far from emotions and thought, living it only in the thought of emotions and in the emotion of thoughts. To goldenly stagnate in the sun, like a murky pond surrounded by flowers. To possess, in the shade, that nobility of spirit that makes no demands on life. To be in the whirl of the worlds like dust of flowers, sailing through the afternoon air on an unknown wind and falling, in the torpor of dusk, wherever it falls, lost among larger things. To be this with a sure understanding, neither happy nor sad, grateful to the sun for its brilliance and to the stars for their remoteness. To be no more, have no more, want no more… The music of the hungry beggar, the song of the blind man, the relic of the unknown wayfarer, the tracks in the desert of the camel without burden or destination…

I experience a feeling of inspiration and liberation as I passively reread those simple lines by Caeiro* that tell what naturally results from the smallness of his village. Since it is small, he says, there one can see more of the world than in the city, and so his village is larger than the city…

Because I’m the size of what I see
And not the size of my stature
.

Lines like these, which seem to spring into being on their own, independently of whoever says them, cleanse me of all the metaphysics
that I automatically tack on to life. After reading them, I step over to my window overlooking the narrow street, I look at the immense sky and the countless stars, and I’m free, with a winged splendour whose fluttering sends a shiver throughout my body.

‘I’m the size of what I see!’ Each time I think on this phrase with all my nerves, the more it seems destined to redesign the whole starry universe. ‘I’m the size of what I see!’ How large are the mind’s riches, ranging from the well of profound emotions to the distant stars that are reflected in it and so in some sense are there!

And since now I know I can see, I look upon the vast objective metaphysics of all the heavens with a certainty that makes me want to die singing. ‘I’m the size of what I see!’ And the vague moonlight, entirely mine, begins to mar with vagueness the blackish blue horizon.

I want to raise my arms and shout wild and strange things, to speak to the lofty mysteries, to affirm a new and vast personality to the boundless expanses of empty matter.

But I control myself and calm down. ‘I’m the size of what I see!’ And the phrase becomes my entire soul, I rest all my emotions on it, and over me, on the inside, as over the city on the outside, there descends an indecipherable peace from the hard moonlight that broadly begins to shine as the night falls.

…in the sad disarray of my confused emotions…

A twilight sadness made of fatigue and false renunciations, a tedium of feeling anything at all, a pain as of a choked sob or a discovered truth… A landscape of abdications unfolds in my oblivious soul: walkways lined by abandoned gestures, high flower beds of dreams that weren’t even well dreamed, incongruities like hedges separating deserted paths, suppositions like old pools whose fountains are broken. It all gets entangled and squalidly looms in the sad disarray of my confused sensations.

To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving. I know nothing more simultaneously false and telling than the statement by Leonardo da Vinci that we cannot love or hate something until we’ve understood it.

Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other’s presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.

Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness. The presence of another person – of any person whatsoever – instantly slows down my thinking, and while for a normal man contact with others is a stimulus to spoken expression and wit, for me it is a counterstimulus, if this compound word be linguistically permissible. When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like an image in a mirror.

The mere thought of having to enter into contact with someone else makes me nervous. A simple invitation to have dinner with a friend produces an anguish in me that’s hard to define. The idea of any social obligation whatsoever – attending a funeral, dealing with someone about an office matter, going to the station to wait for someone I know or don’t know – the very idea disturbs my thoughts for an entire day, and sometimes I even start worrying the night before, so that I sleep
badly. When it takes place, the dreaded encounter is utterly insignificant, justifying none of my anxiety, but the next time is no different: I never learn to learn.

‘My habits are of solitude, not of men.’ I don’t know if it was Rousseau or Senancour who said this. But it was some mind of my species, it being perhaps too much to say of my race.

A firefly flashes forward at regular intervals. Around me the dark countryside is a huge lack of sound that almost smells pleasant. The peace of all this is painful and oppressive. An amorphous tedium smothers me.

I rarely go to the country, and almost never for a whole day or to spend the night. But since the friend in whose house I’m staying wouldn’t let me turn down his invitation, today I came out here, feeling all embarrassed, like a bashful person going to a big party. I arrived here in good spirits, I’ve enjoyed the fresh air and wide-open landscape, I ate a good lunch and supper, and now, late at night, in my unlit room, the uncertain surroundings fill me with anxiety.

The window of the room where I’m to sleep looks out on to the open field, on to an indefinite field that is all fields, on to the vast and vaguely starry night, in which a breeze that cannot be heard is felt. Sitting next to the window, I contemplate with my senses the nothingness of the universal life outside. There is, at this hour, a disquieting harmony, extending from the visible invisibility of everything to the slightly rough wood of the white sill, where my left hand rests sideways on the old, cracked paint.

And yet how often I’ve longingly envisioned this peace that I would almost flee, if I could do so easily and gracefully! How often back home, among the tall buildings and narrow streets, I’ve supposed that peace, prose and definitive reality would be here among natural things rather than there, where the tablecloth of civilization makes us forget the already painted pine it covers! And now that I’m here, feeling healthy and tired after a good long day, I’m restless, I feel trapped, I’m homesick.

I don’t know if it happens only to me or to everyone who, through civilization, has been born a second time. But for me, and perhaps for other people like me, it seems that what’s artificial has become natural, and what’s natural is now strange. Or rather, it’s not that what’s artificial has become natural; it’s simply that what’s natural has changed. I have no use for motor vehicles. I have no use for the products of science – telephones, telegraphs – which make life easy, nor for its fanciful by-products – phonographs, radios – which make life amusing for those who are amused by such things.

None of that interests me, none of it appeals. But I love the Tagus because of the big city along its shore. I delight in the sky because I see it from the fourth floor on a downtown street. Nothing nature or the country can give me compares with the jagged majesty of the tranquil, moonlit city as seen from Graça or São Pedro de Alcântara.* There are no flowers for me like the variegated colouring of Lisbon on a sunny day.

The beauty of a naked body is only appreciated by cultures that use clothing. Modesty is important for sensuality like resistance for energy.