The Book of Disquiet (15 page)

Whirls, whirlpools, in life’s fluid futility! In this large downtown square, the soberly multicoloured flow of people passes by, changes course, forms pools, divides into streams, converges into brooks. While my eyes distractedly watch, I inwardly fashion this aquatic image which is more suitable than any other (in part because I thought it would rain) for this random movements.

As I wrote this last sentence, which for me says exactly what it means, I thought it might be useful to put at the end of my book, when I finally publish it, a few ‘Non-Errata’ after the ‘Errata’, and to note:
the phrase ‘this random movements’ on page so-and-so, is correct as
is, with the noun in the plural and the demonstrative in the singular
. But what does this have to do with what I was thinking? Nothing, which is why I let myself think it.

Around the square the streetcars grumble and clang. They look like giant yellow mobile matchboxes, in which a child stuck a slanted used match to serve as a mast. When jerking into motion, they loudly and ironly screech. Around the statue in the middle, the pigeons are like black crumbs that flit about as if they were being scattered by the wind. The plump creatures take tiny steps with their tiny feet.

And they are shadows, shadows…

Seen from up close, people are monotonously diverse. Vieira* said that Frei Luís de Sousa* wrote about ‘the common with singularity’. These people are singular with commonality, contrary to the style of
The Life of the Archbishop
. It seems to me a pity, though I’m indifferent to it all. I ended up here for no reason, like everything in life.

Towards the east, only partially visible, the city rises almost straight up in a static assault on the Castle. The pallid sun, hidden from view by the sudden outcrop of houses, bathes them in a blurry halo. The sky is a damply whitish blue. Perhaps a gentler version of yesterday’s rain will return today. The wind seems to be easterly, perhaps because it smells vaguely ripe and green, like the adjacent market. There are more out-of-towners on the eastern than the western side of the square. With a racket like carpeted gun reports, the corrugated metal blinds of the market lower upwards; I don’t know why, but that’s the motion the sound suggests to me – perhaps because they usually make this sound when lowered, but now they’re being raised. Everything has an explanation.

Suddenly I’m all alone in the world. I see all this from the summit of a mental rooftop. I’m alone in the world. To see is to be distant. To see clearly is to halt. To analyse is to be foreign. No one who passes by touches me. Around me there is only air. I’m so isolated I can feel the distance between me and my suit. I’m a child in a nightshirt carrying a dimly lit candle and traversing a huge empty house. Living shadows surround me – only shadows, offspring of the stiff furniture* and of the light I carry. Here in the sunlight they surround me but are people.

Today, during a break from feeling, I reflected on the style of my prose. Exactly how do I write? I had, like many others, the perverted desire to adopt a system and a norm. It’s true that I wrote before having the norm and the system, but so did everyone else.

Analysing myself this afternoon, I’ve discovered that my stylistic system is based on two principles, and in the best tradition of the best classical writers I immediately uphold these two principles as general foundations of all good style: 1) to express what one feels exactly as it is felt – clearly, if it is clear; obscurely, if obscure; confusedly, if confused – and 2) to understand that grammar is an instrument and not a law.

Let’s suppose there’s a girl with masculine gestures. An ordinary human creature will say, ‘That girl acts like a boy.’ Another ordinary human creature, with some awareness that to speak is to tell, will say, ‘That girl is a boy.’ Yet another, equally aware of the duties of expression, but inspired by a fondness for concision (which is the sensual delight of thought), will say, ‘That boy.’ I’ll say, ‘She’s a boy’, violating one of the basic rules of grammar – that pronouns must agree in gender and number with the nouns they refer to. And I’ll have spoken correctly; I’ll have spoken absolutely, photographically, outside the norm, the accepted, the insipid. I won’t have spoken, I’ll have told.

In establishing usage, grammar makes valid and invalid divisions. For example, it divides verbs into transitive and intransitive. But a man who knows how to say what he says must sometimes make a transitive verb intransitive so as to photograph what he feels instead of seeing it in the dark, like the common lot of human animals. If I want to say I exist, I’ll say, ‘I am.’ If I want to say I exist as a separate entity, I’ll say, ‘I am myself.’ But if I want to say I exist as an entity that addresses and acts on itself, exercising the divine function of self-creation, then I’ll make
to be
into a transitive verb. Triumphantly and anti-grammatically supreme, I’ll speak of ‘amming myself’. I’ll have stated a philosophy in just two words. Isn’t this infinitely preferable to saying nothing in forty sentences? What more can we demand from philosophy and diction?

Let grammar rule the man who doesn’t know how to think what he feels. Let it serve those who are in command when they express themselves. It is told of Sigismund, King of Rome,* that when someone pointed out a grammatical mistake he had made in a speech, he answered, ‘I am King of Rome, and above all grammar.’ And he went down in history as Sigismund
super-grammaticam
. A marvellous symbol! Every man who knows how to say what he has to say is, in his way, King of Rome. The title is royal, and the reason for it is imperial.*

When I consider all the people I know or have heard of who write prolifically or who at least produce lengthy and finished works, I feel an ambivalent envy, a disdainful admiration, an incoherent mixture of mixed feelings.

The creation of something complete and whole, be it good or bad – and if it’s never entirely good, it’s very often not all bad – yes, the creation of something complete seems to stir in me above all a feeling of envy. A completed thing is like a child; although imperfect like everything human, it belongs to us like our own children.

And I, whose self-critical spirit allows me only to see my lapses and defects, I, who dare write only passages, fragments, excerpts of the non-existent, I myself – in the little that I write – am also imperfect.

Better either the complete work, which is in any case a work, even if it’s bad, or the absence of words, the unbroken silence of the soul that knows it is incapable of acting.

Perhaps everything in life is the degeneration of something else. Perhaps existence is always an approximation – an advent, or surroundings.

Just as Christianity was but the prophetic degeneration of a debased
Neo-Platonism, the Romanization of Hellenism through Judaism,* so our age – senile and carcinogenic* – is the multiple deviation of all great goals, concordant or conflicting, whose defeat gave rise to all the negations we use to affirm ourselves.*

We live an intermission with band music.

But what do I, in this fourth-floor room, have to do with sociologies such as these?* They are all a dream to me, like Babylonian princesses, and to occupy ourselves with humanity is a futile enterprise – an archaeology of the present.

I’ll disappear in the fog as a foreigner to all life, as a human island detached from the dream of the sea, as a uselessly existing ship that floats on the surface of everything.

Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity. If we knew the truth, we’d see it; everything else is systems and approximations. The inscrutability of the universe is quite enough for us to think about; to want to actually understand it is to be less than human, since to be human is to realize it can’t be understood.

I’m handed faith like a sealed package on a strange-looking platter and am expected to accept it without opening it. I’m handed science, like a knife on a plate, to cut the folios of a book whose pages are blank. I’m handed doubt, like dust inside a box – but why give me a box if all it contains is dust?

I write because I don’t know, and I use whatever abstract and lofty term for Truth a given emotion requires. If the emotion is clear and decisive, then I naturally speak of the gods, thereby framing it in a consciousness of the world’s multiplicity. If the emotion is profound, then I naturally speak of God, thereby placing it in a unified consciousness. If the emotion is a thought, I naturally speak of Fate, thereby shoving it up against the wall.*

Sometimes the mere rhythm of a sentence will require God instead
of the Gods; at other times the two syllables of ‘the Gods’ will be necessary, and I’ll verbally change universe; on still other occasions what will matter is an internal rhyme, a metrical displacement, or a burst of emotion, and polytheism or monotheism will prevail accordingly. The Gods are contingent on style.

Where is God, even if he doesn’t exist? I want to pray and to weep, to repent of crimes I didn’t commit, to enjoy the feeling of forgiveness like a caress that’s more than maternal.

A lap in which to weep, but a huge and shapeless lap, spacious like a summer evening, and yet cosy, warm, feminine, next to a fireplace… To be able to weep in that lap over inconceivable things, failures I can’t remember, poignant things that don’t exist, and huge shuddering doubts concerning I don’t know what future…

A second childhood, an old nursemaid like I used to have, and a tiny bed where I’d be lulled to sleep by tales of adventure that my flagging attention would hardly even follow – stories that once ran through infant hair as blond as wheat… And all of this enormous and eternal, guaranteed for ever and having God’s lofty stature, there in the sad, drowsy depths of the ultimate reality of Things…

A lap or a cradle or a warm arm around my neck… A softly singing voice that seems to want to make me cry… A fire crackling in the fireplace… Heat in the winter… My consciousness listlessly wandering… And then a peaceful, soundless dream in a huge space, like a moon whirling among the stars…

When I put away my artifices and lovingly arrange in a corner all my toys, words, images and phrases, so dear to me I feel like kissing them, then I become so small and innocuous, so alone in a room so large and sad, so profoundly sad!

Who am I, finally, when I’m not playing? A poor orphan left out in the cold among sensations, shivering on the street corners of Reality, forced to sleep on the steps of Sadness and to eat the bread offered by
Fantasy. I was told that my father, whom I never knew, is called God, but the name means nothing to me. Sometimes at night, when I’m feeling lonely, I call out to him with tears and form an idea of him I can love. But then it occurs to me that I don’t know him, that perhaps he’s not how I imagine, that perhaps this figure has never been the father of my soul…

When will all this end – these streets where I drag my misery, these steps where I coldly crouch and feel the night running its hands through my tatters? If only God would one day come and take me to his house and give me warmth and affection… Sometimes I think about this and weep with joy just because I can think about it. But the wind blows down the street, and the leaves fall on the pavement. I lift my eyes and look at the stars, which make no sense at all. And all that remains of this is I, a poor abandoned child that no Love wanted as its adopted son and no Friendship accepted as its playmate.

I’m so cold, so weary in my abandonment. Go and find my Mother, O Wind. Take me in the Night to the house I never knew. Give me back my nursemaid, O vast Silence, and my crib and the lullaby that used to put me to sleep.

The only attitude worthy of a superior man is to persist in an activity he recognizes is useless, to observe a discipline he knows is sterile, and to apply certain norms of philosophical and metaphysical thought that he considers utterly inconsequential.

To recognize reality as a form of illusion and illusion as a form of reality is equally necessary and equally useless. The contemplative life, to exist at all, must see real-life accidents as the scattered premises of an unattainable conclusion, but it must also consider the contingencies
of dreams as in some sense worthy of the attention we give them, since this attention is what makes us contemplatives.

Anything and everything, depending on how one sees it, is a marvel or a hindrance, an all or a nothing, a path or a problem. To see something in constantly new ways is to renew and multiply it. That is why the contemplative person, without ever leaving his village, will nevertheless have the whole universe at his disposal. There’s infinity in a cell or a desert. One can sleep cosmically against a rock.

But there are times in our meditation – and they come to all who meditate – when everything is suddenly worn-out, old, seen and reseen, even though we have yet to see it. Because no matter how much we meditate on something, and through meditation transform it, whatever we transform it into can only be the substance of meditation. At a certain point we are overwhelmed by a yearning for life, by a desire to know without the intellect, to meditate with only our senses, to think in a tactile or sensory mode, from inside the object of our thought, as if it were a sponge and we were water. And so we also have our night, and the profound weariness produced by emotions becomes even more profound, since in this case the emotions come from thought. But it’s a night without slumber or moon or stars, a night as if all had been turned inside out – infinity internalized and ready to burst, and the day converted into the black lining of an unfamiliar suit.

Yes, it’s always better to be the human slug that loves what it doesn’t know, the leech that’s unaware of how repugnant it is. To ignore so as to live! To feel in order to forget! Ah, and all the events lost in the green-white wake of age-old ships, like a cold spit off the tall rudder that served as a nose under the eyes of the ancient cabins!