The Book of Disquiet (25 page)

I can imagine that I’m everything, because I’m nothing. If I were something, I wouldn’t be able to imagine. An assistant bookkeeper can dream he is the Roman emperor, but the King of England cannot, for in his dreams the King of England is precluded from being any king other than the one he is. His reality won’t let him feel.*

The slope leads to the mill, but effort leads to nothing.

It was an early autumn afternoon, when the sky has a cold, dead warmth, and clouds smother the light with blankets of moisture.

Destiny gave me only two things: accounting ledgers and a talent for dreaming.

Dreaming is the worst of drugs, because it’s the most natural of all. It works its way into our habits like no other drug can. We take it unawares, like a poison slipped in a drink. It doesn’t hurt, doesn’t
make you pale, and won’t knock you out, but the soul that takes it can’t be cured, for it can never let go of its poison, which is its very own self.

Like a pageant in the mist.....

In dreams I learned to crown the
foreheads of the ordinary with images; to say the banal with mystery and the simple with meanders; to gild, with the sun of artifice, the dark corners and forgotten furniture; and, whenever I write, to give music (as if lulling myself) to the fluid phrases of my fixation.

After a bad night’s sleep, nobody likes us. The sleep which deserted us took with it something that made us human. We feel a latent irritation that even seems to imbue the inorganic air around us. It’s we, after all, who deserted ourselves; it’s between us and us that the silent battle of diplomacy is fought.

Today I’ve dragged my feet and heavy fatigue through the streets. My soul has been reduced to a tied-up ball of thread, and what I am and have been, which is me, forgot its name. I don’t know if I’ll have a tomorrow. All I know is that I didn’t sleep, and the confusion I feel at certain moments imposes long silences on my internal speech.

Ah, the huge parks enjoyed by others, the gardens familiar to so many, the tree-lined paths where people who will never know me walk! I stagnate between sleepless nights, as one who never dared to be superficial, and my meditation is startled awake like a dream when it ends.

I’m a widowed house, cloistered in itself, haunted by shy and furtive ghosts. I’m always in the next room, or they are, and trees loudly rustle all around me. I wander and find; I find because I wander. Ah, it’s you, my childhood days, dressed up in pinafores!

And during all of this I walk down the street, a wandering sleepyhead, a stray leaf. Some slow wind has swept me off the ground and I drift, like the end of twilight, among the details of the landscape. My eyelids weigh heavy on my dragging feet. Because I’m walking I feel
like sleeping. My mouth is shut as if to seal my lips. I walk the way a ship sinks.

No, I didn’t sleep, but I’m more myself when I haven’t slept and still can’t sleep. I’m truly I in the incidental and symbolic eternity of this half-souled state in which I delude myself. One or two people look at me as if they knew me and found me strange. I’m vaguely aware of looking back at them, with eyes I can feel under the eyelids that rub against their surface, but I’d rather not know about the world’s existence.

I’m sleepy, very sleepy, totally sleepy!

The generation I belong to was born into a world where those with a brain as well as a heart couldn’t find any support. The destructive work of previous generations left us a world that offered no security in the religious sphere, no guidance in the moral sphere, and no tranquillity in the political sphere. We were born into the midst of metaphysical anguish, moral anxiety and political disquiet. Inebriated with objective formulas, with the mere methods of reason and science, the generations that preceded us did away with the foundations of the Christian faith, for their biblical criticism – progressing from textual to mythological criticism – reduced the gospels and the earlier scriptures of the Jews to a doubtful heap of myths, legends and mere literature, while their scientific criticism gradually revealed the mistakes and ingenuous notions of the gospels’ primitive ‘science’. At the same time, the spirit of free inquiry brought all metaphysical problems out into the open, and with them all the religious problems that had to do with metaphysics. Drunk with a hazy notion they called ‘positivism’, these generations criticized all morality and scrutinized all rules of life, and all that remained from the clash of doctrines was the certainty of none of them and the grief over there being no certainty. A society so undisciplined in its cultural foundations could obviously not help but be a victim, politically, of its own chaos, and so we woke up to a world eager for social innovations, a world that gleefully
pursued a freedom it didn’t grasp and a progress it had never defined.

But while the sloppy criticism of our fathers bequeathed us the impossibility of being Christians, it didn’t bequeath us an acceptance of the impossibility; while it bequeathed us a disbelief in established moral codes, it didn’t bequeath us an indifference to morality and the rules for peaceful human coexistence; while it left the thorny problem of politics in doubt, it didn’t leave our minds unconcerned about how to solve it. Our fathers blithely wreaked destruction, for they lived in a time that was still informed by the solidity of the past. The very thing they destroyed was what gave strength to society and enabled them to destroy without noticing that the building was cracking. We inherited the destruction and its aftermath.

Today the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. Today the right to live and triumph is awarded on virtually the same basis as admission into an insane asylum: an inability to think, amorality, and nervous excitability.

On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it’s still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there’s something understandable.

Metaphysical theories that can give us the momentary illusion that we’ve explained the unexplainable; moral theories that can fool us for an hour into thinking we finally know which of all the closed doors leads to virtue; political theories that convince us for a day that we’ve solved some problem, when there are no solvable problems except in
mathematics… May our attitude towards life be summed up in this consciously futile activity, in this preoccupation that gives no pleasure but at least keeps us from feeling the presence of pain.

There’s no better sign that a civilization has reached its height than the awareness, in its members, of the futility of all effort, given that we’re ruled by implacable laws, which nothing can repeal or obstruct. We may be slaves shackled to the whim of gods who are stronger than us, but they’re not any better, being subject – like us – to the iron hand of an abstract Fate, which is superior to justice and kindness, indifferent to good and evil.

We are death. What we call life is the slumber of our real life, the death of what we really are. The dead are born, they don’t die. The worlds are switched around in our eyes. We’re dead when we think we’re living; we start living when we die.

The relation that exists between sleep and life is the same that exists between what we call life and what we call death. We’re sleeping, and this life is a dream, not in a metaphorical or poetic sense, but in a very real sense.

Everything in our activities that we hold to be superior participates in death and is death. What are ideals but an admission that life is worthless? What is art but the negation of life? A statue is a dead body, chiselled to capture death in incorruptible matter. Pleasure itself, which seems to be an immersion in life, is in fact an immersion in ourselves, a destruction of the relations between us and life, an excited shadow of death.

The very act of living means dying, since with each day we live, we have one less day of life remaining.

We inhabit dreams, we are shadows roaming through impossible forests, in which the trees are houses, customs, ideas, ideals and philosophies.

Never finding God, and never even knowing if God exists! Passing
from world to world, from incarnation to incarnation, forever coddled by illusion, forever caressed by error…

Never arriving at Truth, and never resting! Never reaching union with God! Never completely at peace but always with a hint of peace, always with a longing for it!

There’s a childish instinct in humanity that makes the proudest among us, if he’s a man and not crazy, long – Blessed Father! – for the paternal hand that would guide us, in whatever shape or form as long as it guides us, through the world’s mystery and confusion. Each of us is a speck of dust that the wind of life lifts up and then drops. We have to depend on a stronger force, to place our small hand in another hand, for today is always uncertain, the sky always far, and life always alien.

Those of us who have risen highest merely have a deeper awareness of how uncertain and empty everything is.

Perhaps we’re guided by an illusion; we’re surely not guided by consciousness.

If one day I become financially secure, so that I can freely write and publish, I know I’ll miss this precarious life in which I hardly write and don’t publish at all. I’ll miss it not only because it will be a life, however mediocre, that I’ll never have again, but also because every sort of life has a special quality and particular pleasure, and when we take up another life, even a better one, that particular pleasure isn’t as good, that special quality is less special, until they fade away, and there’s something missing.

If one day I succeed in carrying the cross of my intention to the good Calvary, I’ll find another calvary on that good Calvary, and I’ll miss
the time when I was futile, mediocre and imperfect. I will in some sense be less.

I’m tired. I had a long day full of idiotic work in this almost deserted office. Two employees are out sick and the others aren’t here. I’m alone, except for the office boy in the back. I miss the future when I’ll be able to look back and miss all of this, however absurdly.

I’m tempted to ask whatever gods there be to keep me here, as if in a strong-box, safe from life’s sorrows as well as its joys.

In the faint shadows cast by the last light before evening gives way to night, I like to roam unthinkingly through what the city is changing into, and I walk as if nothing had a cure. I carry with me a vague sadness that’s pleasant to my imagination, less so to my senses. As my feet wander I inwardly skim, without reading, a book of text interspersed with swift images, from which I leisurely form an idea that’s never completed.

There are those who read as swiftly as they see, and they finish without having taken it all in. So I, from the book skimmed in my soul, glean a hazy story, remembrances of another wanderer, snatches of descriptions of twilights or moonlights, with garden paths in the middle, and various silk figures passing by, passing by…

I don’t discriminate between one and another tedium. I move along in the street, in the evening and in my dreamed reading all at the same time, and the roads are really travelled. I emigrate and rest, as if aboard a ship that’s already on the high sea.

Suddenly the dead street lamps light up in unison on the two extensions of the long curved street. My sadness increases, as if with a thud. The book has finished. In the viscous air of the abstract street there is only an external thread of feeling, like the slobber of an idiot Destiny, dripping on my soul’s consciousness.

Another life, of the city at nightfall. Another soul, of one who watches the night. I walk uncertainly and allegorically, unreally sentient. I’m like a story that someone told, and so well was it told that I
took on just a hint of flesh at the beginning of one of the chapters of this novel that’s the world: ‘At that moment a man could be seen walking slowly down So-and-so Street.’

What do I have to do with life?

I bowed out of life before it began, for not even in dreams did I find it attractive. Dreams themselves wearied me, and this brought me a false, external sensation, as of having come to the end of an infinite road. I overflowed from myself to end up I don’t know where, and that’s where I’ve uselessly stagnated. I’m something that I used to be. I’m never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don’t know who’s seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.

I observe myself. I’m my own spectator. My sensations pass, like external things, before I don’t know what gaze of mine. I bore myself no matter what I do. All things, down to their roots in mystery, have the colour of my boredom.

The flowers Time gave me were already wilted. The only thing I can do is pluck their petals slowly. And this is so fraught with old age!