The Book of Disquiet (27 page)

But as an ironic spectator of myself, I’ve never lost interest in seeing what life brings. And since I now know beforehand that every vague hope will end in disillusion, I have the special delight of already enjoying the disillusion with the hope, like the bitter with the sweet that makes the sweet sweeter by way of contrast. I’m a sullen strategist who, having never won a battle, has learned to derive pleasure from mapping out the details of his inevitable retreat on the eve of each new engagement.

My destiny, which has pursued me like a malevolent creature, is to be able to desire only what I know I’ll never get. If I see the nubile figure of a girl in the street and imagine for the slightest moment, however nonchalantly, what it would be like if she were mine, it’s a dead certainty that ten steps past my dream she’ll meet the man who’s obviously her husband or lover. A romantic would make a tragedy out of this; a stranger to the situation would see it as a comedy; I, however, mix the two things, since I’m romantic in myself and a stranger to myself, and I turn the page to yet another irony.

Some say that without hope life is impossible, others that with hope it’s empty. For me, since I’ve stopped hoping or not hoping, life is simply an external picture that includes me and that I look at, like a show without a plot, made only to please the eyes – an incoherent dance, a rustling of leaves in the wind, clouds in which the sunlight changes colour, ancient streets that wind every which way around the city.

I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write. I unroll myself in sentences and paragraphs, I punctuate myself. In my arranging and rearranging of images I’m like a child using newspaper to dress up as a king, and in the way I create rhythm with a series of words I’m like a lunatic adorning my hair with dried flowers that are still alive in my dreams. And above all I’m calm, like a rag doll that has become conscious of itself and occasionally shakes its head to make the tiny bell on top of its pointed cap (a component part of the same head) produce a sound, the jingling life of a dead man, a feeble notice to Fate.

But how often, in the middle of this peaceful dissatisfaction, my conscious emotion is slowly filled with a feeling of emptiness and tedium for thinking this way! How often I feel, as if hearing a voice behind intermittent sounds, that I myself am the underlying bitterness of this life so alien to human life – a life in which nothing happens except in its self-awareness! How often, waking up for a moment from this exile that’s me, I get a glimpse of how much better it would be to be a complete nobody, the happy man who at least has real bitterness, the contented man who feels fatigue instead of tedium, who suffers instead of imagining he suffers, who kills himself, yes, instead of watching himself die!

I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads. Whatever I feel is felt (against my will) so that I can write that I felt it. Whatever I think is promptly put into words, mixed with images that undo it, cast into rhythms that are something else altogether. From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I. I plumbed myself and dropped the plumb; I spend my life wondering if I’m deep or not, with no remaining plumb except my gaze that shows me – blackly vivid in the mirror at the bottom of the well – my own face that observes me observing it.

I’m like a playing card belonging to an old and unrecognizable suit – the sole survivor of a lost deck. I have no meaning, I don’t know my worth, there’s nothing I can compare myself with to discover what I am, and to make such a discovery would be of no use to anyone. And so, describing myself in image after image – not without truth, but with lies mixed in – I end up more in the images than in me, stating myself until I no longer exist, writing with my soul for ink, useful for nothing except writing. But the reaction ceases, and again I resign myself. I go back to whom I am, even if it’s nothing. And a hint of tears that weren’t cried makes my stiff eyes burn; a hint of anguish that wasn’t felt gets caught in my dry throat. But I don’t even know what I would have cried over, if I’d cried, nor why it is that I didn’t cry over it. The fiction follows me, like my shadow. And what I want is to sleep.

A terrible weariness fills the soul of my heart. I feel sad because of whom I never was, and I don’t know with what kind of nostalgia I miss him. I fell, with every sunset, against my hopes and certainties.

There are people who truly suffer because they weren’t able, in real life, to live with Mr Pickwick or to shake Mr Wardle’s hand. I’m one of those people. I’ve wept genuine tears over that novel, for not having lived in that time and with those people, real people.

The disasters of novels are always beautiful, because the blood in them isn’t real blood and those who die in them don’t rot, nor is rottenness rotten in novels.

When Mr Pickwick is ridiculous he’s not ridiculous, for it all happens in a novel. Perhaps the novel is a more perfect life and reality, which God creates through us. Perhaps we live only to create it. It seems that civilizations exist only to produce art and literature; words are what speak for them and remain. How do we know that these extra-human figures aren’t truly real? It tortures my mind to think this might be the case…

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are. The sensation we come to have of ourselves is of a deserted field at
dusk, sad with reeds next to a river without boats, its glistening waters blackening between wide banks.

I don’t know if these feelings are a slow madness born of disconsolation or if they’re reminiscences of some other world in which we’ve lived – jumbled, criss-crossing remembrances, like things seen in dreams, absurd in the form they come to us but not in their origin, if we knew what it was. I don’t know if we weren’t in fact other beings, whose greater completeness we can sense today, incompletely, forming at best a sketchy notion of their lost solidity in the two dimensions of our present lives, mere shadows of what they were.

I know these thoughts of the emotion ache bitterly in the soul. Our inability to conceive of anything they could correspond to, the impossibility of finding a substitute for what they embrace in our imagination – all of this weighs like a harsh sentence handed down no one knows where, or by whom, or why.

But what remains from feeling all this is an inevitable disaffection with life and all its gestures, a foretasted weariness of all desires in all their manifestations, a generic distaste for all feelings. In these times of acute grief, it is impossible – even in dreams – to be a lover, to be a hero, to be happy. All of this is empty, even in our idea of what it is. It’s all spoken in another language that we can’t grasp – mere nonsense syllables to our understanding. Life is hollow, the soul hollow, the world hollow. All gods die a death greater than death. All is emptier than the void. All is a chaos of things that are nothing.

If, on thinking this, I look up to see if reality can quench my thirst, I see inexpressive façades, inexpressive faces, inexpressive gestures. Stones, bodies, ideas – all dead. All movements are one great standstill. Nothing means anything to me. Nothing is known to me, not because it’s unfamiliar but because I don’t know what it is. The world has slipped away. And in the bottom of my soul – as the only reality of this moment – there’s an intense and invisible grief, a sadness like the sound of someone crying in a dark room.

I sorely grieve over time’s passage. It’s always with exaggerated emotion that I leave something behind, whatever it may be. The miserable rented room where I lived for a few months, the dinner table at the provincial hotel where I stayed for six days, even the sad waiting room at the station where I spent two hours waiting for a train – yes, their loss grieves me. But the special things of life – when I leave them behind and realize with all of my nerves’ sensibility that I’ll never see or have them again, at least not in that exact same moment – grieve me metaphysically. A chasm opens up in my soul and a cold breeze of the hour of God blows across my pallid face.

Time! The past! Something – a voice, a song, a chance fragrance – lifts the curtain on my soul’s memories… That which I was and will never again be! That which I had and will never again have! The dead! The dead who loved me in my childhood. Whenever I remember them, my whole soul shivers and I feel exiled from all hearts, alone in the night of myself, weeping like a beggar before the closed silence of all doors.

The small cove with its small beach, cut off from the world by two miniature promontories, was my retreat from myself during those three days of holiday. The beach was reached by a crudely built stairway that began with wooden steps at the top and continued, halfway down, with steps cut directly into the rock, with a rusty iron handrail for support. And each time I went down that old stairway, and especially on the part made of stone, I stepped out of my own existence and found myself.

Occultists say (or at least some of them do) that the soul has supreme moments when it recalls, with the emotions or with some part of memory, a moment or an aspect or a shadow from a previous
incarnation. And since the soul returns to a time that is closer than the present to the beginning and origin of things, it experiences a sensation of childhood and of liberation.

In descending that now little-used stairway and slowly stepping out on to the forever deserted beach, it was as if I were using some magical technique to find myself nearer the monad that I perhaps am. Certain aspects and characteristics of my daily existence – represented in my normal self by desires, aversions, worries – vanished from me like fugitives from the law, fading into the shadows beyond recognition, and I attained a state of inward distance in which it was hard to remember yesterday or to believe that the self who lives in me day after day really belongs to me. My usual emotions, my regularly irregular habits, my conversations with others, my adaptations to the world’s social order – all of this seemed like things I’d read somewhere, like inert pages of a published biography, or details from some novel, in one of the middle chapters we read while thinking about something else, and the story-line slackens until it finally slithers away on the ground.

There on the beach, with no sound but that of the ocean waves and of the wind passing high overhead, like a large invisible aeroplane, I experienced dreams of a new sort – soft and shapeless things, marvels that made a deep impression, without images or emotions, clear like the sky and the water, and reverberating like the white whorls of ocean rising up from the depths of a vast truth: a tremulously slanting blue in the distance that acquired glistening, muddy-green hues as it approached, breaking with a great hissing its thousand crashing arms to scatter them over darkish sand where they left dry foam, and then gathering into itself all undertows, all return journeys to that original freedom, all nostalgias for God, all memories (like this one, shapeless and painless) of a prior state, blissful because it was so good or because it was different, a body made of nostalgia with a soul of foam, repose, death, the everything or the nothingness which – like a huge ocean – surrounds the island of castaways that is life.

And I slept without sleeping, already straying from what I’d seen through my feelings, a twilight of myself, a ripple of water among trees, the peace of wide rivers, the coolness of sad evenings, the slow panting in the white breast of the childhood sleep of contemplation.

The sweetness of having neither family nor companions, that pleasant taste as of exile, in which the pride of the expatriate subdues with a strange sensuality our vague anxiety about being far from home – all of this I enjoy in my own way, indifferently. Because one of the tenets of my mental attitude is that our attention to what we feel shouldn’t be unduly cultivated, and even dreams should be regarded with condescension, with an aristocratic awareness that they couldn’t exist without us. To give too much importance to a dream would be to give too much importance to something which, after all, broke away from us and set itself up as reality, at least as far as it could, thereby losing its right to special treatment from us.

Commonness is a hearthstone. Banality is a mother’s lap. After a long incursion into lofty poetry, up to the heights of sublime yearning, to the cliffs of the transcendent and the occult, it tastes better than good, it feels like all that is warm in life, to return to the inn with its happily laughing fools and to drink with them as one more fool, as God made us, content with the universe we were given and leaving the rest to those who climb mountains to do nothing at the top.

I’m not impressed should someone tell me that a certain man I consider crazy or stupid surpasses a common man in many achievements and particulars of life. Epileptics have amazing strength when they go into seizure; paranoiacs have an ability to reason that few normal men can match; religious maniacs bring multitudes of believers together as few (if any) demagogues can, and with a force of conviction that the latter can’t inspire in their followers. And all that this proves is that craziness is craziness. I prefer a defeat that knows the beauty of flowers to a victory in the desert, full of blindness in the soul, alone with its isolated nothingness.

How often even my futile dreaming makes me loathe my inner life
and feel physically nauseated by mysticisms and contemplations. How quickly I then race from my apartment where I dream to the office, and when I see the face of Moreira it’s as if I had finally docked at a port. When all is said and done, I prefer Moreira to the astral world; I prefer reality to truth; I prefer life, yes, to the very God who created it. Since this is the life he gave me, this is the life I’ll live. I dream because I dream, but I don’t suffer the indignity of considering my dreams anything more than my personal theatre, even as I don’t consider wine – though I enjoy drinking it – to be a source of nourishment or a vital necessity.