The Book of Disquiet (29 page)

If, for moral reasons, I don’t do good to others, neither do I expect others to do good to me. When I get sick, what I hate most is if someone should feel obliged to take care of me, something I’d loathe doing for another. I’ve never visited a sick friend. And whenever I’ve been sick and had visitors, I’ve always felt their presence as a bother, an insult, an unwarranted violation of my wilful privacy. I don’t like people to give me things, because it seems like they’re obligating me to give something in return – to them or to others, it’s all the same.

I’m highly sociable in a highly negative way. I’m inoffensiveness incarnate. But I’m no more than this, I don’t want to be more than this, I can’t be more than this. For everything that exists I feel a visual affection, an intellectual fondness – nothing in the heart. I have faith in nothing, hope in nothing, charity for nothing. I’m nauseated and outraged by the sincere souls of all sincerities and by the mystics of all mysticisms, or rather, by the sincerities of all sincere souls and the mysticisms of all mystics. This nausea is almost physical when the mysticisms are active – when they try to convince other people, meddle with their wills, discover the truth, or reform the world.

I consider myself fortunate for no longer having family, as it relieves me of the obligation to love someone, which I would surely find burdensome. Any nostalgia I feel is literary. I remember my childhood with tears, but they’re rhythmic tears, in which prose is already being formed. I remember it as something external, and it comes back to me through external things; I remember only external things. It’s not the
stillness of evenings in the country that endears me to the childhood I spent there, it’s the way the table was set for tea, it’s the way the furniture was arranged in the room, it’s the faces and physical gestures of the people. I feel nostalgia for scenes. Thus someone else’s childhood can move me as much as my own; both are purely visual phenomena from a past I’m unable to fathom, and my perception of them is literary. They move me, yes, but because I see them, not because I remember them.

I’ve never loved anyone. The most that I’ve loved are my sensations – states of conscious seeing, impressions gathered by intently hearing, and aromas through which the modesty of the outer world speaks to me of things from the past (so easily remembered by their smells), giving me a reality and an emotion that go beyond the simple fact of bread being baked inside the bakery, as on that remote afternoon when I was coming back from the funeral of my uncle who so loved me, and I felt a kind of sweet relief about I’m not sure what.

This is my morality, or metaphysics, or me: passer-by of everything, even of my own soul, I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing – just an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a fallen sentient mirror reflecting the world’s diversity. I don’t know if I’m happy this way. Nor do I care.

To join in or collaborate or act with others is a metaphysically morbid impulse. The soul conferred on the individual shouldn’t be lent out to its relations with others. The divine fact of existing shouldn’t be surrendered to the satanic fact of coexisting.

When I act with others, there’s at least one thing I lose – acting alone.

When I participate, although it seems that I’m expanding, I’m limiting myself. To associate is to die. Only my consciousness of myself is real for me; other people are hazy phenomena in this consciousness, and it would be morbid to attribute very much reality to them.

Children, who want at all costs to have their way, are closest to God, for they want to exist.

As adults our life is reduced to giving alms to others and receiving them in return. We squander our personalities in orgies of coexistence.

Every spoken word double-crosses us. The only tolerable form of communication is the written word, since it isn’t a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.

To explain is to disbelieve. Every philosophy is a diplomacy dressed up as eternity..... Like diplomacy, it has no real substance, existing not in its own right but completely and utterly on behalf of some objective.

The only noble destiny for a writer who publishes is to be denied a celebrity he deserves. But the truly noble destiny belongs to the writer who doesn’t publish. Not who doesn’t write, for then he wouldn’t be a writer. I mean the writer in whose nature it is to write, but whose spiritual temperament prevents him from showing what he writes.

To write is to objectify dreams, to create an outer world as a material reward [?] of our nature as creators. To publish is to give this outer world to others; but what for, if the outer world common to us and to them is the ‘real’ outer world, the one made of visible and tangible matter? What do others have to do with the universe that’s in me?

To publish – the socialization of one’s self. A vile necessity! But still not a real
act
, since it’s the publisher who makes money, the printer who produces. It at least has the merit of being incoherent.

When a man reaches the age of lucidity, one of his main concerns is to actively and thoughtfully shape himself into the image and likeness of his ideal. Since inertia is the ideal that best embodies the logic of our soul’s aristocratic attitude
vis-à-vis
the
bustle and clamour of the modern world, our Ideal should be the Inert, the Inactive. Futile? Perhaps. But this will only trouble those who feel attracted to futility.

Enthusiasm is a vulgarity.

To give expression to enthusiasm is, above all else, to violate the rights of our insincerity.

We never know when we’re sincere. Perhaps we never are. And even if we’re sincere about something today, tomorrow we may be sincere about its complete opposite.

I myself have never had convictions. I’ve always had impressions. I could never hate a land in which I’d seen a scandalous sunset.

We externalize impressions not so much because we have them but to convince ourselves that we do.

To have opinions is to sell out to yourself. To have no opinion is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.

Everything slips away from me. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and all it contains, my personality: it all slips away. I constantly feel that I was someone different, that a different I felt, that a different I thought. I’m watching a play with a different, unfamiliar setting, and what I’m watching is me.

In the commonplace clutter of my literary drawers I sometimes find things I wrote ten or fifteen years ago, or longer, and many of them seem to be written by a stranger; I can’t recognize the voice as my own. But who wrote them, if not me? I felt those things, but in what seems to be another life, one from which I’ve now awoken, as if from someone else’s sleep.

I often come across pages I wrote in my youth, when I was seventeen or twenty, and some of them reveal an expressive power I can’t remember having back then. There are certain phrases and sentences written in the wake of my adolescence that seem like the product of the person I am now, with all that I’ve learned in the intervening years. I see I’m the same as what I was. And since in general I feel that I’ve greatly progressed from what I was, I wonder where the progress is, if back then I was the same as now.

There’s a mystery here that discredits and disturbs me.

Just the other day I was bowled over by a short piece I wrote ages ago. I’m quite certain that the special care I take with language goes back only a few years, but in one of my drawers I found this much older piece of writing in which that same care was clearly evident. I must not have known myself at all back then. How did I develop into what I already was? How have I come to know the I that I never knew back then? And everything becomes a confusing labyrinth where I stray, in myself, away from myself.

I let my mind wander, and I’m sure that what I’m writing I’ve already written. I remember. And I ask the one in me who presumes to exist if in the Platonism of sensations there might not be another, less vertical anamnesis – another pre-existing life that we vaguely remember but that belongs only to this life…

My God, my God, who am I watching? How many am I? Who is I? What is this gap between me and myself?

Again I found pages of mine, this time in French, written some fifteen years ago. I’ve never been in France and was never in close contact with French people, so it’s not as if I had a familiarity with the language that waned over the years. Today I read as much French as I ever did. I’m older and more practised in thought; I should have progressed. Yet these pages from my distant past denote a confidence in the use of French that I no longer possess; they have a fluid style that today I couldn’t possibly achieve in that language; there are entire passages,
complete sentences, grammatical forms and idioms that demonstrate a fluency I’ve lost without remembering that I ever had it. How can this be explained? Who did I replace inside myself?

It’s easy enough to form a theory of the fluidity of things and souls, to understand ourselves as an inner flow of life, to imagine that we’re a large quantity, that we traverse ourselves, that we have been many… But in this case there’s something besides the flow of personality between its own banks: there’s an absolute other, an extraneous self that was me. That with age I should lose my imagination, my emotion, a certain kind of intelligence, a way of feeling – all of this, while causing regret, wouldn’t cause me any great wonder. But what am I confronting when I read myself as if reading a stranger? On what shore am I standing if I see myself in the depths?

At other times I find pages that I not only don’t remember having written, which in itself doesn’t astonish me, but that I don’t even remember having been capable of writing, which terrifies me. Certain phrases belong to another mentality. It’s as if I’d found an old picture that I know is of me, with a different height and with features I don’t recognize, but undoubtedly me, terrifyingly I.

I have the most conflicting opinions, the most divergent beliefs. For it’s never I who thinks, speaks or acts. It’s always one of my dreams, which I momentarily embody, that thinks, speaks and acts for me. I open my mouth, but it’s I-another who speaks. The only thing I feel to be really
mine
is a huge incapacity, a vast emptiness, an incompetence for everything that is life. I don’t know the gestures for any real act.....

I never learned how to exist.

I obtain everything I want, as long as it’s inside me.

I’d like the reading of this book to leave you with the impression that you’ve traversed a sensual nightmare.

What used to be moral is aesthetic for us. What was social is now individual.

Why should I look at twilights if I have within me thousands of diverse twilights – including some that aren’t twilights – and if, besides seeing them inside me, I myself
am them
, on the inside and the outside?

The sunset spreads over the scattered clouds that dot the entire sky. Soft hues of every colour fill the lofty, spatial diversities, absently floating amid the sorrows on high. On the crests of the half-coloured, half-shaded rooftops, the last slow rays of the departing sun take on colours that are not their own nor of the things they light up. An immense calm hangs over the noisy city, which is also growing calmer. Everything breathes beyond colour and sound, in a deep and hushed sigh.

On the painted buildings that the sun doesn’t see, the colours are beginning to grey. There’s a coldness in these colours’ diversity. A mild anxiety dozes in the pseudo-valleys formed by the streets. It dozes and grows calm. And little by little, in the lowest of the high clouds, the hues begin to be shadowy. Only in that tiny cloud – a white eagle hovering above everything – does the far-off sun still cast its smiling gold.

Everything I sought in life I abandoned for the sake of the search. I’m like one who absent-mindedly looks for he doesn’t know what, having forgotten it in his dreaming as the search got under way. The thing being searched for becomes less real than the real motions of the hands that search – rummaging, picking up, putting down – and that visibly exist, long and white, with exactly five fingers on each.

All that I’ve had is like this high and diversely identical sky, tatters of nothing tinged by a distant light, fragments of pseudo-life gilded by death from afar with its sad smile of whole truth. All I’ve had has amounted to my not knowing how to search, like a feudal lord of swamps at twilight, solitary prince of a city of empty tombs.

All that I am or was, or that I think I am or was, suddenly loses – in these thoughts and in that high cloud’s suddenly spent light – the secret, the truth, perhaps fortune, that was in some obscure thing that
has life for a bed. All of this, like a sun that’s missing, is all I have left. Over the diversely high rooftops the light lets its hands slip away until, in the unity of those same rooftops, the inner shadow of everything emerges.