The Book of Disquiet (32 page)

Nothing satisfies me, nothing consoles me; everything that has been and that hasn’t been jades me. I don’t want to have my soul and don’t want to renounce it. I want what I don’t want and renounce what I don’t have. I can’t be nothing nor be everything: I’m the bridge between what I don’t have and what I don’t want.

… the solemn sadness that dwells in all great things – in high mountains and in great men, in profound nights and in eternal poems.

We can die if all we’ve done is love.

Only once was I truly loved. I’ve always been treated in a friendly manner, and even people I hardly know have rarely been rude or brusque or cold to me. In certain people that friendly manner, with my encouragement, might have been converted into love or affection, but I’ve never had the patience or mental concentration to even want to make the effort.

At first I thought (so little do we know ourselves!) that shyness was to blame for my soul’s apparent apathy in this matter. But I came to realize that it actually had to do with the tedium I felt
vis-à -vis
emotions – not to be confused with the tedium of life. I didn’t have the patience to commit myself to an ongoing feeling, especially when it would require an ongoing effort. ‘What for?’ thought the part of me that doesn’t think. I have enough intellectual subtlety and psychological insight to know ‘how’; the ‘how of the how’ is what has always escaped me. My weakness of will has always begun as a weakness of will to have any will. This was the case in my emotions as well as in my intellect, and in my very will, and in all my dealings with life.

But on that occasion when circumstances mischievously led me to suppose that I loved and to verify that the other person truly loved me, my first reaction was of bewildered confusion, as if I’d won a grand prize in an unconvertible currency. And then, because no human can avoid being human, I felt a certain vanity; this emotion, however, which would seem to be the most natural one, quickly vanished. It was followed by an uncomfortable feeling that’s hard to define but that was composed of tedium, of humiliation, and of weariness.

Of tedium, as if Fate had obliged me to occupy my free evenings with some strange and unfamiliar labour. Of tedium, as if a new duty – that of a hideous reciprocity – had been ironically foisted on me as a
privilege for which I was expected to thank Fate profusely. Of tedium, as if the irregular monotony of life weren’t enough, so that on top of that I needed the obligatory monotony of a definite feeling.

And of humiliation – yes, humiliation. It took me a while to understand the presence of this feeling that seemed not at all justified by its cause. I should have loved being loved. It should have piqued my vanity that someone had heaped attention on me as a lovable human being. But apart from my brief feeling of actual vanity (and even that may have consisted of surprise more than of vanity itself), what I experienced was humiliation. I felt that I’d been given someone else’s prize – a prize that was worth something only to the person who rightfully deserved it.

But most of all I felt weariness – a weariness beyond all tedium. I finally understood a phrase of Chateaubriand whose meaning, because of my lack of personal experience, had always eluded me. Chateaubriand writes of René, his personification, ‘it wearied him to be loved’ –
on le fatigait en l’aimant
. I realized with astonishment that this experience was identical to my own, and so I couldn’t deny its validity.

The weariness of being loved, of being truly loved! The weariness of being the object of other people’s burdensome emotions! Of seeing yourself – when what you wanted was to remain forever free – transformed into a delivery boy whose duty is to reciprocate, to have the decency not to flee, lest anyone think that you’re cavalier towards emotions and would reject the loftiest sentiment that a human soul can offer. The weariness of your existence becoming absolutely dependent on a relationship with someone else’s feeling! The weariness of having to feel something, of having to love at least a little in return, even if it’s not a true reciprocity!

As it came, so it went, and today nothing of that shadowy episode remains in my intellect or in my emotions. It brought me no experience that I couldn’t have deduced from the laws of human life, which I instinctively know because I’m human. It gave me no pleasure to look back on with regret, nor sorrow to remember with equal regret. It all seems like something I read somewhere, like an incident that happened to someone else, a novel I read halfway through and whose second half was missing, but I didn’t care that it was missing, because the first half of the story was all there, and although it made no sense, I realized
that no sense could ever be made of it, regardless of what happened in the part that was missing.

All that remains is my feeling of gratitude towards the one who loved me. But it’s an abstract, bewildered gratitude, more intellectual than emotional. I’m sorry that I caused someone to feel sorrow; I’m sorry about that, and only about that.

It’s unlikely that life will bring me another encounter with natural emotions. I almost wish it would, to see how I’d react the second time, after having thoroughly analysed the first experience. I might feel less emotion, or I might feel more. If Fate should bring it, then well and good. I’m curious about my emotions. Whereas I don’t have the least curiosity about facts, whatever they are or will yet be.

To submit to nothing, whether to a man or a love or an idea, and to have the aloof independence of not believing in the truth or even (if it existed) in the usefulness of knowing it – this seems to me the right attitude for the intellectual inner life of those who can’t live without thinking. To belong is synonymous with banality. Creeds, ideals, a woman, a profession – all are prisons and shackles. To be is to be free. Even ambition, if we take pride in it, is a hindrance; we wouldn’t be proud of it if we realized it’s a string by which we’re pulled. No: no ties even to ourselves! Free from ourselves as well as from others, contemplatives without ecstasy, thinkers without conclusions and liberated from God, we will live the few moments of bliss allowed us in the prison yard by the distraction of our executioners. Tomorrow we will face the guillotine. Or if not tomorrow, then the day after. Let us stroll about in the sun before the end comes, deliberately forgetting all projects and pursuits. Without wrinkles our foreheads will glow in the sun, and the breeze will be cool for those who quit hoping.

I throw my pen against the slanted desk top and watch it roll down without bothering to catch it. I felt all of this without warning. And my happiness consists in this gesture of rage that I don’t feel.

To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.

Enlarge your personality without including anything from the outside – asking nothing from others and imposing nothing on others, but
being
others when you need them.

Reduce your necessities to a minimum, so as not to depend on anyone for anything.

It’s true that such a life is impossible in the absolute. But it’s not impossible relatively.

Let’s consider a man who owns and runs an office. He should be able to do without his employees; he should be able to type, to balance the books, to sweep the office. He should depend on others because it saves him time, not because he’s incompetent. Let him tell the office boy to put a letter in the post because he doesn’t want to lose time going to the post office, not because he doesn’t know where the post office is. Let him tell a clerk to take care of a certain matter because he doesn’t want to waste time on it, not because he doesn’t know how to take care of it.

There is no sure prize for virtue, and no sure punishment for sin. Nor would it be right for such prizes and punishments to exist. Virtue and sin are inevitable manifestations in organisms which, condemned to one thing or the other, serve their sentences of being good or of being bad. That’s why all religions place rewards and punishments – deserved by people who were nothing and could do nothing, and therefore can deserve nothing – in other worlds, which no science can verify and no faith describe.

So let us renounce all sincere beliefs, along with all concern to influence others.

Life, said Tarde,* is the search for the impossible by way of the useless. Let us always search for the impossible, since that is our destiny, and let us search for it by way of the useless, since no path goes by any other way, but let us rise to the consciousness that nothing we search for can be found, and that nothing along the way deserves a fond kiss or memory.

We weary of everything, said the scholiast, except understanding. Let us understand, let us keep understanding, and let us make ghostly flowers out of this understanding, shrewdly entwining them into wreaths and garlands which are also doomed to wilt.

‘We weary of everything, except understanding.’ The meaning of the phrase is sometimes hard to grasp.

We weary of thinking to arrive at a conclusion, because the more we think and analyse and discern, the less we arrive at a conclusion.

And so we fall into that passive state in which we want to understand only the explanation of whatever is being proposed. It’s an aesthetic attitude, since we don’t care in the least whether what’s proposed is or isn’t true, and all we see in what we understand are the details of the explanation, the type of rational beauty it has for us.

We weary of thinking, of having our own opinions, of trying to think in order to act. But we don’t weary of temporarily having other people’s opinions, just to feel their intrusion and not follow their lead.

Hour after hour, all night long, the patter of the rain rained down. All night long, as I tossed and turned, its cold monotony beat against the windows. A gust of wind sometimes whipped overhead, and the rain would wave with sound, passing its quick hands over the panes; at other times there was just a muffled sound that made everything sleep in the dead exterior. My soul, as always, whether among bedclothes or among people, was painfully conscious of the world. The day, like happiness, kept procrastinating – indefinitely, it seemed.

If happiness and the new day would never come! If at least we could never have the disillusion of getting what we wait and hope for!

The chance sound of a late-night car, jostling roughly over the cobblestones, became steadily louder, clacked rudely beneath my window, and faded away at the far end of the street, at the far end of my fitful sleep that never became true slumber. Now and then a neighbour’s door would slam. At times there was a splashing of footsteps, a swishing sound of wet clothes. Once or twice, when the steps were numerous, they made a louder sound. Then they died out, the silence returned, and the rain relentlessly continued.

If I opened my eyes from my pretended slumber I could see, on the darkly visible walls of my room, floating snatches of dreams to be dreamed, dim lights, black lines, hazy shapes climbing up and down. The various pieces of furniture, larger than in the daytime, indistinctly blotted the dark’s absurdity. The door was distinguishable as something no whiter or blacker than night, just different. The window I could only hear, not see.

Again, fluid and uncertain, the rain pattered. Time dragged to its accompaniment. My soul’s solitude grew and spread, invading what I felt, what I wanted, and what I was going to dream. The room’s hazy objects, which shared my insomnia in the shadows, moved with their sadness into my desolation.

The light had become an extremely sluggish yellow, a yellow that was filthy white. The distance between things had increased, and sounds were spaced differently, disconnectedly, and farther apart. As soon as they were heard, they suddenly ceased, as if cut short. The heat, which seemed to have intensified, was cold, though it was still heat. Through the crack between the window’s two shutters, the only visible tree displayed an exaggeratedly expectant attitude. It had a different kind of green, which infused it with silence. The atmosphere, like a flower, had closed its petals. And in the composition of space itself, a different interrelationship of something like planes had changed and fragmented the way that sounds, lights and colours use space.

Even apart from our ordinary dreams – those abominations from the soul’s sewers that no one would dare confess and that oppress our nights like foul phantoms, grimy bubbles and slime of our repressed sensibility – what ridiculous, frightening and unspeakable things the soul, with a little effort, can recognize in its corners!

The human soul is a madhouse of the grotesque. If a soul were able to reveal itself truthfully, if its shame and modesty didn’t run deeper than all its known and named ignominies, then it would be – as is said of truth – a well, but a sinister well full of murky echoes and inhabited by abhorrent creatures, slimy non-beings, lifeless slugs, the snot of subjectivity.

All it would take to make a catalogue of monsters is to photograph in words the things the night brings to drowsy souls unable to sleep. These things have all the incoherence of dreams without the alibi of sleeping. They hover like bats over the soul’s passivity, or like vampires that suck the blood of submission.

They’re larvae from the debris on the hillside, shadows that fill the valley, remnants left by destiny. Sometimes they’re worms, loathsome to the very soul that cradles and breeds them; sometimes they’re ghosts that sinisterly skulk around nothing at all; sometimes they pop out as snakes from the absurd hollows of spent emotions.

Ballast of falseness, they’re useful for nothing but to render us useless. They are doubts from the abyss that drag their cold and slithery bodies across the soul. They hang on as smoke, they leave tracks, and they never amounted to more than the sterile substance of our awareness of them. One or another is like an inner firework, sparking between dreams, and the rest is what our unconscious consciousness saw of them.