The Book of Disquiet (36 page)

To say that it’s a metaphysical anxiety in disguise, that it’s an acute disillusion incognito, that it’s a voiceless poetry of the bored soul sitting at the window which looks out on to life – to say this or something similar can colour tedium, like a child who colours over the outlines of a figure and effaces them, but it’s no more to me than a din of words echoing in the cellar of the mind.

Tedium… To think without thinking, but with the weariness of thinking; to feel without feeling, but with the anxiety of feeling; to shun without shunning, but with the disgust that makes one shun – all of this is in tedium but is not tedium itself, being at best a paraphrase or translation of it. In terms of our immediate sensation, it’s as if the drawbridge had been raised over the moat of the soul’s castle, such that we can only gaze at the lands around the castle, without ever being able to set foot on them. There’s something in us that isolates us from ourselves, and the separating element is as stagnant as we are, a ditch of filthy water around our self-alienation.

Tedium… To suffer without suffering, to want without desire, to think without reason… It’s like being possessed by a negative demon, like being bewitched by nothing at all. Wizards and witches, by making images of us and subjecting them to torments, can supposedly cause those torments to be reflected in us through an astral transference. Transposing this image, I would say that my tedium is like the fiendish reflection of an elfin demon’s sorceries, applied not to my image but to its shadow. It’s on my internal shadow, on the outside of my inner soul, that papers are pasted or needles are poked. I’m like the man that sold his shadow,* or, rather, like the shadow that was sold.

Tedium… I work hard. I fulfil what the moralists of action would say is my social duty. I fulfil that duty, or fate, without too much effort and without gross incompetence. But sometimes right in the middle of my work, or in the middle of the rest which, according to the same moralists, I deserve and ought to enjoy, my soul overflows with a bitter inertia, and I’m tired, not of working or of resting, but of me.

Why of me, if I wasn’t thinking about myself? Of what other thing, if I wasn’t thinking about anything? The mystery of the universe that descends on my bookkeeping or on my repose? The universal sorrow of living which is suddenly particularized in my soul-turned-medium? Why so ennoble someone whose identity isn’t even certain? It’s a sensation of emptiness, a hunger without appetite, as noble as the sensations that come to our physical brain and stomach when we smoke too much or suffer from indigestion.

Tedium… Perhaps, deep down, it is the soul’s dissatisfaction because we didn’t give it a belief, the disappointment of the sad child (who we are on the inside) because we didn’t buy it the divine toy. Perhaps it is the insecurity of one who needs a guiding hand and who doesn’t feel, on the black path of profound sensation, anything more than the soundless night of not being able to think, the empty road of not being able to feel…

Tedium… Those who have Gods don’t have tedium. Tedium is the lack of a mythology. For people without beliefs, even doubt is impossible, even their scepticism will lack the strength to question. Yes, tedium is the loss of the soul’s capacity for self-delusion; it is the mind’s lack of the non-existent ladder by which it might firmly ascend to truth.

I know, by analogy, what it means to overeat. I know it through my sensations, not my stomach. There are days when they’ve eaten too much, and my body gets heavy, my gestures are clumsy, and I don’t feel like moving a muscle.

On these occasions, like a thorn in the side, a vestige of my vanished imagination nearly always emerges from out of my undisturbed torpor. And I make plans founded on ignorance, I raise edifices based on hypotheses, and I’m dazzled by what’s bound to never happen.

At these strange times, my moral as well as material life are mere appendages to who I am. I forget not only about the notion of duty but also about the idea of being, and I feel physically tired of the whole
universe. I sleep what I know and what I dream with an equal intensity that makes my eyes sore. Yes, at these times I know more about myself than I’ve ever known, and I’m every snooze of every beggar lying under the trees on the estate of Nobody.

The idea of travelling seduces me vicariously, as if it were the perfect idea for seducing someone I’m not. All the world’s vast panorama traverses my alert imagination like a colourful tedium; I trace a desire as one who’s tired of making gestures, and the anticipated weariness of potential landscapes scourges the flower of my drooping heart like a harsh wind.

And as with journeys, so with books, and as with books, so with everything… I dream of an erudite life in the quiet company of the ancients and the moderns, a life in which I would renew my emotions via the emotions of others, and fill myself with contradictory thoughts based on the contradiction between the meditators and those who almost thought (and who are the majority of writers). But the very idea of reading vanishes as soon as I pick up a book from the table, the physical act of reading abolishing all desire to read. In the same way, the idea of travelling withers if I happen to go near a platform or port of departure. And I return to the two worthless things that I (likewise worthless) am certain of: my daily life as an inconspicuous passer-by, and the waking insomnia of my dreams.

And as with books, so with everything… As soon as something occurs to me that might interrupt the silent procession of my days, I lift my eyes with heavy protest towards the sylph who belongs to me and who, poor thing, might have been a siren had she only learned to sing.

When I first came to Lisbon I used to hear, from the apartment above ours, the sound of scales played on a piano, the monotonous practising of a girl I never actually saw. Today I realize that in the cellar of my soul, by some mysterious process of infiltration, those scales persist, audible if the door below is opened, played over and over by the girl who is now someone else, a grown woman, or dead and enclosed in a white place where verdant cypresses blackly wave.

I’m no longer the child I was back then, but the sound of the playing is the same in my memory as it was in reality, so that whenever it gets up from where it pretends to be sleeping, it has the same slow finger work, the same rhythmic monotony. When I feel or think about it, I’m overwhelmed by a vague and anxious sadness that’s my own.

I don’t mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost. It’s not the concrete passing of my own days but the abstract flight of time that torments my physical brain with the relentless repetition of the piano scales from upstairs, terribly anonymous and far away. It’s the huge mystery of nothing lasting which incessantly hammers things that aren’t really music, just nostalgia, in the absurd depths of my memory.

I summon up, insensibly, the vision of the sitting room that I never saw, where the pupil I never met is still playing today, finger by careful finger, the forever identical scales of what’s already dead. I see, I see more and more, I reconstruct by seeing. And the entire household of the upstairs apartment, for which today I feel a nostalgia I didn’t feel yesterday, is fictitiously constructed by my uncertain contemplation.

I suspect, however, that all of this is vicarious, that the nostalgia I feel isn’t truly mine or truly abstract but is the emotion intercepted from an unidentified third party, for whom these emotions, which in me are literary, are – as Vieira* would say – literal. Conjectured feelings are what grieve and torment me, and the nostalgia that makes my eyes well with tears is conceived and felt through imagination and projection.

And with a relentlessness that comes from the world’s depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a
piano student keep playing over and over, up and down the physical backbone of my memory. It’s the old streets with other people, the same streets that today are different; it’s dead people speaking to me through the transparency of their absence; it’s remorse for what I did or didn’t do; it’s the rippling of streams in the night, noises from below in the quiet building.

I feel like screaming inside my head. I want to stop, to break, to smash this impossible phonograph record that keeps playing inside me, where it doesn’t belong, an intangible torturer. I want my soul, a vehicle taken over by others, to let me off and go on without me. I’m going crazy from having to hear. And in the end it is I – in my odiously impressionable brain, in my thin skin, in my hypersensitive nerves – who am the keys played in scales, O horrible and personal piano of our memory.

And always, always, as if in a part of my brain that had become autonomous, the scales play, play, play, below me and above me, in the first building I lived in when I came to Lisbon.

It’s the last death of Captain Nemo. Soon I too will die.

All of my childhood was deprived, in that moment, of any possibility of enduring.

Smell is a strange way of seeing. It evokes sentimental scenes, sketched all of a sudden by the subconscious. I’ve often experienced this. I’m walking down a street. I see nothing, or rather, I look all around and see the way everyone sees. I know I’m walking down a street and don’t know that it exists with two sides comprised of variously shaped buildings made by human hands. I’m walking down a street. The smell of bread from a bakery nauseates me with its sweetness, and my
childhood rises up from a distant neighbourhood, and another bakery emerges from that fairyland which is everything we ever had that has died. I’m walking down a street. Suddenly I smell the fruit on the slanted rack of the small grocery, and my short life in the country – I can’t say from when or where – has trees in the background and peace in what can only be my childhood heart. I’m walking down a street. I’m unexpectedly thrown off balance by the smell of crates from the crate-maker’s: my dear Cesário!* You appear before me and at last I’m happy, for I’ve returned by way of memory to the only truth, which is literature.

One of my life’s greatest tragedies is to have already read
The Pickwick Papers
. (I can’t go back and read them for the first time.)

Art frees us, illusorily, from the squalor of being. While feeling the wrongs and sufferings endured by Hamlet, prince of Denmark, we don’t feel our own, which are vile because they’re ours and vile because they’re vile.

Love, sleep, drugs and intoxicants are elementary forms of art, or rather, of producing the same effect as art. But love, sleep and drugs all have their disillusion. Love wearies or disappoints. We wake up from sleep, and while sleeping we haven’t lived. And we pay for drugs with the ruin of the very body they served to stimulate. But in art there is no disillusion, since illusion is accepted from the start. There’s no waking up from art, because we dream but don’t sleep in it. Nor do we pay a tax or penalty for having enjoyed art.

Since the pleasure we get from art is in a sense not our own, we don’t have to pay for it or regret it later.

By art I mean everything that delights us without being ours – the
trail left by what has passed, a smile given to someone else, a sunset, a poem, the objective universe.

To possess is to lose. To feel without possessing is to preserve and keep, for it is to extract from things their essence.

It’s not love but love’s outskirts that are worth knowing…

The repression of love sheds much more light on its nature than does the actual experience of it. Virginity can be a key to profound understanding. Action has its rewards but brings confusion. To possess is to be possessed, and therefore to lose oneself. Only the idea can fathom reality without getting ruined.

Christ is a form of emotion.

In the Pantheon there’s room for all the gods that mutually exclude each other; all have their throne and their sovereignty. Each one can be everything, for here there are no limits, not even logical ones, and the mingling of various immortals allows us to enjoy the coexistence of diverse infinities and assorted eternities.

Nothing is ever sure in history. There are periods of order when everything is contemptible and periods of disorder in which all is lofty. Decadent eras abound in mental vitality, mighty eras in intellectual weakness. Everything mixes and criss-crosses, and truth exists only in so far as it is presumed.

So many noble ideas fallen into the dung heap, so many heartfelt desires lost in the torrent!

Gods and men – they’re all the same to me in the rampant confusion of unpredictable fate. They march through my dreams in this anonymous fourth-floor room, and they’re no more to me than they were to those who believed in them. Idols of leery, wide-eyed Africans, animal deities of hinterland savages, the Egyptians’ personified symbols, luminous Greek divinities, stiff Roman gods, Mithras lord of the Sun and of emotion, Jesus lord of consequences and charity, various versions of the same Christ, new holy gods of new towns – all of them make up the funeral march (be it a pilgrimage or burial) of error and illusion. They all march, and behind them march the dreams that are just empty shadows cast on the ground but that the worst dreamers suppose are firmly planted there: pathetic concepts without body or soul – Liberty, Humanity, Happiness, a Better Future, Social Science – moving forward in the solitude of darkness like leaves dragged along by the train of a royal robe stolen by beggars.

Revolutionaries make a crass and grievous error when they distinguish between the bourgeoisie and the masses, the nobility and the common people, the ruling and the ruled. The only distinction is between those who adapt and those who don’t; the rest is literature, and bad literature. The beggar, if he adapts, can become king tomorrow, though in doing so he’ll forfeit the virtue of being a beggar. He’ll have crossed the border, losing his nationality.