The Book of Disquiet (39 page)

The love of absurdity and paradox is the animal happiness* of the sad. Just as the normal man talks nonsense and slaps others on the back out of zest and vitality, so those incapable of joy and enthusiasm do somersaults in their minds and perform, in their own cold way, the warm gestures of life.

Reductio ad absurdum
is one of my favourite drinks.

Everything is absurd. One man spends his life earning and saving up money, although he has no children to leave it to nor any hope that some heaven might reserve him a transcendent portion. Another man strives to gain posthumous fame without believing in an afterlife that would give him knowledge of that fame. Yet another wears himself out in pursuit of things he doesn’t really care for. Then there’s one who .....

One man reads so as to learn, uselessly. Another man enjoys himself so as to live, uselessly.

I’m riding on a tram and, as usual, am closely observing all the details of the people around me. For me these details are like things, voices, phrases. Taking the dress of the girl in front of me, I break it down into the fabric from which it’s made and the work that went into making it (such that I see a dress and not just fabric), and the delicate embroidery that trims the collar decomposes under my scrutiny into the silk thread with which it was embroidered and the work it took to embroider it. And immediately, as in a textbook of basic economics, factories and jobs unfold before me: the factory where the cloth was made; the factory where the darker-coloured silk was spun to trim with curlicues its place around the neck; the factories’ various divisions, the machines, the workers, the seamstresses. My inwardly turned eyes penetrate into the offices, where I see the managers trying to stay calm, and I watch everything being recorded in the account books. But that’s not all: I see beyond all this to the private lives of those who live their social existence in these factories and offices. The whole world opens up before my eyes merely because in front of me – on the nape of a dark-skinned neck whose other side has I don’t know what face – I see a regularly irregular dark-green embroidery on a light-green dress.

All humanity’s social existence lies before my eyes.

And beyond this I sense the loves, the secrets and the souls of all who laboured so that the woman in front of me in the tram could wear, around her mortal neck, the sinuous banality of a dark-green silk trim on a less-dark-green cloth.

I get dizzy. The seats in the tram, made of tough, close-woven straw, take me to distant places and proliferate in the form of industries, workers, their houses, lives, realities, everything.

I get off the tram dazed and exhausted. I’ve just lived all of life.

Every time I go somewhere, it’s a vast journey. A train trip to Cascais* tires me out as if in this short time I’d travelled through the urban and rural landscapes of four or five countries.

I imagine myself living in each house I pass, each chalet, each isolated cottage whitewashed with lime and silence – happy at first, then bored, then fed up. It all happens in a moment, and as soon as I’ve abandoned one of these homes, I’m filled with nostalgia for the time I lived there. And so every trip I make is a painful and happy harvest of great joys, great boredoms, and countless false nostalgias.

And as I pass by those houses, villas and chalets, I also live the daily lives of all their inhabitants, living them all at the same time. I’m the father, mother, sons, cousins, the maid and the maid’s cousin, all together and all at once, thanks to my special talent for simultaneously feeling various and sundry sensations, for simultaneously living the lives of various people – both on the outside, seeing them, and on the inside, feeling them.

I’ve created various personalities within. I constantly create personalities. Each of my dreams, as soon as I start dreaming it, is immediately incarnated in another person, who is then the one dreaming it, and not I.

To create, I’ve destroyed myself. I’ve so externalized myself on the inside that I don’t exist there except externally. I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

In my dream on the deck I shuddered: a chilling presentiment ran through my Far-away Prince’s soul.

A noisy, threatening silence invaded the room’s visible atmosphere like a livid breeze.

It all comes down to a harsh, troubling brilliance in the moonlight over the ocean that no longer tosses but still waves. Though I still couldn’t hear them, it became clear that there were cypresses next to the Prince’s palace.

The sword of the first lightning bolt vaguely whirled in the beyond. The moonlight over the high sea is the colour of lightning, and what it all means is that the palace of the prince I never was is now ruins in a distant past.

As the ship draws near with a sullen sound, the room lividly darkens, and he didn’t die, nor is he captive, but I don’t know what has become of him, the prince. What cold and unknown thing is his destiny now?

The only way you can have new sensations is by forging a new soul. It’s useless to try to feel new things without feeling them in a new way, and you can’t feel in a new way without changing your soul. For things are what we feel they are – how long have you known this without yet knowing it? – and the only way for there to be new things, for us to feel new things, is for there to be some novelty in how we feel them.

Change your soul. How? That’s for you to figure out.

From the time we’re born until we die, our soul slowly changes, like the body. Find a way to make it change faster, even as our body changes more rapidly when suffering or recovering from certain diseases.

We should never stoop down to delivering lectures, lest anyone think
we have opinions or would condescend to speak with the public. Let the public read us, if they wish.

The lecturer, moreover, resembles an actor – an errand boy of Art, a figure despised by any good artist.

I’ve discovered that I’m always attentive to, and always thinking about, two things at the same time. I suppose everyone is a bit like that. Certain impressions are so vague that only later, because we remember them, do we even realize we had them. I believe these impressions form a part – perhaps the internal part – of the dual attention we all possess. In my case the two realities that hold my attention are equally vivid. This is what constitutes my originality. This, perhaps, is what constitutes my tragedy, and what makes it comic.

Hunched over the ledger, I attentively record the entries that tell the useless history of an obscure firm, while at the same time and with equal attention my thoughts follow the route of a non-existent ship past landscapes of an unreal Orient. For me the two things are equally visible and equally distinct: the ruled pages on which I carefully write the commercial epic of Vasques & Co., and the deck where I carefully observe – beyond the ruled pattern of the floorboards’ tarred joints – the rows of lounge chairs and the stretched legs of passengers relaxing on the voyage. (If I were run over by a child’s bicycle, the child’s bicycle would become part of my history.) The smoking room blocks the view; that’s why only their legs can be seen.

As I dip my pen in the inkwell, the door of the smoking room opens up – almost right next to where I feel I am – to reveal the face of the stranger. He turns his back to me and walks towards the others. His gait is slow and his hips don’t tell much. He’s English. I begin another entry. I try to figure out where I was going wrong. The Marques account should be debited rather than credited. (I see him as a chubby and affable jokester, and suddenly the ship disappears.)

The world belongs to those who don’t feel. The essential condition for being a practical man is the absence of sensibility. The chief requisite for the practical expression of life is will, since this leads to action. Two things can thwart action – sensibility and analytic thought, the latter of which is just thought with sensibility. All action is by nature the projection of our personality on to the external world, and since the external world is largely and firstly made up of human beings, it follows that this projection of personality is basically a matter of crossing other people’s path, of hindering, hurting or overpowering them, depending on the form our action takes.

To act, then, requires a certain incapacity for imagining the personalities of others, their joys and sufferings. Sympathy leads to paralysis. The man of action regards the external world as composed exclusively of inert matter – either intrinsically inert, like a stone he walks on or kicks out of his path, or inert like a human being who couldn’t resist him and thus might as well be a stone as a man since, like a stone, he was walked on or kicked out of the way.

The best example of the practical man is the military strategist, in whom extreme concentration of action is joined to its extreme importance. All life is war, and the battle is life’s synthesis. The strategist is a man who plays with lives like the chess player with chess pieces. What would become of the strategist if he thought about how each of his moves brings night to a thousand homes and grief to three thousand hearts? What would become of the world if we were human? If man really felt, there would be no civilization. Art gives shelter to the sensibility that action was obliged to forget. Art is Cinderella, who stayed at home because that’s how it had to be.

Every man of action is basically cheerful and optimistic, because those who don’t feel are happy. You can spot a man of action by the fact he’s never out of sorts. A man who works in spite of being out of sorts is an auxiliary to action. He can be a bookkeeper, as it were, in the vast general scheme of life, as I happen to be in my own particular life, but he cannot be a ruler over things or men. Rulership requires insensibility. Whoever governs is happy, since to be sad one has to feel.

Today my boss, Senhor Vasques, closed a deal that brought a sick man and his family to ruin. As he negotiated the deal he completely forgot that this man existed, except as the opposing commercial party. After the deal was closed, he was touched by sensibility. Only afterwards, of course, since otherwise the deal would never have been made. ‘I feel sorry for the fellow,’ he told me. ‘He’s going to wind up being destitute.’ Then, lighting up a cigar, he added: ‘Well, if he needs anything from me’ – meaning some kind of charity – ‘I won’t forget that I have him to thank for a good business deal and a few thousand escudos.’

Senhor Vasques isn’t a crook; he’s a man of action. The loser in this game can indeed count on my boss’s charity in the future, for he’s a generous man.

Senhor Vasques is like all men of action, be they business leaders, industrialists, politicians, military commanders, social and religious idealists, great poets, great artists, beautiful women, or children who do what they please. The one who ordains is the one who doesn’t feel. The one who succeeds is the one who thinks only of what is needed for success. The remaining general lot of humanity – amorphous, sensitive, imaginative and fragile – is no more than the backdrop against which these stage actors perform until the puppet show ends, no more than the flat and lifeless chess board over which the pieces move until they’re put away by the Great Player, who, fooling himself with a double personality, plays against his own person* and is always entertained.

Faith is the instinct of action.

My vital habit of disbelieving everything (especially instinctive things) and my natural inclination to insincerity neutralize all obstacles to the constant application of my method.

What I basically do is convert other people into my dreams. I take up their opinions, which I develop through my reason and intuition in order to make them my own (having no opinions, I can adopt theirs as well as any others) and to conform them to my taste, turning their personalities into things that have an affinity with my dreams.

I’ve so favoured dreaming over real life that I’m able, in my verbal encounters (the only kind I have), to keep on dreaming and to keep following, through the opinions and feelings of others, the fluid course of my own amorphous personality.

Other people are channels or conduits in which the ocean’s water flows according to their fancy, and the shimmering of that water in the sunlight defines their curved path much better than their empty dryness could do.

Although it sometimes seems to my hasty analysis that I’m the parasite of others, what really occurs is that I force them to be parasites of my subsequent emotion. My life inhabits the shells of their personalities. I reproduce their footsteps in my spirit’s clay, absorbing them so thoroughly into my consciousness that I, in the end, have taken their steps and walked in their paths even more than they.

Due to my habit of dividing myself, following two distinct mental operations at the same time, it’s generally the case that as I lucidly and intensely adapt myself to what others are feeling, I simultaneously undertake a rigorously objective analysis of their unknown self, what they think and are. And thus in my dreaming, without ever interrupting my reverie, I not only live the distilled essence of their sometimes dead emotions, I also discover and classify the intricate links between their various intellectual and spiritual energies, which were often lying dormant in their soul.

Nor, while all this is going on, do their physiognomies and dress and gestures escape my notice. I live their dreams, their instinctive nature, and their body and its postures all at the same time. In a
sweeping, unified dispersion, I ubiquitize* myself in them, and at each moment of our conversation I create, and am, a multitude of selves – conscious and unconscious, analysed and analytical – joined together as in a spread fan.

I belong to a generation that inherited disbelief in the Christian faith and created in itself a disbelief in all other faiths. Our fathers still had the believing impulse, which they transferred from Christianity to other forms of illusion. Some were champions of social equality, others were wholly enamoured of beauty, still others had faith in science and its achievements, and there were some who became even more Christian, resorting to various Easts and Wests in search of new religious forms to entertain their otherwise hollow consciousness of merely living.