The Book of Disquiet (40 page)

We lost all of this. We were born with none of these consolations. Each civilization follows the particular path of a religion that represents it; turning to other religions, it loses the one it had, and ultimately loses them all.

We lost the one, and all the others with it.

And so we were left, each man to himself, in the desolation of feeling ourselves live. A ship may seem to be an object whose purpose is to sail, but no, its purpose is to reach a port. We found ourselves sailing without any idea of what port we were supposed to reach. Thus we reproduced a painful version of the argonauts’ adventurous precept:* living doesn’t matter, only sailing does.

Without illusions, we live by dreaming, which is the illusion of those who can’t have illusions. Living off our inner selves has diminished us, for the complete man is the one who doesn’t know himself. Without faith, we have no hope, and without hope we have no real life. Having no idea of the future, we likewise have no idea of today, because today, for the man of action, is nothing but a prologue to the future. The energy to fight was stillborn in us, for we were born without the fighting spirit.

Some of us stagnated in the idiotic conquest of the ordinary, contemptibly seeking our daily bread without ever sweating for it, without making a conscious effort, without the nobility of achievement.

Others of us, more high-minded, spurned state and society, wanting and desiring nothing, and trying to take to the calvary of oblivion the cross of simply existing – an impossible endeavour for whoever doesn’t have, like the bearer of the Cross, the consciousness of a divine origin.

Still others, busy on the outside of the soul, devoted themselves to the cult of noise and confusion, thinking they were living whenever they heard themselves, and supposing they loved whenever they brushed love’s outward forms. Living was painful because we knew we were alive; dying didn’t scare us, for we had lost the normal notion of what death is.

But those who formed the Terminal Race, the spiritual limit of the Deadly Hour, didn’t even have courage enough for true denial and asylum. What we lived was in denial, discontent and disconsolation, but we lived it within, without moving, forever closed (at least in the way we lived) inside the four painted walls of our room and the four stone walls of our inability to act.

Since we can’t extract beauty from life, let’s at least try to extract beauty from not being able to extract beauty from life. Let’s make our failure into a victory, into something positive and lofty, endowed with columns, majesty and our mind’s consent.

If life has given us no more than a prison cell, let’s at least decorate it as best we can – with the shadows of our dreams, their colourful patterns engraving our oblivion on the static surface of the walls.

Like every dreamer, I’ve always felt that my calling was to create. Since I’ve never been able to make an effort or carry out an intention, creation for me has always meant dreaming, wanting or desiring, and action has meant dreaming of the acts I wish I could perform.

I called my incapacity for living genius, and I dressed up my cowardice by calling it refinement. I placed myself – God gilded with false gold – on an altar of cardboard painted to look like marble.

But I didn’t succeed in fooling myself, nor […] my self-delusion.

The pleasure of praising ourselves…

It smells to me of coldness, of regret, of the hopelessness of every road and of every ideal ever dreamed up.

Women today take so much care with how they look and move that they give the excruciating impression of being ephemeral and irreplaceable.

Their
and embellishments so paint and colour them that they become more decorative than carnally alive. Friezes, pictures, paintings – that’s all they amount to, visually speaking.

The mere gesture of wrapping a shawl around their shoulders is done with a greater awareness of its visual effect than ever before. The shawl used to be part of a woman’s basic attire; now it’s an optional feature, depending solely on notions of aesthetic taste.

In these colourful times when almost nothing escapes being turned into art, everything plucks petals from the conscious sphere and merges
into flights of fancy.

These female figures are all like fugitives from pictures that were never painted. Some of them are too full of details… Certain profiles
stand out too sharply, as if they were trying to look unreal, so detached are their pure lines from the background.

My soul is a secret orchestra, but I don’t know what instruments – strings, harps, cymbals, drums – strum and bang inside me. I only know myself as the symphony.

Every effort is a crime, because every gesture is a dead dream.

Your hands are captive doves. Your lips are silent doves (that come to coo before my eyes).

All of your gestures are birds. You’re a swallow when you stoop, a condor when you look at me, and an eagle in your disdainful lady’s ecstasies. I look at you and see a pond full of flapping wings .....

You are nothing but wings .....

Rain, rain, rain…

Groaning, unrelenting rain .....

My body makes even my soul shiver, not with a coldness that’s in the air, but with a coldness that comes from watching the rain.

Every pleasure is a vice, because to seek pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the only black vice is to do what everyone else does.

Sometimes, without expecting it and with no reason to expect it, the oppressiveness of common life makes me gag, and I feel physically nauseated by the voice and gestures of my so-called fellow man. It’s an instant physical nausea, automatically felt in my stomach and head, an impressive but stupid consequence of my alert sensibility. Everyone who talks to me, each face whose eyes gaze at me, hits me like an insult or a piece of filth. I brim with disgust at the whole lot. I get dizzy from feeling myself feel them.

And in these moments of abdominal distress, there’s nearly always a man, a woman or even a child that stands before me as a live representative of the banality that torments me. Not a representative according to my subjective, pondered emotion but by an objective truth, outwardly corresponding to what I inwardly feel and appearing to me by analogical magic as the perfect example for the rule I conceive.