The Book of Disquiet (48 page)

For a long time – I’m not sure if for days or for months – I haven’t recorded any impressions; I don’t think, therefore I don’t exist. I’ve forgotten who I am. I’m unable to write because I’m unable to be. Through an oblique slumber, I’ve been someone else. To realize I don’t remember myself means that I’ve woken up.

I fainted for a spell, cut off from my life. I return to myself without remembering what I’ve been, and the memory of what I used to be suffers from having been interrupted. I have a confused impression of a mysterious interlude; part of my memory is vainly struggling to find the other part. I can’t pull myself together. If I’ve lived during this time, I forgot to be aware of it.

It’s not that this first day that really feels like autumn – the first uncomfortably cool one to dress the dead summer with less light – gives me, through a kind of distracted clarity, a sensation of dead purpose and false desire. It’s not that in this interlude of lost things there’s a pale trace of useless memory. It’s more painful than that. It’s a tedium of trying to remember what can’t be recalled, an anguish over what my consciousness has lost among reeds and seaweed, on the seashore of who knows what.

I know that the clear, still day has a veritable sky whose blue is less vivid than a deep blue. I know that the sun, slightly less golden than it
was, bathes the walls and windows with its humid glimmers. I know that, although there is no wind, nor a breeze to recall and negate it, a wakeful coolness dozes in the hazy city. I know all this, without thinking or wanting to, and I’m sleepy only because I remember to be sleepy, nostalgic only because I’m disquieted.

I remotely and futilely convalesce from the sickness I never had. Wide awake, I prepare myself for what I don’t dare. What sleepiness kept me from sleeping? What endearment refused to speak to me? How good to be someone else taking in a deep, cold breath of vigorous spring! How good – much better than life – to be able at least to imagine it, while in the distance, in the image I remember, the blue-green reeds bow along the riverside where there’s not a hint of wind!

How often, remembering who I wasn’t, I think of myself young and forget all the rest! The landscapes that existed but that I never saw were different then, and the landscapes that didn’t exist but that I did see were new to me. Why do I care? I ended up in interstices, led on by chance, and now, as the sun itself seems to radiate coolness, the dark reeds by the river sleep coldly in the sunset that I see but do not have.

No one has yet defined tedium in a language comprehensible to those who have never experienced it. What some people call tedium is merely boredom; others use the term to mean a nagging discomfort; still others consider tedium to be weariness. But while tedium includes weariness, discomfort and boredom, it doesn’t resemble them any more than water resembles the hydrogen and oxygen of which it is composed.

If some have a limited and incomplete notion of tedium, a few people give it a meaning that in a certain way transcends it – as when they use the word to signify intellectual and visceral dissatisfaction with the world’s diversity and uncertainty. What makes us yawn, which we call boredom, what makes us fidget and is known as discomfort, and what makes us practically immobile, namely weariness – none of these things is tedium; but neither is tedium the profound sense of life’s emptiness
that causes frustrated ambition to surface, disappointed longings to rise up, and the seed to be planted in the soul of the future mystic or saint.

Tedium, yes, is boredom with the world, the nagging discomfort of living, the weariness of having lived; tedium is indeed the carnal sensation of the endless emptiness of things. But tedium, even more than all that, is a boredom with other worlds, whether real or imaginary; the discomfort of having to keep living, albeit as someone else, in some other way, in some other world; a weariness not only of yesterday and today but also of tomorrow and of eternity, if such exists, or of nothingness, if that’s what eternity is. It’s not only the emptiness of things and living beings that troubles the soul afflicted by tedium, it’s also the emptiness of something besides things and beings – the emptiness of the very soul that feels this vacuum, that feels itself to be this vacuum, and that within this vacuum is nauseated and repelled by its own self.

Tedium is the physical sensation of chaos, a chaos that is everything. The bored, the uncomfortable and the weary feel like prisoners in a narrow cell. Those who abhor the narrowness of life itself feel shackled inside a large cell. But those who suffer tedium feel imprisoned in the worthless freedom of an infinite cell. The walls of the narrow cell may collapse and bury those who are bored, uncomfortable or tired. The shackles may fall and allow the man who abhors life’s puniness to escape, or they may cause him pain as he struggles in vain to remove them and, through the feeling of that pain, revive him without his old abhorrence. But the walls of the infinite cell cannot crumble and bury us, because they don’t exist; nor can we be revived by the pain of shackles no one has put on us.

This is what I feel before the placid beauty of this eternally dying afternoon. I look at the lofty, clear sky where I see fuzzy, pinkish shapes like the shadows of clouds, an impalpable soft down of a winged and far-away life. I look below me at the river, whose ever-so-slightly shimmering water is of a blue that seems to mirror a deeper sky. I raise my eyes back to the sky, where the coloured fuzziness that shredlessly unravels in the invisible air is now tinged by a frigid shade of dull white, as if something in the higher, more rarefied sphere of things had
its own material tedium, an impossibility of being what it is, an imponderable body of anguish and desolation.

But what’s in the lofty air besides the lofty air, which is nothing? What’s in the sky besides a colour that’s not its own? What’s in these tatters that aren’t even of clouds (and whose very existence I doubt) besides a few glimmers of materially arriving rays from an already resigned sun? What’s in all this besides myself? Ah, but that, and that alone, is tedium. In all of this – the sky, the earth, the world – there is nothing at all but me!

I’ve reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.

The outer world exists like an actor on stage: it’s there but is something else.

…and everything is an incurable sickness.

The indolence of feeling, the frustration of never knowing how to do anything, the inability to take action.....

Fog or smoke? Was it rising from the ground or descending from the sky? Impossible to say: it seemed more like a disease of the air than an emanation or something descended. Sometimes it seemed more like an ailment of the eyes than a reality of nature.

Whatever it was, the entire landscape was cloaked by a hazy uneasiness made of forgetfulness and attenuation. It was as if the silence of the delinquent sun had taken shape in an imperfect body, or as if a general intuition that something was going to happen had caused the visible world to disguise itself.

It was hard to tell if the sky was filled with clouds or fog. It was all a torpid haze that was coloured here and there, a greyness with just a hint of yellow, except where it had dissolved into a false pink or had bluely stagnated, though this blue may have been the sky showing through rather than another blue overlaying it.

Nothing was definite, not even the indefinite. That’s why it was only natural to call the fog smoke, since it didn’t seem like fog, or to ask whether it was fog or smoke, it being impossible to determine. Even the air’s temperature contributed to the doubt. It wasn’t hot or cold or in between, but seemed to be composed of elements that had nothing to do with heat. Indeed, the fog that felt cool to the eyes seemed hot to the touch, as if sight and touch were two distinct modes of the same faculty of perception.

One couldn’t even find, around the outlines of the trees or the corners of buildings, that blurring of contours and edges caused by true fog when it sets in, nor that slipping into view and out of view caused by real smoke. It was as if each thing projected its own vaguely diurnal shadow, in all directions, without a source of light to explain it as shadow, and without a specific place where it was projected to justify it as something visible.

Nor, in fact, was it visible: it was like something about to appear, equally throughout, as if it hesitated to be revealed.

And what feeling prevailed? The impossibility of having any feeling, the heart all broken to pieces in the mind, feelings all in a jumble, conscious existence in a stupor, and the heightening of some faculty
akin to hearing – but in the soul – in order to apprehend a definitive, useless revelation that’s always on the verge of appearing, like truth, and that always remains, like truth, the twin of what never appears.

Even the desire to sleep, remembered by the mind, has withered because mere yawning seems like too much of an effort. Even to stop seeing hurts the eyes. And in the soul’s complete and colourless renunciation, only external, distant sounds constitute what’s left of the impossible world.

Ah, another world, other things, another soul with which to feel them, another mind with which to know this soul! Anything, even tedium – anything but this general blurring of the soul and things, this bluish, forlorn indefiniteness of everything!

Together and apart we walked along the forest’s sharply turning paths. Foreign to us, our steps were united, for they went in unison over the crackling softness of the yellow and half-green leaves that matted the ground’s unevenness. But they also went separately, for we were two minds, with nothing in common except for the fact that what we weren’t was treading in unison over the same resonant ground.

Autumn had already begun, and besides the leaves under our feet we could hear, in the wind’s rough accompaniment, the constant falling of other leaves, or sounds of leaves, wherever we walked or had walked. There was no landscape but the forest, which veiled all others. But it was a good enough place for people like us, whose only life was to walk diversely and in unison over a moribund ground. I believe it was the close of day, the close of that day or any day, or perhaps all days, in an autumn that was all autumns, in the symbolic and true forest.

Not even we could say what homes, duties and loves we’d left behind. We were, in that moment, no more than wayfarers between what we had forgotten and what we didn’t know, knights on foot defending an abandoned ideal. But that explained, along with the steady sound of trampled leaves and the forever rough sound of an
unsteady wind, the reason for our departure, or for our return, since, not knowing what the path was, or why, we didn’t know if we were coming or going. And always, all around us, the sound of leaves we couldn’t see, falling we didn’t know where, lulled the forest to sleep with sadness.

Although we paid no attention to each other, neither of us would have continued alone. We kept each other company with the drowsiness we both felt. The sound of our steps in unison helped each of us to think without the other, whereas our own solitary steps would have brought the other to mind. The forest was all false clearings, as if the forest itself were false, or were ending, but neither it nor the falseness was going to end. Our steps kept going in unison, and around the sound of the leaves we were trampling we heard a very soft sound of leaves falling in the forest that had become everything, in the forest that was the universe.

Who were we? Were we two, or two forms of one? We didn’t know and we didn’t ask. A hazy sun presumably existed, for it wasn’t night in the forest. A vague aim presumably existed, for we were walking. Some world or other presumably existed, since a forest existed. But what it was or might be was foreign to us, two perpetual walkers treading in unison over dead leaves, anonymous and impossible listeners to falling leaves. Nothing else. A now harsh now gentle murmur of the inscrutable wind, a now loud now soft rustle of the unfallen leaves, a vestige, a doubt, a goal that had perished, an illusion that never was – the forest, the two walkers, and I, I, unsure of which one I was, or if I was both, or neither, and without seeing it to the end I watched the tragedy of nothing ever having existed but the autumn and the forest, the always rough and unsteady wind, and the always fallen or falling leaves. And always, as if surely there were a sun and day out there, one could see clearly – to nowhere – in the clamorous silence of the forest.

I suppose I’m what they call a decadent, one whose spirit is outwardly defined by those sad glimmers of artificial eccentricity that incarnate an anxious and artful soul in unusual words. Yes, I think that’s what I am, and that I’m absurd. That’s why, in the spirit of a classical writer, I try at least to place into an expressive mathematics the decorative sensations of my substituted soul. At a certain point in my written cogitation, I no longer know where the centre of my attention lies – whether in the scattered sensations I attempt to describe like enigmatic tapestries, or in the words which absorb me as I try to describe the act of describing and which, absorbing me, distract me and cause me to see other things. Beset by lucid and free associations of ideas, images and words, I say what I imagine I’m feeling as much as what I’m really feeling, and I’m unable to distinguish between the suggestions of my soul and the fruits born of images that fell from my soul to the ground, nor do I know whether the sound of a discordant word or the rhythm of an incidental phrase might not be diverting me from the already hazy point, from the already stowed sensation, thereby absolving me from thinking and saying, like long voyages designed to distract us. And all of this, which even as I’m telling it should stir in me a sense of futility, failure and anguish, gives me only wings of gold. As soon as I start talking about images, even if it’s to say they should be used sparingly, images are born in me; as soon as I stand up from myself to repudiate something I don’t feel, I start feeling that very thing, and even my repudiation becomes a feeling trimmed with embroidery; as soon as I want to abandon myself to the wind, having lost faith in my efforts, a placid phrase or a sober, concrete adjective suddenly, like sunlight, makes me clearly see the dormantly written page before me, and the letters drawn in my ink are an absurd map of magic signs. And I lay myself aside like my pen, and wrap myself in the flowing cape of obliviously leaning back, far away, intermediate and submissive, doomed like a castaway drowning within sight of marvellous islands, engulfed by the same purplish seas that he had so truly dreamed in distant beds.