The Book of Disquiet (49 page)

Let’s make the receptivity of our senses purely literary, and let’s convert our emotions, when they stoop to becoming apparent, into visible matter that can be sculpted into statues with fluid, glowing words.

‘Creator of indifferences’ is the motto I want for my spirit today. I’d like my life’s activity to consist, above all, in educating others to feel more and more for themselves, and less and less according to the dynamic law of collectiveness. To educate people in that spiritual antisepsis which precludes contamination by commonness and vulgarity is the loftiest destiny I can imagine for the pedagogue of inner discipline that I aspire to be. If all who read me would learn – slowly, of course, as the subject matter requires – to be completely insensitive to other people’s opinions and even their glances, that would be enough of a garland to make up for my life’s scholastic stagnation.

My inability to act has always been an ailment with a metaphysical aetiology. I’ve always felt that to perform a gesture implied a disturbance, a repercussion, in the outer universe; I’ve always had the impression that any movement I might make would unsettle the stars and rock the skies. And so the tiniest gesture assumed for me early on a metaphysical significance of astonishing proportions. I developed an attitude of transcendental honesty with respect to all action, and ever since this attitude took firm hold in my consciousness, it has prevented me from having intense relations with the tangible world.

To know how to be superstitious is still one of the arts which, developed to perfection, distinguishes the superior man.

Ever since I’ve been using my idle moments to observe and meditate, I’ve noticed that people don’t agree or know the truth about anything that’s of real importance in life or that would be useful for living it. The most exact science is mathematics, which lives in the cloister of its own laws and rules; when applied, yes, it elucidates other sciences, but it can elucidate only what they discover – it cannot help in the discovery. In the other sciences, the only sure and accepted facts are those that don’t matter for life’s supreme ends. Physics knows the expansion coefficient for iron, but it doesn’t know the true mechanics of the world’s composition. And the more we advance in what we’d like to know, the more we fall behind in what we do know. Metaphysics would seem to be the supreme guide, since it alone is concerned with ultimate truth and life’s supreme ends, but it isn’t even a scientific theory, just a pile of bricks that these or those hands form into awkward houses with no mortar holding them together.

I’ve also noticed that the only difference between humans and animals is the way they deceive themselves and remain ignorant about the life they live. Animals don’t know what they do: they’re born, they grow up, they live and they die without thought, reflection or a real future. And how many men live differently from animals? We all sleep, and the only difference is in what we dream, and in the degree and quality of our dreaming. Perhaps death will awaken us, but we can’t even be sure of that unless it’s by faith (for which believing is having), by hope (for which wanting is possessing), or by charity (for which giving is receiving).

It’s raining on this cold and sad winter afternoon as if it had been raining, just as monotonously, since the first page of the world. It’s raining, and as if the rain had made them hunch forward, my feelings lower their stupid gaze to the ground, where water flows and nourishes nothing, washes nothing, cheers up nothing. It’s raining, and I suddenly feel the terrible weight of being an animal that doesn’t know what it is, dreaming its thought and emotion, withdrawn into a spatial region of being as into a hovel, satisfied by a little heat as by an eternal truth.

‘The people’ are a regular chap.

The people are never humanitarian. What most characterizes this fellow called ‘the people’ is a narrow focus on his own interests, and a careful exclusion – as far as possible – of the interests of others.

When the people lose their tradition, it means that the social bond has been severed; and when the social bond is severed, then the bond between the people and the minority who aren’t like them is also severed. And the severing of the social bond between the minority and the people spells the death of art and true science, the end of the main agencies on whose existence civilization depends.

To exist is to deny. What am I today, living today, but the denial of who and what I was yesterday? To exist is to contradict oneself. Nothing better symbolizes life than those news articles that contradict today what the newspaper said yesterday.

To want is to be unable to achieve. The man who wanted something he achieved didn’t want it until it was already in his power to achieve. The man who wants will never achieve, because he loses himself in wanting. These principles seem fundamental to me.

… contemptible like the aims we live for, without our having chosen those aims.

Most if not all men live a contemptible life: contemptible in all its joys, and contemptible in almost all its sorrows, except those that have to do with death, since Mystery plays a part in these.*

Through the filter of my inattention, I hear fluid, scattered sounds which rise like intermittently flowing waves from outside, as if they came from another world: cries of vendors selling what’s natural, such as vegetables, or what’s social, such as lottery tickets; the round scraping of wheels from carts and wagons that hurriedly jerk forward;
cars whose veering makes more noise than their motors; the shaking of some sort of cloth out of some window; the whistle of a little boy; the laughter from an upper floor; the metallic groan of the tram one street over; the jumble of sounds issuing from the cross street; a mishmash of loud noises, soft noises and silences; halting rumbles of traffic; some footsteps; beginnings, middles and ends of people’s utterances – and all of this exists for me, who am sleeping while thinking of it, like a stone poking out of a patch of grass where it doesn’t belong.

Next, and coming through the wall of my rented room, it’s domestic sounds that flow together in a stream: footsteps, dishes, the broom, a song (fado?*) that’s cut short, last night’s balcony rendezvous, irritation because something is missing from the dining table, someone asking for the cigarettes left on top of the cabinet – all of this is reality, the anaphrodisiac reality that has no part in my imagination.

Lightly fall the steps of the junior maid, whose slippers I picture having a red and black braid, and since that’s how I picture them, their sound takes on something of a red and black braid; loudly fall the boots of the family’s son, who’s going out and yells goodbye, the slam of the door cutting the echo of the
later
that follows the
see you
; a dead calm, as if the world on this fourth floor had ended; dishes being taken to the kitchen to get washed; water running; ‘Didn’t I tell you that’… and silence whistling from the river.

But I dreamily and digestively drowse. I have time, between synaesthesias. And it’s extraordinary to think that, if I were asked right now what I want for this short life, I could think of nothing better than these long, slow minutes, this absence of thought and emotion, of action and almost of sensation itself, this inner sunset of dissipated desire. And then it occurs to me, almost without thinking, that most if not all people live like this, with greater or lesser consciousness, moving forward or standing still, but with the very same indifference towards ultimate aims, the same renunciation of their personal goals, the same watered-down life.* Whenever I see a cat lying in the sun, I think of humanity. Whenever I see someone sleep, I remember that everything is slumber. Whenever someone tells me he dreamed, I wonder if he realizes that he has never done anything but dream. The sound from the street gets louder, as if a door had opened, and the doorbell rings.

It was nothing, for the door shut immediately. The footsteps die out at the end of the hallway. The washed plates raise their voice of water and porcelain. […] A passing truck shakes the back of the apartment, and since all things end, I get up from my thinking.

And I reason at will, in the same way I dream, for reasoning is just another kind of dreaming.

O prince of better days, I was once your princess, and we loved each other with another kind of love, whose memory makes me grieve.

The so gentle and ethereal hour was an altar for prayer. The horoscope of our meeting was surely ruled by auspicious conjunctions – so subtle and silken was the vague substance of glimpsed dreams that had mingled with our awareness of feeling. Our bitter conviction that life wasn’t worth living had come to an end, like one more summer. There was a rebirth of that spring which we could now, albeit fallaciously, imagine had been ours. With humiliating similarity to humans, the pools among the trees also lamented, along with the roses in the unshaded flower beds and the indefinite melody of living – all irresponsibly.

It’s useless to discern or foresee. The whole of the future is a mist that surrounds us, and when we glimpse tomorrow, it tastes like today. My destinies are the clowns that the caravan left behind, with no better moonlight than that of the open road, nor any quivering in the leaves except what the breeze causes, and the uncertainty of the moment, and our belief that they are quivering. Distant purples, fleeting shadows, the dream incomplete and no hope of death’s completing it, the rays of a dying sun, the light in the house on the hill, the anguished night, the perfume of death here among these books, all alone, with life
outside, the trees smelling greenly in the vast night that is starrier on the other side of the hill… And so your sorrows had their solemn and benevolent union; your few words royally consecrated the voyage, no ships ever returned, not even the real ones, and the smoke of living stripped everything of its contours, leaving only the shadows and skeletons, the bitter waters of eerie ponds among boxwoods seen through gates that from a distance recall Watteau, anguish, and never again. Millenniums just for you to come, but the road has no curves and so you can never arrive. Goblets reserved for the inevitable hemlocks – not yours, but the life of us all, and even the street lamps, the nooks and crannies, the faint wings we only hear, while in the restless, suffocating night our thought slowly rises and paces across its anxiety… Yellow, green-black, love-blue: all dead, my divine nursemaid, all dead, and all ships are the ship that never set sail! Pray for me, and perhaps God will exist because it’s for me that you pray. The fountain softly pattering in the distance, life uncertain, the smoke fading to nothing in the village where night is falling, my memory so hazy, the river so far away… Grant that I may sleep, grant that I may forget myself, lady of Obscure Designs, Mother of Endearments and of Blessings incompatible with their own existence…

After the last rains left the sky for earth, making the sky clear and the earth a damp mirror, the brilliant clarity of life that returned with the blue on high and that rejoiced in the freshness of the water here below left its own sky in our souls, a freshness in our hearts.

Whether we like it or not we’re servants of the hour and its colours and shapes, we’re subjects of the sky and earth. Even those who delve only in themselves, disdaining what surrounds them, delve by different paths when it rains and when it’s clear. Obscure transmutations, perhaps felt only in the depths of abstract feelings, occur because it rains or stops raining. They’re felt without our feeling them because the weather we didn’t feel made itself felt.

Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the
self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways. At this very moment, jotting down these impressions during a break that’s excusable because today there’s not much work, I’m the one who is attentively writing them, I’m the one who is glad not to have to be working right now, I’m the one seeing the sky outside, invisible from in here, I’m the one thinking about all of this, I’m the one feeling my body satisfied and my hands still a bit cold. And my entire world of all these souls who don’t know each other casts, like a motley but compact multitude, a single shadow – the calm, bookkeeping body with which I lean over Borges’s tall desk, where I’ve come to get the blotter that he borrowed from me.

Falling between the buildings, in alternating patches of light and shadow (or of brighter and less bright light), the morning dawns over the city. It seems to come not from the sun but from the city itself, as if the sunlight emanated from the walls and rooftops – not from them physically, but because they happen to be there.

To see and feel it makes me feel a great hope, but I realize that hope is literary. Morning, spring, hope – they’re linked in music by the same melodic intention; they’re linked in the soul by the same memory of an identical intention. No: if I observe myself as I observe the city, I realize that all I can hope is for the day to end, like all days. Reason also sees the dawn. Whatever hope I placed in the day wasn’t mine; it was of those who just live the passing hour and whose outer way of understanding I happened, for a moment, to embody.

Hope? What do I have to hope for? The day doesn’t promise me more than the day, and I know it has a certain duration and an end. The light heartens but does not improve me, for I’ll walk away as the same man – just a few hours older, a feeling or two happier, a thought or two sadder. When something is born, we can feel it as a birth or we can think about it having to die. Now, under the full light of the sun,
the city landscape is like an open field of buildings – natural, vast and harmonious. But while seeing all this, can I forget that I exist? My consciousness of the city is, at its core, my consciousness of myself.