The Book of Disquiet (50 page)

I suddenly remember when I was a child and saw, as today I cannot see, dawn breaking over the city. Back then it didn’t break for me but for life, because back then I (not being conscious) was life. I saw dawn break and felt happy; today I see dawn break, feel happy, and become sad. The child is still there but has fallen silent. I see the way I saw, but from behind my eyes I see myself seeing, and that is enough to darken the sun, to make the green of the trees old, and to wilt the flowers before they open. Yes, I once belonged here; but today, before each landscape, no matter how fresh, I stand as a foreigner, a guest and pilgrim before it, an outsider of what I see and hear, old to myself.

I’ve seen everything, even what I’ve never seen nor will ever see. Even the memory of future landscapes flows in my blood, and my anxiety over what I’ll have to see again is already monotonous to me.

And leaning on the windowsill to enjoy the day, gazing at the variegated mass of the whole city, just one thought fills my soul: that I profoundly wish to die, to cease, to see no more light shining on this city or any city, to think no more, to feel no more, to leave behind the march of time and the sun like a piece of wrapping paper, to remove like a heavy suit – next to the big bed – the involuntary effort of being.

I’m intuitively certain that for people like me no material circumstance can be propitious, no situation have a favourable outcome. If I already had good reasons for withdrawing from life, this is yet another one. Those courses of events that make success inevitable in an ordinary man have an unexpected, adverse effect in my case.

This observation sometimes causes me a painful impression of divine hostility. It seems that only by some conscious manipulation of events, to make them work against me, could the series of disasters that define my life have happened.

The result of all this is that I never make much of an effort. Let luck
come my way, if it will. I know all too well that my greatest effort won’t achieve what it would in other people. That’s why I give myself up to luck, without expecting anything from it. What should I expect?

My stoicism is an organic necessity; I need to shield myself against life. Since stoicism is after all just a stringent form of Epicureanism, I try to get some amusement out of my misfortune. I don’t know to what extent I achieve this. I don’t know to what extent I achieve anything. I don’t know to what extent anything can be achieved…

Where another man would succeed not so much by his effort as by a circumstantial inevitability, I wouldn’t and couldn’t succeed, whether by that inevitability or by that effort.

I seem to have been born, spiritually speaking, on a short winter day. Night fell early on my being. The only way I can live my life is in frustration and desolation.

None of this is truly stoical. It’s only in words that my suffering is at all noble. I complain like a sick maid. I fret like a housewife. My life is totally futile and totally sad.

All I asked of life is what Diogenes* asked of Alexander: not to stand in the way of the sun. There were things I wanted, but I was denied any reason for wanting them. As for what I found, it would have been better to have found it in real life. Dreaming.....

While out walking I’ve formulated perfect phrases which I can’t remember once I get home. I’m not sure if the ineffable poetry of these phrases belongs totally to what they were (and which I forgot), or partly to what they after all weren’t.

I hesitate in everything, often without knowing why. How often I’ve sought – as my own version of the straight line, seeing it in my mind as the ideal straight line – the longest distance between two points. I’ve
never had a knack for the active life. I’ve always taken wrong steps that no one else takes; I’ve always had to make an effort to do what comes naturally to other people. I’ve always wanted to achieve what others have achieved almost without wanting it. Between me and life there were always sheets of frosted glass that I couldn’t tell were there by sight or by touch; I didn’t live that life or that dimension. I was the daydream of what I wanted to be, and my dreaming began in my will: my goals were always the first fiction of what I never was.

I’ve never known if it was my sensibility that was too much for my intelligence, or my intelligence that was too much for my sensibility. I’ve always been late, I’m not sure if for the former or for the latter, or perhaps for both, or perhaps it was the third thing that was late.

The dreamers of ideals [?] – socialists, altruists, and humanitarians of whatever ilk – make me physically sick to my stomach. They’re idealists with no ideal, thinkers with no thought. They’re enchanted by life’s surface because their destiny is to love rubbish, which floats on the water and they think it’s beautiful, because scattered shells float on the water too.

An expensive cigar smoked with one’s eyes closed – that’s all it takes to be rich.

Like someone who revisits a place where he lived in his youth, with a cheap cigarette I can return – heart and soul – to the time in my life when I used to smoke them. Through the mild flavour of the smoke, the whole of the past comes back to me.

At other times it’s a certain sweet. A mere piece of chocolate can shake up my nerves with the surfeit of memories it provokes. Childhood! And as my teeth sink into the dark, soft mass, I chew and savour my humble joys as the happy companion of my toy soldiers, as the knight in perfect accord with whatever stick happened to be serving
as my horse. Tears well up in my eyes, and along with the flavour of the chocolate I can taste my bygone happiness, my long lost childhood, and I voluptuously bask in the sweetness of my sorrow.

This ritual of taste, however simple it may be, is as solemn as any other.

But it’s cigarette smoke that most subtly, spiritually, reconstructs my past. Since it just barely grazes my awareness of taste, it evokes the moments to which I’ve died in a more general way, by a kind of displacement; it makes them more remotely present, more like mist when they envelop me, more ethereal when I embody them. A menthol cigarette or a cheap cigar wraps certain of my moments in a sweet softness. With what subtle plausibility – taste combined with smell – I recreate the dead stage settings and reinvest them with the colours of a past, always so eighteenth century in its weary and mischievous aloofness, always so medieval in its irreparable lostness!

Elevating disgrace into splendour, I created for myself a pageantry of pain and effacement. I didn’t make a poem out of my pain, but I used it to make a cortège. And from the window that looks on to myself I contemplate in awe the deep-red sunsets, the wispy twilights of my sorrows without cause, where the dangers, burdens and failures of my innate incapacity for existing march by in processions of my aimlessness. The child in me that never died still watches and excitedly waves at the circus I stage for myself. He laughs at the clowns, who exist only in the circus; he fixes his eyes on the stunt men and the acrobats as if they were the whole of life. And thus all the unsuspected anguish of a human soul about to burst, all the incurable despair of a heart forsaken by God, sleeps the innocent child’s sleep, without joy and yet contented, within the four walls of my room with their ugly, peeling paper.

I walk not through the streets but through my sorrow. The flanking rows of buildings are all the incomprehension that surrounds my soul;..... my footsteps resound against the pavement like a ridiculous
death knell, a frightful noise in the night, final like a receipt or a tomb.

Stepping back from myself, I see that I’m the bottom of a well.

The man I never was died. God forgot who I should have been. I’m just a vacant interlude.

If I were a musician, I would compose my own funeral march, and with such good reason!

To be reincarnated in a stone or a speck of dust – my soul weeps with this yearning.

I’m losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless.

I have no meaning I can fathom… Life weighs on me… Any emotion is too much for me… Only God knows my heart… What cortèges from my past cause a tedium of unremembered splendours to cradle my nostalgia? And what canopies? what starry sequences? what lilies? what pennants? what stained-glass windows?

What shady path of mystery was followed by our best fantasies, which so vividly remember this world’s trickling waters, cypress trees and boxwoods, and which can find no canopies for their processions except in the fruits of abdication?

Don’t speak… You happen too much… If only I didn’t see you… When will you be just a fond memory of mine? How many women
you’ll be until that happens! And my having to suppose I can see you is an old bridge no one uses… Yes, this is life. The others have dropped their oars… The cohorts have lost their discipline… The knights left at daybreak with the sound of their lances… Your castles passively waited to be deserted… No wind abandoned the rows of trees on the summit… Useless porticos, hidden silverware, prophetic signs – all of this belongs to vanquished twilights in ancient temples and not to our meeting in this present moment, for there is no reason for lindens to give shade apart from your fingers and their belated gesture…

All the more reason for remote territories… Treaties signed by stained-glass kings… Lilies from religious pictures… Whom is the retinue waiting for?… Where did the lost eagle go?

To wrap the world around our fingers, like a thread or ribbon which a woman twiddles while daydreaming at the window…

Everything comes down to our trying to feel tedium in such a way that it doesn’t hurt.

It would be interesting to be two kings at the same time: not the one soul of them both, but two distinct, kingly souls.

Life, for most people, is a pain in the neck that they hardly notice, a sad affair with some happy respites, as when the watchers of a dead body tell anecdotes to get through the long, still night and their obligation to keep watch. I’ve always thought it futile to see life as a valley of tears; yes, it is a valley of tears, but one in which we rarely weep. Heine said that after great tragedies we always merely blow our
noses. As a Jew, and therefore universal, he understood the universal nature of humanity.

Life would be unbearable if we were conscious of it. Fortunately we’re not. We live as unconsciously, as uselessly and as pointlessly as animals, and if we anticipate death, which presumably (though not assuredly) they don’t, we anticipate it through so many distractions, diversions and ways of forgetting that we can hardly say we think about it.

That’s how we live, and it’s a flimsy basis for considering ourselves superior to animals. We are distinguished from them by the purely external detail of speaking and writing, by an abstract intelligence that distracts us from concrete intelligence, and by our ability to imagine impossible things. All this, however, is incidental to our organic essence. Speaking and writing have no effect on our primordial urge to live, without knowing how or why. Our abstract intelligence serves only to elaborate systems, or ideas that are quasi-systems, which in animals corresponds to lying in the sun. And to imagine the impossible may not be exclusive to us; I’ve seen cats look at the moon, and it may well be that they were longing to have it.

All the world, all life, is a vast system of unconscious agents operating through individual consciousnesses. Like two gases that form a liquid when an electric current passes through them, so two consciousnesses – that of our concrete being and that of our abstract being – form a superior unconsciousness when life and the world pass through them.

Happy the man who doesn’t think, for he accomplishes instinctively and through organic destiny what the rest of us must accomplish through much meandering and an inorganic or social destiny. Happy the man who most resembles the animals, for he is effortlessly what the rest of us only are by hard work; for he knows the way home, which the rest of us can reach only through byways of fiction and hazy return routes; for he is rooted like a tree, forming part of the landscape and therefore of beauty, while we are but myths who cross the stage, walk-ons of futility and oblivion dressed in real-life costumes.

I don’t much believe in the happiness of animals, except when I want to use this conceit as a frame for highlighting a particular feeling. To be happy, it’s necessary to know that one’s happy. The only happiness we get from sleeping without dreaming is when we wake up and realize that we’ve slept without dreaming. Happiness is outside of happiness.

There’s no happiness without knowledge. But the knowledge of happiness brings unhappiness, because to know that you’re happy is to realize that you’re experiencing a happy moment and will soon have to leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything else. Not to know, on the other hand, is not to exist.

Only the absolute of Hegel managed to be two things at once, but in writing. Being and non-being do not mix and meld in the sensations and laws of life; they exclude one another, by a kind of reverse synthesis.