The Book of Disquiet (51 page)

What to do? Isolate the moment like a thing, and be happy now, in the moment we’re feeling happiness, thinking of nothing but what we’re feeling and completely excluding everything else. Trap all thought in our sensation.....

That’s what I believe this afternoon. It’s not what I’ll believe tomorrow morning, because tomorrow morning I’ll be someone else. What kind of believer will I be tomorrow? I don’t know; I would already have to be there to know. Not even God eternal, in whom today I believe, could know – today or tomorrow – anything about me tomorrow. Because today I’m I, and tomorrow it’s possible that he’ll have never existed.

God created me to be a child and willed that I remain a child. But why did he let Life beat me up, take away my toys and leave me alone during playtime, my weak hands clutching at my blue, tear-stained smock? If I couldn’t live without loving care, why was this thrown out
with the rubbish? Ah, every time I see a child crying in the street, left there on his own, the jolting horror of my exhausted heart grieves me even more than the child’s sadness. I grieve with every pore of my emotional life, and it is my hands that wring the corner of the child’s smock, my mouth that is contorted by real tears, my weakness, my loneliness… And all the laughs from the adult life passing by are like the flames of matches struck against the sensitive fabric* of my heart.

He sang, in a soft and gentle voice, a song from a faraway country. The music made the strange words familiar. It sounded like the soul’s fado,* though it didn’t in the least resemble fado.

Through its veiled words and human melody, the song told of things that are in the hearts of us all and that no one knows. He sang in a kind of stupor, a kind of ecstasy right there in the street, his gaze oblivious to his listeners.

The crowd that had gathered listened to him without any discernible scoffing. The song belonged to everyone, and the words sometimes spoke to us – an oriental secret of some lost race. We didn’t hear the city’s noises, even if we heard them, and the carts passed by so close that one of them brushed against my coat. But I only felt it; I didn’t hear it. There was a rapt intensity in the stranger’s song that was soothing to what in us dreams or doesn’t succeed. It was a street incident, and we all noticed the policeman slowly turning the corner. He approached with the same slow gait, then stood still for a while behind the boy selling umbrellas, as if something had caught his eye. That’s when the singer stopped. No one said anything. Then the policeman intervened.

For some reason or other, I’m alone in the office. Although this dawns on me suddenly, I had already vaguely sensed it. In some corner of my consciousness I’d felt a great sigh of relief, a deeper breathing with different lungs.

This is one of the strangest sensations that the fortuity of encounters and absences can bring: that of finding ourselves alone in a place that is normally full of people and noise, or that belongs to someone else. We suddenly have a feeling of absolute ownership, of vast and effortless dominion, and – as I said – of relief and serenity.

How good it feels to be completely alone! To be able to talk to ourselves out loud, to walk around without being looked at, to lean back in an undisturbed reverie! Every house becomes an open field, every room has the breadth of a farm.

The usual sounds are all strange, as if they belonged to a nearby but independent universe. We are kings at last. This is what we all truly long to be, and the most plebeian among us perhaps more ardently than those full of false gold. For a moment we are the universe’s pensioners, recipients of a steady income, with no needs and no worries.

Ah, but in those footsteps climbing the stairs I recognize someone who’s coming here, someone who will interrupt my amused solitude. My implicit empire is about to be invaded by barbarians. The footsteps don’t tell me who it is that’s coming; they don’t recall the footsteps of anyone I know. But I have a gut instinct that I’m the destination of what for now are merely footsteps, climbing up the stairs which I suddenly see, since I’m thinking about who’s climbing them. Yes, it’s one of the clerks. He stops, the door opens, he enters. I see all of him. And as he enters he says: ‘All alone, Senhor Soares?’ And I answer: ‘Yes, for some time now…’ And then, taking off his jacket while eyeing his other, older one that’s hanging up, he says: ‘To be here all alone is a real bore, Senhor Soares, and not only that…’ ‘A real bore, no doubt about it,’ I answer. ‘It almost makes you feel like sleeping,’ he says, already wearing the frayed jacket and walking towards his desk. ‘It certainly does,’ I agree, smiling. And reaching for my forgotten
pen, I graphically re-enter the anonymous wholesomeness of normal life.

Whenever they can, they sit opposite a mirror. While talking to us, they look at themselves with infatuated eyes. Sometimes, as happens to people in love, they lose track of the conversation. They always liked me, because my adult aversion to my physical appearance made me automatically turn my back to whatever mirror I found. And so they treated me well, for they instinctively recognized that I was the good listener who would always let them show off and have the pulpit.

As a group they weren’t so bad; as individuals, some were better and some were worse. They had tender and generous feelings that an observer of average behaviour would never expect, mean and petty attitudes that a normal human being would hardly imagine. Pathetic, envious and self-deluded – that sums them up, and the same words would sum up whatever part of this milieu has infiltrated the work of worthy men who happened to get caught for a time in its mire. (This explains the presence, in Fialho’s* writings, of flagrant envy, rank vulgarity, and an abominable lack of elegance.)

Some are witty, others have nothing but wit, and still others don’t exist. Café wit may be divided into jokes about those who are absent and jibes at those who are present. This kind of wittiness is known elsewhere as mere vulgarity. There’s no greater proof of an impoverished mind than its inability to be witty except at other people’s expense.

I passed by, I saw, and – unlike them – I conquered. Because my victory consisted in seeing. I saw that they were no different from other inferior social groups: in the house where I rent a room, I found the same squalid soul that the café s had already revealed to me, but without – thank all the gods – any delusions of making a hit in Paris. My landlady dreams of Lisbon’s newer section in her moments of imaginative fancy, but she’s spared from the myth of going abroad, and my heart is touched.

From that time I spent at the tomb of human will, I remember a couple of funny jokes and otherwise being bored sick.

They’re heading to the cemetery, and it seems that their past was left behind at the café, for they don’t even mention it now.

…and posterity will never know of them, forever hidden from its view under the rotten heap of pennants they won in their verbal battles.

Pride is the emotional certainty of our own greatness. Vanity is the emotional certainty that others see this greatness or attribute it to us. These two sentiments don’t necessarily coincide, nor do they naturally oppose each other. They’re different but compatible.

Pride all by itself, unaccompanied by vanity, manifests itself in timid behaviour. One who feels he’s great but isn’t convinced that others recognize him as such will be afraid to pit his opinion about himself against other people’s opinion.

Vanity all by itself, unaccompanied by pride, which is rare but possible, manifests itself through audacity. One who is certain that others think highly of him will fear nothing from them. Both physical courage and moral courage can exist without vanity, but audacity cannot. And by audacity I mean boldness in taking the initiative. Audacity can exist without physical or moral courage, for these character traits are of a different, incommensurable order.

I don’t even have the consolation of pride. And even if I did have something I could brag about, how much more I have to be ashamed of!

I spend life lying down. And not even in my dreams can I make a move to get up, so complete is my incapacity for any and all effort.

The creators of metaphysical systems and
of psychological explanations are still in the primary stage of suffering. What is systematizing and explaining but
and construction? And what is all this – arranging, ordering, organizing – but achieved effort? And how deplorably this is life!

No, I’m not a pessimist. Happy those who are able to translate their suffering into a universal principle. I don’t know if the world is sad or arbitrary, nor do I care, because I’m indifferent to what other people suffer. As long as they don’t weep or moan, which I find bothersome and unpleasant, I don’t even shrug my shoulders at their suffering. That’s how deep my disdain for them runs.

I like to think of life as half light, half darkness. I’m not a pessimist. I don’t complain about the horror of life; I complain about the horror of my life. The only fact I worry about is that I exist and suffer and can’t even dream of being removed from my feeling of suffering.

The happy dreamers are the pessimists. They shape the world to their likeness and thus always feel at home. What grieves me the most is the disparity between the world’s happy bustle and my own glum, wearisome silence.

For those who live it, life with all its sorrows and fears and jolts must be a good and happy thing, like a journey in an old stagecoach, when one is in good company (and can enjoy it).

I can’t even consider my suffering a sign of Greatness. I don’t know if it is or isn’t. But I suffer things that are so trivial, and am hurt by things so banal, that this hypothesis – if I dared entertain it – would be an insult to the hypothesis that I might be a genius.

The splendour of a beautiful sunset saddens me with its beauty. When gazing at one I always think: what a thrill it must be for a happy man to see this!

And this book is a lament. Once written, it will replace
Alone
* as the saddest book in Portugal.

Next to my pain, all other pains seem unreal or insignificant. They’re the pains of people who are happy or who live life and complain. My pains are of a man who finds himself incarcerated, cut off from life…

Between me and life…

And so I see all the things which cause anguish and feel none of the
things which bring joy. And I’ve noticed that suffering is seen more than felt, whereas happiness is felt more than seen. Because if one doesn’t see or think, he will know a certain contentment, like that of the mystics and the bohemians and the riffraff. It’s by the door of thought and the window of observation that suffering comes into one’s house.

Let us live by dreams and for dreams, distractedly dismantling and recomposing the universe according to the whim of each dreaming moment. Let us do this while being consciously conscious of the uselessness and
of doing it. Let us ignore life with every pore of our body, stray from reality with all of our senses, and abdicate from love with our whole heart. Let us fill the pitchers we take to the well with useless sand and empty them out, so as to refill and re-empty them, in utter futility.