The Book of Disquiet (53 page)

And right here on this very street I can wait, in ecstasy, for Death among battlements and swords.

From my fourth-floor room overlooking infinity, in the viable intimacy of the falling evening, at the window before the emerging stars, my dreams – in rhythmic accord with the visible distance – are of journeys to unknown, imagined, or simply impossible countries.

The blond light of the golden moon shines out of the east. The shimmer it forms on the wider river opens into snakes on the sea.

In lavish satins and puzzled purples the empires proceeded towards death under exotic flags flanking wide roads and luxurious canopies at the stopping-places. Baldachins passed by. Roads now drab, now spruce, let the processions come through. The weapons coldly flashed in the excruciatingly slow, pointless marches. The gardens on the
outskirts were forgotten, and the fountains’ water was merely the continuation of what had been left behind, a distant laughter falling among memories of lights, which is not to say that the statues along the paths talked, nor did the succession of yellows stifle the autumn colours that embellished the tombs. The halberds were corners around which lay splendorous ages dressed in green-black, faded purple and garnet-coloured robes. Behind all the evasions, the squares lay empty, and never again would the flower beds where we stroll be visited by the shadows that had abandoned the aqueducts.

The drums, like thunder, drummed the tremulous hour.

Every day things happen in the world that can’t be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they’re mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can’t be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.

Dreaming itself has become a torture. I’ve acquired such lucidity in my dreams that I see all dreamed things as real. And so all the value that they had as mere dreams has been lost.

Do I dream of being famous? Then I feel all the public exposure that comes with glory, the total loss of privacy and anonymity that makes glory painful.

To think of our greatest anxiety as an insignificant event, not only in the life of the universe but also in the life of our own soul, is the beginning of wisdom. To think this way right in the midst of our anxiety is the height of wisdom. While we’re actually suffering, our human pain seems infinite. But human pain isn’t infinite, because nothing human is infinite, and our pain has no value beyond its being a pain we feel.

How often, oppressed by a tedium that seems like insanity or by an anxiety that seems to surpass it, I stop, hesitating, before I revolt, I hesitate, stopping, before I deify myself. From among all the pains there are – the pain of not grasping the mystery of the world, the pain of not being loved, the pain of being treated unjustly, the pain of life oppressing us, suffocating and restraining us, the pain of a toothache, the pain of shoes that pinch – who can say which is the worst for himself, let alone for someone else, or for the generality of those who exist?

Some of the people I talk with consider me insensitive. But I think I’m more sensitive than the vast majority. I’m a sensitive man who knows himself, and who therefore knows sensitivity.

Ah, it’s not true that life is painful, or that it’s painful to think about life. What’s true is that our pain is grave and serious only when we pretend it is. If we let it be, it will leave just as it came, it will die down the way it grew up. Everything is nothing, our pain included.

I’m writing this under the weight of a tedium that doesn’t seem to fit inside me, or that needs more room than is in my soul; a tedium of all people and all things that strangles and deranges me; a physical feeling of being completely misunderstood that unnerves and overwhelms me. But I lift up my head to the blue sky that doesn’t know me, I let my face feel the unconsciously cool breeze, I close my eyelids after having looked, and I forget my face after having felt. This doesn’t make me feel better, but it makes me different. Seeing myself frees me from myself. I almost smile, not because I understand myself but because, having become another, I’ve stopped being able to understand myself. High in the sky, like a visible nothingness, floats a tiny white cloud left behind by the universe.

My dreams
: In my dreams I create
friends
, with whom I then keep company. They’re imperfect in a different way.

Remain pure, not in order to be noble or strong but to be yourself. To give your love is to lose love.

Abdicate from life so as not to abdicate from yourself.

Women are a good source of dreams. Don’t ever touch them.

Learn to disassociate the ideas of voluptuousness and pleasure. Learn to delight in everything, not for what it is, but for the ideas and dreams it kindles. (Because nothing is what it is, but dreams are always dreams.) To accomplish this, you mustn’t touch anything. As soon as you touch it, your dream will die; the touched object will occupy your capacity for feeling.

Seeing and hearing are the only noble things in life. The other senses are plebeian and carnal. The only aristocracy is never to touch. Avoid getting close – that’s true nobility.

For each separate thing, the dreamer should strive to feel the complete indifference which it, as a thing, arouses in him.

The ability to spontaneously abstract whatever is dreamable from each object or event, leaving all of its reality as dead matter in the Exterior World – that is what the wise man should strive for.

Never to feel his own feelings sincerely, and to raise his pallid triumph to the point of regarding his own ambitions, longings and desires with indifference; to pass alongside his joys and anxieties as if passing by someone who doesn’t interest him…

The greatest self-mastery is to be indifferent towards ourselves, to
see our body and soul as merely the house and grounds where Destiny willed that we spend our life. To treat our own dreams and deepest desires with arrogance,
en grand seigneur
, politely and carefully ignoring them. To act modestly in our own presence; to realize that we are never truly alone, since we are our own witnesses, and should therefore act before ourselves as before a stranger, with a studied and serene outward manner – indifferent because it’s noble, and cold because it’s indifferent.

In order not to sink in our own estimation, all we have to do is quit having ambitions, passions, desires, hopes, whims or nervous disquiet. The key is to remember that we’re always in our own presence – we’re never so alone that we can feel at ease. With this in mind, we will overcome having passions and ambitions, for these make us vulnerable; we won’t have desires or hopes, since desires and hopes are plebeian and inelegant; and we won’t have whims or be disquieted, because rash behaviour is unpleasant for others to witness, and agitated behaviour is always a vulgarity.

The aristocrat is the one who never forgets that he’s never alone; that’s why etiquette and decorum are the privilege of aristocracies. Let’s internalize the aristocrat. Let’s take him out of his gardens and drawing rooms and place him in our soul and in our consciousness of existing. Let’s always treat ourselves with etiquette and decorum, with studied and for-other-people gestures.

Each of us is an entire community, an entire neighbourhood of the great Mystery,* and we should at least make sure that the life of our neighbourhood is distinctive and elegant, that the feasts of our sensations are genteel and restrained, and that the banquets of our thoughts are decorous and dignified. Since other souls may build poor and filthy neighbourhoods around us, we should clearly define where our own begins and ends, and from the façades of our feelings to the alcoves of our shyness, everything should be noble and serene, sculpted in sobriety, without ostentation.

We should try to find a serene way to realize each sensation. To reduce love to the shadow of a dream of love, a pale and tremulous interval between the crests of two tiny, moonlit waves. To turn desire into a useless and innocuous thing, a kind of knowing smile in our soul; to make it into something we never dream of achieving or even
expressing. To lull hatred to sleep like a captive snake, and to tell fear to give up all its outer manifestations except for anguish in our eyes, or rather, in the eyes of our soul, for only this attitude can be considered aesthetic.

Throughout my life, in every situation and in every social circumstance, everyone has always seen me as an intruder. Or at least as a stranger. Whether among relatives or acquaintances, I’ve always been regarded as an outsider. I’m not suggesting that this treatment was ever deliberate. It was due, rather, to a natural reaction in the people around me.

Everyone everywhere has always treated me kindly. Rare is the man like me, I suspect, who has caused so few to raise their voice, wrinkle their brow, or speak angrily or askance. But the kindness I’ve been shown has always been devoid of affection. For those who are closest to me I’ve always been a guest, and as such treated well, but always with the kind of attention accorded to a stranger and with the lack of affection that’s normal for an intruder.

I don’t doubt that this attitude in other people derives mainly from some obscure cause intrinsic to my own temperament. Perhaps I have a communicative coldness that makes others automatically reflect my unfeeling manner.

By nature I quickly strike up acquaintances. People are friendly to me right away. But I never receive affection. I’ve never been shown devotion. To be loved has always seemed impossible to me, like a stranger calling me by my first name.

I don’t know if I should regret this, or if I should accept it as an indifferent destiny which there’s no reason to regret or accept.

I’ve always wanted to be liked. It always grieved me that I was treated with indifference. Left an orphan by Fortune, I wanted – like all orphans – to be the object of someone’s affection. This need has always been a hunger that went unsatisfied, and so thoroughly have I adapted to this inevitable hunger that I sometimes wonder if I really feel the need to eat.

Whatever be the case, life pains me.

Other people have someone who is devoted to them. I’ve never had anyone who even thought of being devoted to me. Others are doted on; I’m treated nicely.

I know I have the capacity to stir respect, but not affection. Unfortunately I’ve never done anything that would justify, for others, the respect they initially feel, and so they never come to truly respect me.

Sometimes I think I must enjoy suffering. But I know I’d really prefer something else.

I don’t have the qualities of a leader or of a follower. Nor even those of a contented man, which are the ones that count when the others are missing.

Other people, less intelligent than I, are stronger. They’re better at carving out their place in life; they manage their intelligence more effectively. I have all the qualities it takes to exert influence except for the knack of actually doing it, or even the will to want to do it.

Were I ever to fall in love, I wouldn’t be loved back.

All I have to do is want something for it to perish. My destiny lacks the strength to be lethal in general, but it has the weakness of being lethal in whatever specifically concerns me.

Having seen how lucidly and logically certain madmen* justify their lunatic ideas to themselves and to others, I can never again be sure of the lucidness of my lucidity.

One of my life’s greatest tragedies – albeit a surreptitious tragedy, of the kind that take place in the shadows – is my inability to feel anything naturally. I can love and hate like others and, like others, feel fear and
enthusiasm; but neither my love nor my hate, nor my fear nor my enthusiasm, are quite like the real thing. Either they lack a certain ingredient, or they have one that doesn’t belong. They are at any rate some other thing, and what I feel doesn’t square with life.

In what is very aptly called a calculating personality, feelings are shaped by calculation and a kind of scrupulous self-interest to the point that they seem like something else. In what is specifically known as a scrupulous personality, the same displacement of natural instincts can be observed. In me there is a similar disturbance, a lack of clarity in my feelings, yet I am neither calculating nor scrupulous. I have no excuse for feeling things abnormally. I instinctively denature my instincts. Against my will, I will in the wrong way.

The slave of my own character as well as of my circumstances, offended not only by other people’s indifference but also by their affection for whom they think I am – such are the human insults heaped on me by Destiny.

I was a foreigner in their midst, but no one realized it. I lived among them as a spy and no one, not even I, suspected it. They all took me for a relative; no one knew I’d been swapped at birth. And so I was one of their equals without anything in common, a brother to all without belonging to the family.

I had come from wondrous lands, from landscapes more enchanting than life, but only to myself did I ever mention these lands, and I said nothing about the landscapes which I saw in dreams. My feet stepped like theirs over the floorboards and the flagstones, but my heart was far away, even if it beat close by, false master of an estranged and exiled body.

No one knew me under the mask of similarity, nor ever knew that I had a mask, because no one knew that there are masked people in the world. No one imagined that at my side there was always another, who was in fact I. They always supposed I was identical to myself.