The Book of Disquiet (57 page)

Where are the living?

I’d like to be in the country to be able to like being in the city. I like being in the city in any case, but I’d like it twice over if I were in the country.

The greater the sensibility and the subtler its capacity for feeling, the more absurdly it shivers and shudders over little things. It takes extraordinary intelligence to feel anxiety because of an overcast day. Humanity, basically insensitive, doesn’t get anxious over the weather, because there’s always weather; humanity doesn’t feel the rain unless it’s falling on its head.

The hazy, torpid day humidly swelters. Alone in the office, I review my life, and what I see is like the day that oppresses and afflicts me. I see myself as a child happy for no reason, as an adolescent full of ambition, as a full-grown man without happiness or ambition. And it all happened in a haze and a torpor, like this day that makes me see or remember it.

Who among us, looking back down the path of no return, can say they followed it in the right way?

Knowing how easily the littlest things can torture me, I deliberately avoid contact with the littlest things. If I suffer when a cloud passes in front of the sun, how will I not suffer from the darkness of the forever overcast day that’s my life?

My isolation isn’t a search for happiness (which my soul wouldn’t know how to feel), nor for tranquillity (which no one obtains unless he never really lost it), but for sleep, for effacement, for a modest renunciation.

The four walls of my squalid room are at once a cell and a wilderness, a bed and a coffin. My happiest moments are those when I think nothing, want nothing and dream nothing, being lost in a torpor like some accidental plant, like mere moss growing on life’s surface. I savour without bitterness this absurd awareness of being nothing, this foretaste of death and extinction.

I’ve never had anyone I could call ‘Master’. No Christ died for me. No Buddha showed me the way. No Apollo or Athena, in my loftiest dreams, ever appeared to enlighten my soul.

But my self-imposed exile from life’s actions and objectives and my attempt to break off all contact with things led precisely to what I tried to escape. I didn’t want to feel life or to touch anything real, for the experience of my temperament in contact with the world had taught me that the sensation of life was always painful to me. But in isolating myself to avoid that contact, I exacerbated my already overwrought sensibility. If it were possible to cut off completely all contact with things, then my sensibility would pose no problem. But this total isolation cannot be achieved. However little I do, I still breathe; however little I act, I still move. And so, having exacerbated my sensibility through isolation, I found that the tiniest things, which even for me had been perfectly innocuous, began to wrack me like catastrophes. I chose the wrong method of escape. I fled via an uncomfortable and roundabout route to end up at the same place I’d started from, with the fatigue of my journey added to the horror of living there.

I’ve never seen suicide as a solution, because my hatred of life is due to my love of life. It took me a long time to be convinced of this unfortunate mistake in how I live with myself. Convinced of it, I felt frustrated, which is what I always feel when I convince myself of something, since for me each new conviction means another lost illusion.

I killed my will by analysing it. If only I could return to my childhood before analysis, even if it would have to be before I had a will!

My parks are all a dead slumber, their pools stagnating under the midday sun, when the drone of insects swells and life oppresses me, not like a grief but like a persistent physical pain.

Far-away palaces, pensive parks, narrow paths in the distance, the dead charm of stone benches where no one sits any more – perished
splendours, vanished charm, lost glitter. O my forgotten yearning, if I could only recover the grief with which I dreamed you!

Peace at last. All that was dross and residue vanishes from my soul as if it had never been. I’m alone and calm. It’s like the moment when I could theoretically convert to a religion. But although I’m no longer attracted to anything down here, I’m also not attracted to anything up above. I feel free, as if I’d ceased to exist and were conscious of that fact.

Peace, yes, peace. A great calm, gentle like something superfluous, descends on me to the depths of my being. The pages I read, the tasks I complete, the motions and vicissitudes of life – all has become for me a faint penumbra, a scarcely visible halo circling something tranquil that I can’t identify. The exertion in which I’ve sometimes forgotten my soul, and the contemplation in which I’ve sometimes forgotten all action – both come back to me as a kind of tenderness without emotion, a paltry, empty compassion.

It’s not the mild and languidly cloudy day. It’s not the feeble, almost non-existent breeze, hardly more perceptible than the still air. It’s not the anonymous colour of the faintly and spottily blue sky. It’s none of this, because I feel none of it. I see without wanting to see, helplessly. I attentively watch the non-spectacle. I don’t feel my soul, just peace. External things, all of them distinct and now perfectly still, even if they’re moving, are to me as the world must have been to Christ when, looking down at everything, Satan tempted him. They are nothing, and I can understand why Christ wasn’t tempted. They are nothing, and I can’t understand why clever old Satan thought they would be tempting.

Go swiftly by, life that’s not felt, a stream flowing silently under forgotten trees! Go gently by, soul that’s not known, an unseen rustle beyond large fallen branches! Go uselessly by, pointlessly by, consciousness conscious of nothing, a hazy flash in the distance amid clearings in the leaves, coming from and going to we don’t know where! Go, go, and let me forget!

Faint breath of what never dared live, dull sigh of what failed to feel, useless murmur of what refused to think, go slowly, go slackly, go in the eddies you have to have and in the dips you’re given, go to the shadow or to the light, brother of the world, go to glory or to the abyss, son of Chaos and of the Night, but remember in some obscure part of you that the Gods came later and that they will also pass.

Whoever has read the pages of this book will by now surely have concluded that I’m a dreamer. And he will have concluded wrongly. I lack the money to be a dreamer.

Great melancholies and sorrows full of tedium can exist only in an atmosphere of comfort and solemn luxury. That’s why Poe’s Egaeus,* pathologically absorbed in thought for hours on end, lives in an ancient, ancestral castle where, beyond the doors of the lifeless drawing room, invisible butlers administer the house and prepare the meals.

Great dreams require special social circumstances. One day, when the doleful cadence of a certain passage I’d written made me excitedly think of Chateaubriand, it didn’t take me long to remember that I’m not a viscount, nor even a Breton. On another occasion, when I’d written something whose content seemed to recall Rousseau, it likewise didn’t take long for me to realize that, besides not being the noble lord of a castle, I also lack the privilege of being a wanderer from Switzerland.

But there is also the universe of the Rua dos Douradores. Here God also grants that the enigma of life knows no bounds. My dreams may be poor, like the landscape of carts and crates from among whose wheels and boards I conceive them, but they’re what I have and am able to have.

The sunsets, to be sure, are somewhere else. But even from this fourth-floor room that looks out over the city, it’s possible to contemplate infinity. An infinity with warehouses down below, it’s true, but with stars up above… This is what occurs to me as I look out my high window at the close of day, with the dissatisfaction of the
bourgeois that I’m not, and with the sadness of the poet that I can never be.

The advent of summer makes me sad. It seems that summer’s luminosity, though harsh, should comfort those who don’t know who they are, but it doesn’t comfort me. There’s too sharp a contrast between the teeming life outside me and the forever unburied corpse of my sensations – what I feel and think, without knowing how to feel or think. In this borderless country known as the universe, I feel like I’m living under a political tyranny that doesn’t oppress me directly but that still offends some secret principle of my soul. And then I’m slowly, softly seized by an absurd nostalgia for some future, impossible exile.

What I mostly feel is slumber. Not a slumber that latently brings – like all other slumbers, even those caused by sickness – the privilege of physical rest. Not a slumber that, because it’s going to forget life and perhaps bring dreams, bears the soothing gifts of a grand renunciation on the platter with which it approaches our soul. No: this is a slumber that’s unable to sleep, that weighs on the eyelids without closing them, that purses the corners of one’s disbelieving lips into what feels like a stupid and repulsive expression. It’s the kind of sleepiness that uselessly overwhelms the body when one’s soul is suffering from acute insomnia.

Only when night comes do I feel, not happiness, but a kind of repose which, since other reposes are pleasant, seems pleasant by way of analogy. Then my sleepiness goes away, and the confusing mental dusk brought on by the sleepiness begins to fade and to clear until it almost glows. For a moment there’s the hope of other things. But the hope is short-lived. What comes next is a hopeless, sleepless tedium, the unpleasant waking up of one who never fell asleep. And from the window of my room I gaze with my wretched soul and exhausted body at the countless stars – countless stars, nothing, nothingness, but countless stars…

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.

Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

He listened to me read my verses – which I read well that day, for I was relaxed – and said to me with the simplicity of a natural law: ‘If you could always be like that but with a different face, you’d be a charmer.’ The word ‘face’ – more than what it referred to – yanked me out of myself by the collar of my self-ignorance. I looked at the mirror in my room and saw the poor, pathetic face of an unpoor beggar; and then the mirror turned away, and the spectre of the Rua dos Douradores opened up before me like a postman’s nirvana.

The acuity of my sensations is like a disease that’s foreign to me. It afflicts someone else, of whom I’m just the sick part, for I’m convinced that I must depend on some greater capacity for feeling. I’m like a special tissue, or a mere cell, that bears the brunt of responsibility for an entire organism.

When I think, it’s because I’m drifting; when I dream, it’s because I’m awake. Everything I am is tangled up in myself, such that no part of me knows how to be.

When we constantly live in the abstract, be it the abstraction of thought itself or of thought sensations, then quite against our own sentiment or will the things of the real world soon become phantoms – even those things which, given our particular personality, we should feel most keenly.

However much and however sincerely I may be someone’s friend, the news that he is sick or that he died produces in me only a vague, indefinite, dull impression, which it embarrasses me to feel. Only direct contact, the actual scene, would kindle my emotion. When we live by the imagination, we exhaust our capacity for imagining, and especially for imagining what’s real. Mentally living off what doesn’t and can never exist, we lose our ability to ponder what can exist.

I found out today that an old friend, one I haven’t seen for a long time but whom I always sincerely remember with what I suppose is nostalgia, has just entered the hospital for an operation. The only clear and definite sensation that this news aroused in me was weariness at the thought of my having to visit him, with the ironic alternative of forgoing the visit and feeling guilty about it.

That’s all… From dealing so much with shadows, I myself have become a shadow – in what I think and feel and am. My being’s substance consists of nostalgia for the normal person I never was. That, and only that, is what I feel. I don’t really feel sorry for my friend who’s going to be operated on. I don’t really feel sorry for anyone who’s going to be operated on or who suffers and grieves in this world. I only feel sorry for not being a person who can feel sorrow.

And all at once I’m helplessly thinking of something else, impelled by I don’t know what force. And as if I were hallucinating, everything I was never able to feel or be gets mixed up with a rustling of trees, a trickling of water into pools, a non-existent farm… I try to feel, but I no longer know how. I’ve become my own shadow, as if I’d surrendered my being to it. Contrary to Peter Schlemihl* of the German story, I sold not my shadow but my substance to the Devil. I suffer from not suffering, from not knowing how to suffer. Am I alive or do I just pretend to be? Am I asleep or awake? A slight breeze that coolly
emerges from the daytime heat makes me forget everything. My eyelids are pleasantly heavy… It occurs to me that this same sun is shining on fields where I neither am nor wish to be… From the midst of the city’s din a vast silence emerges… How soft it is! But how much softer, perhaps, if I could feel!…

Even writing has lost its appeal. To express emotions in words and to produce well-wrought sentences has become so banal it’s like eating or drinking, something I do with greater or lesser interest but always with a certain detachment, and without real enthusiasm or brilliance.

To speak is to show too much consideration for others. It’s when they open their mouths that fish, and Oscar Wilde, are fatally hooked.