The Book of Disquiet (70 page)

We’re convalescents. Most of us are people who never learned an art or a trade, not even the art of enjoying life. Since we’re basically averse to prolonged social contact, even the greatest of friends tend to bore us after half an hour; we long to see them only when we think about seeing them, and the best moments we spend with them occur in our dreams. I don’t know if this is indicative of superficial friendship.
Perhaps not. What I do know is that the things we love, or think we love, have their full weight and worth only when simply dreamed.

We don’t care for shows. We despise actors and dancers. Every show is a coarse imitation of what should have been only dreamed.

We’re indifferent to other people’s opinion – not innately, but because of an education of our sentiments that has generally been forced on us by various painful experiences. But we treat others courteously and even like them, with an indifferent sort of interest, because everyone is interesting and convertible into dreams and into other people.....

With no aptitude for loving, we are wearied by the mere thought of the words we would have to say in order to be loved. Besides, who among us wants to be loved? The ‘
on le fatigait en l’aimant
’* apropos René is not quite the right motto for us. The very idea of being loved wearies us, and to the point of panic.

My life is an unrelenting fever, an unquenchable thirst. Real life afflicts me like a hot day, and there’s something mean about the way it afflicts me.

For those who choose to make dreams their life, and to make a religion and politics out of cultivating sensations like plants in a hothouse, the sign that they’ve successfully taken the first step is when they feel the tiniest things in an extraordinary and extravagant way. That’s all there is to the first step. To know how to sip a cup of tea with the extreme voluptuousness that the normal man experiences only when overcome by joy at seeing his ambition suddenly fulfilled or himself suddenly cured of a terrible nostalgia, or when he’s in the final, carnal acts of love; to be able to achieve in the vision of a sunset or in the contemplation of a decorative detail that intensity of feeling which generally can’t occur through sight or hearing but only by way of the carnal senses – touch, taste and smell – when they sculpt the object of sensation on our consciousness; to be able to convert our interior vision, the hearing in our dreams, and all imagined senses and the senses of the imagination into tangible receptors like the five senses that receive the outside world: these are some of the sensations (and similar
examples can be imagined) that the trained cultivator of his own feelings is able to experience with a convulsive fervour, and I mention them so as to give a rough but concrete idea of what I’m trying to convey.

Arriving at this degree of sensation, however, causes the lover of sensations to feel griefs – both from the outside and from inside himself – with the same conscious intensity. It is when he realizes, and because he realizes, that to feel in the extreme can mean not only extreme pleasure but also acute suffering that the dreamer is led to take the second step in his self-ascension.

I’ll leave aside the step that he might or might not take and that, if he can and does take it, will determine certain of his attitudes and affect the general way he proceeds – I mean the step of completely isolating himself from the real world, which of course he can take only if he’s rich. For I suppose it’s clear by reading between the lines that the dreamer, depending on his relative possibility of isolation and self-dedication, should with greater or lesser intensity concentrate on his work of pathologically stimulating his sensitivity to things and dreams. The man who must actively live and associate with people – and even in this case it’s possible to reduce intimacy with others to a minimum (intimacy with people, and not mere contact, is what’s detrimental) – will have to freeze the entire surface of his social self, so that every fraternal and friendly gesture he receives will slide off and not enter or make a lasting impression. This seems hard to do but isn’t. People are easy to drive away: all we have to do is not go near them. Anyway, I’ll pass over this point and return to what I was explaining.

The creation of an automatically heightened and complex awareness of the simplest and commonest sensations leads not only to a vast increase in the enjoyment we get from feeling but also, as I’ve said, to a tremendous upsurge in the amount of pain we experience. The second step for the dreamer should therefore be to avoid pain. He shouldn’t avoid it like the Stoics or the early Epicureans, by abandoning the nest, for that will harden him against pleasure as well as against pain. He should, instead, seek pleasure in pain, and then learn how to feel pain falsely – to feel some kind of pleasure, that is, whenever he feels pain. There are various paths for reaching this goal. One is to
hyperanalyse our pain (but only after we’ve first trained ourselves to react to pleasure by exclusively feeling it, with no analysis). This is an easier technique than it seems, at least for superior souls. To analyse pain and to get in the habit of submitting all pains to analysis, until we do it automatically, by instinct, will endow every pain imaginable with the pleasure of analysing it. Once our ability and instinct to analyse grow large enough, our practice of it will absorb everything, and there will be nothing left of pain but an indefinite substance for analysis.

Another method, more subtle and more difficult, is to develop the habit of incarnating the pain in an ideal figure. First we must create another I, charged with suffering – in and for us – everything we suffer. Next we need to create an inner sadism, completely masochistic, that enjoys its suffering as if it were someone else’s. This method, which on first reading seems impossible, isn’t easy, but it is eminently attainable, presenting no special difficulties for those who are well versed in lying to themselves. Once this is achieved, pain and suffering acquire an absolutely tantalizing flavour of blood and disease, an incredibly exotic pungency of decadent gratification! The feeling of pain resembles the anguished, troubled height of convulsions, and suffering – the long and slow kind – has the intimate yellow which colours the vague bliss of a profoundly felt convalescence. And an exquisite exhaustion tinged with disquiet and melancholy evokes the complex sensation of anguish that our pleasures arouse, in the thought that they will vanish, as well as the melancholy pre-weariness we feel in our sensual delights, when we think of the weariness they’ll bring.

There is a third method for subtilizing pains into pleasures and for making doubts and worries into a soft bed. It consists in intensely concentrating on our anxieties and sufferings, making them so fiercely felt that by their very excess they bring the pleasure of excess, while by their violence they suggest the pleasure that hurts for being so pleasurable and the gratification that smacks of blood for having wounded us. This can only happen, of course, in souls dedicated to pleasure by habit and by education. And when, as in me – refiner that I am of fallacious refinements, an architect dedicated to building myself out of sensations subtilized through the intellect, through abdication from life, through analysis and through pain itself –, all three methods
are employed simultaneously, when every felt pain (felt so quickly there’s no time for the soul to plan any defence) is automatically analysed to the core, ruthlessly foisted on an extraneous I, and buried in me to the utmost height of pain, then I truly feel like a victor and a hero. Then life stops for me, and art grovels at my feet.

Everything I’ve been describing is just the second step that the dreamer must take to reach his dream.

Who besides me has been able to take the third step, which leads to the sumptuous threshold of the Temple? This is the step which is indeed hard to take, for it requires an inward effort vastly greater than any effort we make in life, but it also rewards us to the heights and depths of our soul in a way that life never could. This step is – once everything else has been completely and simultaneously carried out, the three subtle methods having been applied to exhaustion – to immediately pass the sensation through pure intelligence, filtering it through a higher analysis that shapes it into a literary form with its own substance and character. Then I have completely fixed the sensation. Then I have made the unreal real and have given the unattainable an eternal pedestal. Then, within myself, I have been crowned Emperor.

Don’t imagine that I write to publish, or merely to write, or to produce art. I write because this is the final goal, the supreme refinement, the organically illogical refinement,
of my cultivation of the states of soul. If I take one of my sensations and unravel it so as to use it to weave the inner reality I call ‘The Forest of Estrangement’ or ‘A Voyage I Never Made’, you can be sure I don’t do it for the sake of a lucid and shimmering prose, nor even for the sake of the pleasure I get from that prose – though I’m quite glad to have it as an additional final touch, like a splendidly falling curtain over my dreamed stage settings – but to give complete exteriority to what is interior, thereby enabling me to realize the unrealizable, to conjoin the contradictory and, having exteriorized my dream, to give it its most powerful expression as pure dream. Yes, this is my role as a stagnator of life, chiseller of inaccuracies, sick pageboy of my soul and Queen, reading to her at twilight not the poems from the book of my Life that lies open on my knees, but the poems that I invent and pretend to read, and that she pretends to hear, while somewhere and somehow the
Evening is softening – over this metaphor raised up in me into Absolute Reality – the last hazy light of a mysterious spiritual day.

The twilights of ancient cities, with lost traditions inscribed in the black stones of their massive buildings; tremulous dawns over inundated fields, swampy and damp like the air before the sun comes out; the narrow lanes where anything could happen; the heavy chests in age-old sitting rooms; the well behind the farmhouse on a moonlit night; the letter dating from when our grandmother whom we never met was first in love; the mildew in the rooms where the past is stored; the rifle no one knows how to use any more; the fever of hot afternoons next to the window; not a soul on the road; fitful slumber; the blight in the vineyards; church bells; the cloistral grief of living… Hour of blessings: your soft, frail hands… The caress never comes, the stone in your ring bleeds in the growing darkness… Religious celebrations with no belief in our soul: the material beauty of the ugly, roughhewn saints, romantic passions lived in the mind, the smell of the sea as night falls on the docks of the city made damp by the chilling air…

Your slender hands hover, like wings, over someone whom life sequesters. Long corridors and cracks around the windows, open even when closed, the floor as cold as tombstones, the nostalgia for love like a trip yet to be made to incomplete lands… Names of ancient queens… Stained-glass windows depicting stalwart counts… The vaguely scattered morning light, like a cold incense filling the air of the church and concentrated in the darkness of the impenetrable ground… Dry hands pressed one against the other.

The scruples of the monk when he discovers the teachings of occult masters in the strange ciphers of an ancient book, and the steps of Initiation in the book’s decorative prints.

A beach in the sun – fever in me… The sea that shimmers in the anxiety that chokes me… The sails in the distance and how they sail in my fever… The steps leading down to the beach in my fever… Warmth in the cool breeze from across the sea,
mare vorax, minax
,
mare tenebrosum
– the dark, far-away night of the argonauts,* and my forehead burning with their primitive ships…

Everything belongs to others except my grief for not having any of it.

Give me the needle… Today the house is missing the sound of her soft footsteps, and I miss not knowing where she might be and what she might be making with pleats, with colours, with pins… Today her sewing, locked for ever in the drawers of the chest, is superfluous, and there is no warmth of dreamed arms clasping round my mother’s neck.

Anteros
*

I have a decorative and superficial concept of profound love and its usefulness. I prefer visual passions, keeping my heart intact for the sake of more unreal destinies.

I don’t remember having ever loved more than the ‘painting’ in someone, the pure exterior, in which the soul’s only role is to animate and enliven it, making it different from a painting done on canvas.

This is how I love: I fix my attention on a beautiful or attractive or otherwise lovable figure, whether of a woman or a man (where there’s no desire, there’s no sexual preference), and that figure captivates, obsesses, possesses me. But I want only to see it, and nothing would horrify me more than the prospect of meeting and speaking to the real person whom the figure visibly manifests.