The Book of Disquiet (30 page)

Like a hazy flickering drop, in the distance the first small star glows.

All stirrings of our sensibility, even the most pleasant ones, are bound to disturb the inscrutable inner life of that same sensibility. Tiny concerns as well as large worries distract us from ourselves, hindering the peace of mind we all aspire to, whether we know it or not.

We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it’s towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses.

I’m older than Time and Space, because I’m conscious. Things derive from me; the whole of Nature is the offspring of my sensations.

I seek and don’t find. I want and can’t have.

Without me the sun rises and expires; without me the rain falls and the wind howls. It’s not because of me that there are seasons, the twelve months, time’s passage.

Lord of the world in me which, like earthly lands, I can’t take with me.....

That locus of sensations known as my soul sometimes walks with me, consciously, through the city’s nocturnal streets, in the wearisome hours when I feel like a dream among dreams of a different sort, by the
gaslight, in the midst of the transitory sound of traffic.

As my body penetrates the lanes and side streets, my soul loses itself in intricate labyrinths of sensation. All that can disturbingly convey the notion of unreality and feigned existence, all that can demonstrate – not to abstract reason but
and concretely – how the place occupied by the universe is hollower than hollow: all this objectively unfolds before my detached spirit. I don’t know why, but I’m troubled by this objective network of wide and narrow streets, this succession of street lamps, trees, lighted and dark windows, opened and closed gates – heterogeneously nocturnal shapes which my near-sightedness makes even hazier, until they become subjectively monstrous, unintelligible and unreal.

Verbal snatches of envy, lust and triviality collide with my sense of hearing. Whispered murmurs
ripple towards my consciousness.

Little by little I lose my clear awareness of the fact that I concurrently exist with all this, that I really move – seeing little but hearing – among shadows that represent beings and places where there actually are beings. It becomes gradually, darkly, indistinctly unintelligible to me how all of this can exist in the face of eternal time and infinite space.

Through a passive association of ideas, I start thinking about the men whose consciousness of that space and time was so analytically and intuitively acute that it lost touch with the world. It seems ludicrous that on nights no doubt like this one, in cities surely not very different from the one in which I contemplate, there were men such as Plato, Scotus Erigena,* Kant and Hegel who virtually forgot about all this, who became different from these
people. And they were from the same human race.....

With what horrible clarity even I, as I walk here and think these thoughts, feel distant, alien, confused and.....

I end my solitary peregrination. A vast silence, impassive to slight
sounds, assaults and overwhelms me. In both body and spirit I feel sorely weary of things, all things, of simply being here, of
finding myself in this present state. I almost catch myself wanting to scream because of a feeling that I’m sinking in an ocean of
whose immensity has nothing to do with the infinity of space or the eternity of time, nor with anything that can be measured and named. In these moments of supremely silent terror, I don’t know what I materially am, what I normally do, what I usually want, feel and think. I feel cut off from myself, outside of my reach. The moral impulse to struggle, the intellectual effort to systematize and understand, the restless artistic yearning to produce something that I no longer fathom but that I remember having fathomed and that I call beauty – all of this vanishes from my sense of reality, all of this strikes me as not even worthy of being considered useless, empty and remote. I feel like a mere void, the illusion of a soul, the locus of a being, a conscious darkness where a strange insect
vainly seeks at least the warm memory of a light.

What good is dreaming?

What did I make of myself? Nothing.

To be spiritualized in Night.....

Inner Statue without contours, Outer Dream without a dream-essence.

I’ve always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises. Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was, I’ve always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat. I was never convinced of what I believed in. I filled my hands with sand,
called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through. Words were my only truth. When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been.

If it weren’t for my continuous dreaming, my perpetual state of alienation, I could very well call myself a realist – someone, that is, for whom the outer world is an independent nation. But I prefer not to give myself a name, to be somewhat mysterious about what I am and to be impishly unpredictable even to myself.

I feel a certain duty to dream continuously since, not being more nor wanting to be more than a spectator of myself, I have to put on the best show I can. And so I fashion myself out of gold and silks, in imaginary rooms, on a false stage, with ancient scenery: a dream created to invisible music and the play of soft lights.

I cherish, like the memory of a special kiss, my childhood remembrance of a theatre with a bluish, moonlit setting that depicted the terrace of an impossible palace, surrounded by a huge park, likewise painted. I spent my soul living all of that as though it were real. The music that softly played on this occasion of my mental experience of life gave the stage setting a feverish reality.

The setting was definitely bluish and moonlight, but I don’t remember who appeared on stage. The play I place today in that remembered scenery comes from the verses of Verlaine and Pessanha,* but this isn’t the play (which I’ve forgotten) that was performed on the actual stage and had nothing to do with that reality of blue music. It’s my own, fluid play, a grandiose moonlit masquerade, a silver and nocturnal blue interlude.

Then came life. That night they took me to The Gold Lion* for dinner. I can still taste the steaks on the palate of my nostalgia – steaks (I know because I imagine*) such as nowadays no one makes or I, at any rate, don’t eat. And it all gets mixed up – the childhood I live from afar, the tasty food at the restaurant, the moonlit setting, Verlaine future and I present – in a blurry diagonal, in a false gap between what I was and what I am.

As when a storm is brewing and the noises from the street talk in a loud and detached voice…

The street winced in the stark white light, and the dull darkness trembled all around the world with a boom of echoing crashes. The harsh sadness of the heavy rain accentuated the air’s ugly black hue. Cold and warm and hot at the same time, the air was everywhere equivocal. Then a wedge of metallic light entered the large office, ripping into the peace of each human body, and a huge rock of sound struck with a chill shock on all sides, shattering into a hard silence. The sound of rain diminishes, becoming a soft voice. The noise from the street diminishes out of fear. A new light spreads its swift yellow over the silent darkness, but breathing was again possible before the fist of rumbling sound abruptly echoed from afar; like an angry farewell, the storm was beginning to draw away.