The Book of Disquiet (37 page)

These thoughts console me in this cramped office, whose grimy windows overlook a joyless street. These thoughts console me, and for company I have my fellow creators of the world’s consciousness – the reckless playwright William Shakespeare, John Milton the schoolteacher, Dante Alighieri the tramp,..... and even, if the reference be permitted, Jesus Christ, who was nothing in the world, his very existence being doubted by history. Quite a different class of men is formed by the likes of the state councillor Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
the senator Victor Hugo, the chief of state Lenin, the chief of state Mussolini .....

Those of us in the shade, among the delivery boys and the barbers, constitute humanity .....

On the one hand there are the kings with their prestige, the emperors with their glory, the geniuses with their aura, the saints with their haloes, the leaders with their supremacy, the prostitutes, the prophets and the rich… On the other hand there’s us – the delivery boy on the corner, the reckless playwright William Shakespeare, the barber with his jokes, John Milton the schoolteacher, the shop assistant, Dante Alighieri the tramp, those whom death forgets or consecrates and whom life forgot without ever consecrating.

Government of the world begins in us. It’s not the sincere who govern the world, but neither is it the insincere; it’s those who create in themselves a real sincerity by artificial and automatic means. This sincerity is what makes them strong, and it outshines the less false sincerity of others. To be adept at deluding oneself is the first prerequisite for a statesman. Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.

An opinion is a vulgarity, even when it’s not sincere.

Every instance of sincerity is an intolerance. There are no sincere liberal minds. There are, for that matter, no liberal minds.

There everything is feeble, anonymous and gratuitous. There I saw great demonstrations of compassion, which seemed to reveal the depths of tragically sad souls, but I discovered that the demonstrations lasted no longer than the moment in which they were words, and that they originated – how often I observed this with the discernment of the silent – in something analogous to pity, lost as swiftly as the novelty of the observation, or else in the wine of the compassionate soul’s dinner. There was always a direct relationship between the humanitarian sentiments expressed and the amount of brandy consumed, and many a grand gesture suffered from one glass too many or from a pleonastic thirst.

All of these individuals had sold their souls to a devil from hell’s riff-raff, a devil that craved sordidness and idleness. They lived drunken lives of vanity and sloth, and limply died in the cushions of words, in a morass of scorpions whose venom is mere drool.

The most extraordinary thing about all of these people was their complete and unanimous lack of importance, in every sense of the word. Some wrote for the major newspapers and succeeded in not existing. Others figured prominently in the professional register and succeeded in doing nothing in life. Others were even poets of renown, but one and the same ashen dust paled their foolish faces, and they were all a graveyard of embalmed stiffs, positioned with their hands on their hips, in postures of the living.

From the short time that I stagnated in that exile of mental cleverness, I’ve retained the memory of a few good and genuinely amusing moments, of many dull and unhappy moments, of several profiles standing out from the nothingness, of some gestures directed at whatever waitress happened to be on duty – in short, a physically nauseating tedium and the remembrance of a funny joke or two.

Interspersed among them like blank spaces there were a few older men, who with their outmoded witticisms would backbite like the others, and about the same people.

I’ve never felt so much sympathy for the minor figures of public glory as when I saw them vilified by these minor men who grudge them
their petty glory. I understood then why the pariahs of Greatness are able to triumph: because they triumph in relation to these men and not in relation to humanity.

Poor devils with their insatiable hunger – either hungry for lunch, hungry for fame, or hungry for life’s desserts. Anyone who hears them for the first time will imagine he’s listening to Napoleon’s tutors and Shakespeare’s teachers.

Some triumph in love, some triumph in politics, and some triumph in art. The first group has the advantage of storytelling, since one can be highly successful in love without there being public knowledge of what happened. Of course, on hearing one of these men recount his sexual marathons, we begin to have our doubts after about the seventh conquest. Those who are the lovers of aristocratic or well-known ladies (and it seems to be the case for nearly all of them) ravage so many countesses that a tally of their conquests would shatter the gravity and composure of even the great-grandmothers of young women with titles.

Some specialize in physical conflict, killing the boxing champions of Europe in nocturnal revelries on the street corners of Chiado.* Others have influence over all the ministers of all the ministries, and these are the ones whose claims are at least plausible.

Some are terrible sadists, others are inveterate pederasts, and still others confess in a loud, sad voice that they’re brutal with women, having brought them along life’s paths by the whip. They always let someone else pay for their coffee.

Some are poets, some are .....

I know no better antidote for that torrent of shadows than direct acquaintance with common human life – in its commercial reality, for instance, as exhibited on the Rua dos Douradores. With what relief I used to return from that madhouse of puppets to the real presence of Moreira, my supervisor, a genuine and competent bookkeeper, badly dressed and out of shape, but at any rate a man, something none of these others have succeeded in being.

Most men spontaneously live a fictitious and alien life. ‘Most people are other people,’* said Oscar Wilde, and he was right. Some spend their lives in pursuit of something they don’t want; others pursue something they want that’s useless to them; still others lose themselves .....

But most men are happy and enjoy life for no reason. Man usually doesn’t weep much, and when he complains, that’s his literature. Pessimism isn’t viable as a democratic formula. Those who lament the world’s woes are isolated – they lament only their own. A Leopardi or an Antero de Quental* doesn’t have a sweetheart? Then the universe is a torment. A Vigny feels he’s inadequately loved? The world is a prison. A Chateaubriand dreams the impossible? Human life is tedious. A Job is covered with boils? Earth is covered with boils. People step on some sad fellow’s corns? Alas for his feet, the suns and the stars!

Indifferent to all this, humanity keeps on eating and loving, weeping over only what it must weep, and for as short a time as possible – over the death of a son, for instance, who is soon forgotten except on his birthday, or over the loss of money, which only causes weeping until more money comes along or one gets used to the loss.

The will to live recovers and carries on. The dead are buried. Our losses are forgotten.

He left today for his home town, apparently for good. I mean the so-called office boy, the same man I’d come to regard as part of this human corporation, and therefore as part of me and my world. He left today. In the corridor, casually running into each other for the expected surprise of our farewell, he timidly returned my embrace, and I had enough self-control not to cry, as in my heart – independent of me – my ardent eyes wanted.

Whatever has been ours, because it was ours, even if only as a casual
presence in our daily routine or in what we see, becomes part of us. The man who left today for a Galician town I’ve never heard of was not, for me, the office boy; he was a vital part, because visible and human, of the substance of my life. Today I was diminished. I’m not quite the same. The office boy left today.

Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything that ceases in what we see ceases in us. Everything that has been, if we saw it when it was, was taken from us when it went away. The office boy left today.

Wearier, older, and less willing, I sit down at the high desk and continue working from where I left off yesterday. But today’s vague tragedy, stirring thoughts I have to dominate by force, interrupts the automatic process of good bookkeeping. The only way I’m able to work is through an active inertia, as my own slave. The office boy left today.

Yes, tomorrow or another day, or whenever the bell will soundlessly toll my death or departure, I’ll also be one who’s no longer here, an old copier stowed away in the cabinet under the stairs. Yes, tomorrow or when Fate decides, the one in me who pretended to be I will come to an end. Will I go to my home town? I don’t know where I’ll go. Today the tragedy is visible because of an absence, considerable because it doesn’t deserve consideration. My God, my God, the office boy left today.

O night in which the stars feign light, O night that alone is the size of the Universe, make me, body and soul, part of your body, so that – being mere darkness – I’ll lose myself and become night as well, without any dreams as stars within me, nor a hoped-for sun shining with the future.

First it’s a sound that makes another sound, in the nocturnal hollow of things. Then it’s a low howl, accompanied by the creaking of the street’s swaying signboards. And then the voice of space becomes a shout, a roar, and everything shudders, nothing sways, and there’s silence in the dread of all this, like a speechless dread that sees another dread when the first one has passed.

Then there’s nothing but wind, just wind, and I sleepily notice how the doors shake in their frames and how the glass in the windows loudly resists.

I don’t sleep. I interexist.* A few vestiges of consciousness persist. I feel the weight of slumber but not of unconsciousness. I don’t exist. The wind… I wake up and go back to sleep without yet having slept. There’s a landscape of loud and indistinct sound beyond which I’m a stranger to myself. I cautiously delight in the possibility of sleeping. I really do sleep, but don’t know if I’m sleeping. In what seems to me like a slumber there is always a sound of the end of all things, the wind in the darkness, and, if I listen closely, the sound of my own lungs and heart.

After the last stars whitened into nothing in the morning sky and the breeze turned less cold in the oranged yellow of the light falling over several low-lying clouds, I finally succeeded in dragging my body – exhausted from nothing – out of the bed where I had sleeplessly pondered the universe.

I walked to the window with eyes that were burning from having stayed open all night. The light reflected off the crowded rooftops in various shades of pale yellow. I contemplated everything with the grand stupidity that comes from not sleeping. The yellow was wispy and insignificant against the hulking figures of the tall buildings. Far
off in the west (the direction I was facing), the horizon was already a greenish white.

I know that today will oppress me as when I can’t grasp a thing. I know that everything I do today will be marked not by weariness from the sleep I didn’t have, but by the insomnia I did have. I know that my existence will feel even more like sleep-walking than usual, not just because I haven’t slept but because I couldn’t sleep.

There are days that are philosophies, that suggest interpretations of life, that are marginal notes – full of critical observations – in the book of our universal destiny. This seems to be one of those days. I have the ludicrous impression that it is my heavy eyes and my empty brain that trace, like an absurd pencil, the letters of my profound and useless commentary.

Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can’t live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you’re a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but you’re not free. And you can’t hold this up as your own tragedy, for your birth is a tragedy of Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life itself so oppresses you that you’re forced to become a slave. Hapless you are if, having been born free, with the capacity to be isolated and self-sufficient, poverty should force you to live with others. This tragedy, yes, is your own, and it follows you.

To be born free is the greatest splendour of man, making the humble hermit superior to kings and even to the gods, who are self-sufficient by their power but not by their contempt of it.

Death is a liberation because to die is to need no one. In death the wretched slave is forcibly set free from his pleasures, from his sufferings, from his coveted and ongoing life. The king is freed of the domains
he didn’t want to give up. Women who spread love are freed of the triumphs they cherish. Men who conquered are freed of the victories for which their lives were predestined.

Death ennobles, dressing our poor ridiculous bodies in finery they have never known. In death a man is free, even if he didn’t want freedom. In death he’s no longer a slave, even if he wept on giving up his slavery. Like a king whose greatest glory is his kingly title, and who as a man may be laughable but as a king is superior, so the dead man may be horribly deformed but is still superior, because death has freed him.

Tired, I close the shutters of my windows, I exclude the world, and I have a few moments of freedom. Tomorrow I’ll go back to being a slave, but right now – alone, needing no one, and worried only that some voice or presence might disturb me – I have my little freedom, my moment of excelsis.

Leaning back in my chair, I forget the life that oppresses me. Nothing pains me besides having felt pain.