The Book of Disquiet (20 page)

I dedicate this work of supreme Discovery to the memory of your Portuguese name, creator of argonauts.

126

I have times of great stagnation. It’s not, as happens to everyone, that I let days and days go by without sending a postcard in response to the urgent letter I received. It’s not, as happens to no one, that I indefinitely postpone what’s easy and would be useful, or what’s useful and would be pleasurable. There’s more subtlety in my self-contradiction. I stagnate in my very soul. My will, emotions and thought stop functioning, and this suspension lasts for days on end; only the vegetative life of my soul – words, gestures, habits – expresses me to others and, through them, to myself.

In these periods of shadowy subsistence, I’m unable to think, feel or want. I can’t write more than numbers and scribbles. I don’t feel, and the death of a loved one would strike me as having happened in a foreign language. I’m helpless. It’s as if I were sleeping and my gestures, words and deliberate acts were no more than a peripheral respiration, the rhythmic instinct of some organism.

Thus the days keep passing, and if I added them all up, who knows how much of my life they would amount to? It sometimes occurs to me, when I shake off this state of suspension, that perhaps I’m not as naked as I suppose, that perhaps there are still intangible clothes covering the eternal absence of my true soul. It occurs to me that thinking, feeling and wanting can also be stagnations, on the threshold of a more intimate thinking, a feeling that’s more mine, a will lost somewhere in the labyrinth of who I really am.

However it may be, I’ll let it be. And to whatever god or gods that be, I’ll let go of who I am, according as luck and chance determine, faithful to a forgotten pledge.

127

I don’t get indignant, because indignation is for the strong; I’m not resigned, because resignation is for the noble; I don’t hold my peace, because silence is for the great. And I’m neither strong, nor noble, nor great. I suffer and I dream. I complain because I’m weak. And since I’m an artist, I amuse myself by making my complaints musical and by arranging my dreams according to my idea of what makes them beautiful.

I only regret not being a child, since then I could believe in my dreams, and not being a madman, since then I could keep everyone around me from getting close to my soul .....

Taking dreams for reality, living too intensely what I dream, has given this thorn to the false rose of my dreamed life: that not even dreams cheer me, because I see their defects.

Not even by colourfully painting my window can I block out the noise of the life outside, which doesn’t know I’m observing it.

Happy the creators of pessimistic systems! Besides taking refuge in the fact of having made something, they can exult in their explanation of universal suffering, and include themselves in it.

I don’t complain about the world. I don’t protest in the name of the universe. I’m not a pessimist. I suffer and complain, but I don’t know if suffering is the norm, nor do I know if it’s human to suffer. Why should I care to know?

I suffer, without knowing if I deserve to. (A hunted doe.)

I’m not a pessimist. I’m sad.

128

I’ve always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I’m not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.

Nothing would bother me more than if they found me strange at the office. I like to revel in the irony that they don’t find me at all strange. I like the hair shirt of being regarded by them as their equal. I like the crucifixion of being considered no different. There are martyrdoms more subtle than those recorded for the saints and hermits. There are torments of our mental awareness as there are of the body and of desire. And in the former, as in the latter, there’s a certain sensuality .....

129

The office boy was tying up the day’s packages in the twilight coolness of the empty office. ‘What a thunderclap!’ the cruel bandit said to no one, in the loud voice of a ‘Good morning!’ My heart started beating again. The apocalypse had passed. There was a respite.

And with what relief – a flashing light, a pause, the hard clap – did this now near, then retreating thunder relieve us of what had been. God had ceased. My lungs breathed heavily. I realized it was stuffy in the office. I noticed that there were other people besides the office boy. They had all been silent. I heard something crisp and tremulous: it was one of the Ledger’s large and heavy pages that Moreira, checking something, had abruptly turned.

130

I often wonder what I would be like if, shielded from the winds of fate by the screen of wealth, I’d never been brought by the dutiful hand of my uncle to an office in Lisbon, nor risen from it to other offices, all the way up to this paltry pinnacle as a competent assistant bookkeeper, with a job that’s like a siesta and a salary that I can live on.

I realize that if I’d had this imagined past, I wouldn’t now be able to write these pages, which are at least something, and therefore better than all the pages I would only have dreamed of writing in better circumstances. For banality is a form of intelligence, and reality –
especially if stupid or crude – is a natural complement of the soul.

My job as a bookkeeper is responsible for a large part of what I’m able to feel and think, since this occurs as a denial and evasion of that selfsame job.

If I had to list, in the blank space of a questionnaire, the main literary influences on my intellectual development, I would immediately jot down the name of Cesário Verde,* but I would also write in the names of Senhor Vasques my boss, of Moreira the head bookkeeper, of Vieira the local sales representative, and of António the office boy. And as the crucial address of them all I would write LISBON in big letters.

The fact is that not only Cesário Verde, but also my co-workers, have served as correction coefficients for my vision of the world. I think that’s the term (whose exact meaning I obviously don’t know) for the treatment given by engineers to mathematics so that it can be applied to life. If it is the right term, then that’s what I meant. If it isn’t, then let’s imagine it could be, the intention substituting for the failed metaphor.

And if I think, with all the lucidity I can muster, about what my life has apparently been, I see it as a coloured thing – a chocolate wrapper or a cigar band – swept from the dirty tablecloth by the brisk brush of the housemaid (who’s listening overhead) and landing in the dustpan with the crumbs and the crusts of reality proper. It stands out from other things with a similar destiny by its privilege of getting to ride in the dustpan as well. And above the maid’s brushing the gods continue their conversation, indifferent to the affairs of the world’s servants.

Yes, if I’d been wealthy, shielded, spruce, ornamental, I wouldn’t even have been this brief episode of pretty paper among crumbs; I would have remained on a lucky dish – ‘Thank you but no’ – and have retreated to the sideboard to grow old. This way, rejected after my useful substance has been eaten, I go to the rubbish bin with the dust of what’s left of Christ’s body, and I can’t imagine what will follow and among what stars, but something – inevitably – will follow.

131

Since I have nothing to do and nothing to think about doing, I’m going to describe my ideal on this sheet of paper –

Note

The sensibility of Mallarmé in the style of Vieira;* to dream like Verlaine in the body of Horace; to be Homer in the moonlight.

To feel everything in every way; to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind; not to desire much except with the imagination; to suffer with haughtiness; to see clearly so as to write accurately; to know oneself through diplomacy and dissimulation; to become naturalized as a different person, with all the necessary documents; in short, to use all sensations but only on the inside, peeling them all down to God and then wrapping everything up again and putting it back in the shop window like the sales assistant I can see from here with the small tins of a new brand of shoe polish.

All these ideals, possible or impossible, now end. Now I face reality, which isn’t even the sales assistant (whom I don’t see), only his hand, the absurd tentacle of a soul with a family and a fate, and it twists like a spider without a web while putting back tins of polish in the window.

And one of the tins fell, like the Fate of us all.*

132

The more I contemplate the spectacle of the world and the ever-changing state of things, the more profoundly I’m convinced of the inherent fiction of everything, of the false importance exhibited by all realities. And in this contemplation (which has occurred to all thinking souls at one time or another), the colourful parade of customs and fashions, the complex path of civilizations and progress, the grandiose commotion of empires and cultures – all of this strikes me as a myth and a fiction, dreamed among shadows and ruins. But I’m not sure
whether the supreme resolution of all these dead intentions – dead even when achieved – lies in the ecstatic resignation of the Buddha, who, once he understood the emptiness of things, stood up from his ecstasy saying, ‘Now I know everything’, or in the jaded indifference of the emperor Severus: ‘Omnia fui, nihil expedit – I’ve been everything, nothing’s worth the trouble.’

133

…the world – a dunghill of instinctive forces that nevertheless shines in the sun with pale shades of light and dark gold.

The way I see it, plagues, storms and wars are products of the same blind force, sometimes operating through unconscious microbes, sometimes through unconscious waters and thunderbolts, and sometimes through unconscious men. For me, the difference between an earthquake and a massacre is like the difference between murdering with a knife and murdering with a dagger. The monster immanent in things, for the sake of his own good or his own evil, which are apparently indifferent to him, is equally served by the shifting of a rock on a hilltop or by the stirring of envy or greed in a heart. The rock falls and kills a man; greed or envy prompts an arm, and the arm kills a man. Such is the world – a dunghill of instinctive forces that nevertheless shines in the sun with pale shades of light and dark gold.

To oppose the brutal indifference that constitutes the manifest essence of things, the mystics discovered it was best to renounce. To deny the world, to turn our backs on it as on a swamp at whose edge we suddenly find ourselves standing. To deny, like the Buddha, its absolute reality; to deny, like Christ, its relative reality; to deny .....

All I asked of life is that it ask nothing of me. At the door of the cottage I never had, I sat in the sunlight that never fell there, and I enjoyed the future old age of my tired reality (glad that I hadn’t arrived there yet). To still not have died is enough for life’s wretches, and to still have hope .....

..... satisfied with dreams only when I’m not dreaming, satisfied with the world only when I’m dreaming far away from it. A swinging pendulum, back and forth, forever moving to arrive nowhere, eternally captive to the twin fatality of a centre and a useless motion.

134

I seek and don’t find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, neatly lined up in flowerpots. God made my soul to be a decorative object.

I don’t know what overly pompous and selective details define my temperament. If I love the ornamental, it must be because I sense something there that’s identical to the substance of my soul.

135

The simplest, truly simplest things, which nothing can make semi-simple, become complex when I live them. To wish someone a good day sometimes intimidates me. My voice gets caught, as if there were a strange audacity in saying these words out loud. It’s a kind of squeamishness about existing – there’s no other way to put it!

The constant analysis of our sensations creates a new way of feeling, which seems artificial to those who only analyse with the intellect, and not with sensation itself.

All my life I’ve been metaphysically glib, serious at playing around. I haven’t done anything seriously, however much I may have wanted to. A mischievous Destiny had fun with me.

To have emotions made of chintz, or of silk, or of brocade! To have emotions that could be described like that! To have describable emotions!

I feel in my soul a divine regret for everything, a choked and sobbing grief for the condemnation of dreams in the flesh of those who dreamed
them. And I hate without hatred all the poets who wrote verses, all the idealists who saw their ideals take shape, all those who obtained what they wanted.

I haphazardly roam the calm streets, walking until my body is as tired as my soul, grieved to the point of that old and familiar grief that likes to be felt, pitying itself with an indefinable, maternal compassion set to music.

Sleep! To fall asleep! To have peace! To be an abstract consciousness that’s conscious only of breathing peacefully, without a world, without heavens, without a soul – a dead sea of emotion reflecting an absence of stars!

136

The burden of feeling! The burden of having to feel!

137

… the hypersensitivity of my feelings, or perhaps merely of their expression, or perhaps, more accurately, of the intelligence which lies between the former and the latter and which forms, from my wish to express, the fictitious emotion that exists only to be expressed. (Perhaps it’s just the machine in me that reveals who I’m not.)

138

There’s an erudition of acquired knowledge, which is erudition in the narrowest sense, and there’s an erudition of understanding, which we call culture. But there’s also an erudition of the sensibility.