The Book of Disquiet (43 page)

Action is a disease of thought, a cancer of the imagination. Action is self-exile. Every action is incomplete and flawed. The poem I dream has no flaws until I try to realize it. We find this recorded in the myth of Jesus. God, becoming man, cannot help but end in martyrdom. The supreme dreamer has the supreme martyr for a son.

The leaves’ tattered shadows, the birds’ tremulous song, the river’s long arms shimmering coolly in the sun, the plants, the poppies, and
the simplicity of sensations – even while feeling all this, I’m nostalgic for it, as if in feeling it I didn’t feel it.

Time, like a wagon at the close of day, creakingly returns through the shadows of my thoughts. If I lift up my eyes from my thinking, they smart at the sight of the world.

To realize a dream, one must forget it, tearing away his attention from it. To realize is thus to not realize. Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns.

I’d like to write the encomium of a new incoherence that could serve as the negative charter for the new anarchy of souls. I’ve always felt that a digest of my dreams might be useful to humanity, which is why I’ve never tried to compile one. The idea that something I did might be helpful galled me and made me feel sapped.

I have country homes on the outskirts of life. I escape from the city of my actions to the trees and flowers of my reverie. Not a single echo from the life of my acts reaches my green retreat. I’m lulled by my memory as by an endless procession. From the goblets of my meditation I drink only the smile of the golden wine; I drink it only with my eyes, closing them, and Life passes by like a sail in the distance.

Sunny days smack of what I don’t have. The blue sky and white clouds, the trees, the flute that’s missing – eclogues left unfinished by the branches’ rustling… All this is the silent harp, grazed by the lightness of my fingers.

The vegetable academy of silences… your name that sounded like poppies… the ponds… my going home… the crazy priest who went out of his mind during Mass… These memories are from my dreams… I keep my eyes open but see nothing… The things I do see aren’t here… Waters*…

The lush green of the trees, through a jumble of entanglements, is part of my blood. Life throbs in my distant heart… I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.

The agony of fate! I could die tomorrow! Even today something terrible could befall my soul! When I think of these things, I’m sometimes
appalled at the supreme tyranny that obliges us to take steps without knowing where our uncertain paths will lead.

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The rain kept sadly falling, but now with less force, as if seized by a cosmic weariness. There was no lightning, and only very occasionally would a distant, short roll of thunder harshly rumble, haltingly at times, as if it too were weary. Suddenly the rain let up even more. One of the employees opened the windows facing on to the Rua dos Douradores. A cool air, with dead remnants of warmth, drifted into the large office. The voice of Senhor Vasques talked loudly on the phone in his private office: ‘You mean the line’s still busy?’ And then there was a dryly spoken aside – presumably an obscene remark to the receptionist on the other end.

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To be able to have dreams, it’s crucial that you know how to have no illusions.

In this way you’ll reach the summit of dreamy abstention, where senses blend, feelings overflow, and ideas intermingle. There colours and souls taste like each other, hatreds taste like loves, and concrete things like abstract things, abstract things like concrete. The ties that joined everything but also separated everything – because they isolated each element – are broken. Everything melds and merges.

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Fictions of the interlude,* colourfully covering the torpor and sloth of our underlying disbelief.

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And I don’t dream, I don’t live; I dream real life. All ships are dreamed ships if we have the power to dream them. What kills the dreamer is to not live while he dreams; what hurts the man of action is to not dream while he lives. I fused the beauty of dreaming and the reality of life into a single, blissful colour. However much a dream may be ours, we can never possess it like the handkerchief in our pocket or, if you will, like our own flesh. However much one lives a life of full, boundless and triumphant action, he will never be free from the
of contact with others, from stumbling over obstacles, even if small, and from feeling the passage of time.

To kill our dream life would be to kill ourselves, to mutilate our soul. Dreaming is the one thing we have that’s really ours, invulnerably and inalterably ours.

Life and the Universe – be they reality or illusion – belong to everyone. Everyone can see what I see and have what I have, or can at least imagine himself seeing it and having it, and this is .....

But no one besides me can see or have the things I dream. And if I see the outer world differently from how others see it, it’s because I inadvertently incorporate, into what I see, the things from my dreams that have stuck to my eyes and ears.

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On this clear bright day even the softness of the sounds is golden. There’s gentleness everywhere. If I were told that a war had broken out, I would say there was no war. A day like today cannot admit anything that would disturb this gentleness that is everything.

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Join your hands, and put them in mine, and listen, my love.

I want to tell you, with the soft and soothing voice of a confessor giving counsel, how much our yearning to attain falls short of what we do attain.

With my voice and your attention, I want us to pray together the litany of despair.

There is no artist’s work that could not have been more perfect. When read line by line, the greatest of poems has few verses that couldn’t be improved, few scenes that couldn’t have been told more vividly, and the overall result is never so good that it couldn’t have been vastly better.

Woe to the artist who notices this, who one day happens to think about it! Never again will he work with joy or sleep in peace. He’ll be a young man without youth, and grow old dissatisfied.

And why should anyone express himself? What little he may say would be better left unsaid.

If I could really convince myself that renunciation is beautiful, how dolefully happy I would always be!

For you do not love the things I say with the same ears I use to hear myself say them. Even my ears, should I speak out loud, do not hear the words I speak in the same way as my inner ear hears the words I think. If even I, when I hear myself, get confused and am not always sure what I meant, then how much more other people are bound to misunderstand me!

What elaborate misconceptions form other people’s understanding of us!

The joy of being understood by others cannot be had by those who want to be understood, for they are too complex to be understood; and simple people, who can be understood by others, never have the desire to be understood.

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Have you ever considered, beloved Other, how invisible we all are to each other? Have you ever thought about how little we know each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside ourself.

The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe in
our
meanings of other people’s words. We hear death in words they speak to express sensual bliss. We read sensuality and life in words they drop from their lips without the slightest intention of being profound.

The voice of brooks that you interpret, pure explicator… The voice of trees whose rustling means what we say it means… Ah, my unknown love, this is all just us and our fantasies, all ash, trickling down the bars of our cell!

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Since perhaps not everything is false, may nothing cure us, my love, of the almost ecstatic pleasure of lying.

Ultimate subtlety! Supreme perversion! The absurd lie has all the charm of the perverse with the even greater, ultimate charm of being innocent. The deliberately innocent perversion – who can go beyond this supreme subtlety? The perversion that doesn’t even aspire to give us pleasure and that lacks the fury to cause us pain, falling to the ground between pleasure and pain, useless and absurd like a shoddy toy with which an adult tries to amuse himself!

Don’t you know, Exquisite One, the pleasure of buying things you don’t need? Don’t you know the delight of roads which, when we’re distracted, we take by mistake? What human act has a colour as lovely as a spurious one ..... which lies to its own nature and contradicts its own intention?

How sublime to waste a life that could have been useful, never to
execute a work of art that was certain to be beautiful, to abandon midway a sure road to victory!

Ah, my love, the glory of works which have been lost for ever, of treatises which today are mere titles, of libraries which burned down, of statues which were demolished!

How blessed with Absurdity are the artists who set fire to a beautiful work! Or the artists who could have made a beautiful work but deliberately made it ordinary! Or the great poets of Silence who, knowing they were capable of writing an absolutely perfect work, preferred to crown it with the decision never to write it. (For an imperfect work, it makes no difference.)

How much more beautiful the Mona Lisa would be if we couldn’t see it! And if someone were to rob it just to burn it, what an artist he would be, even greater than the one who painted it!

Why is art beautiful? Because it’s useless. Why is life ugly? Because it’s all aims, objectives and intentions. All of its roads are for going from one point to another. If only we could have a road connecting a place no one ever leaves from to a place where no one goes! If only someone would devote his life to building a road from the middle of one field to the middle of another – a road that would be useful if extended at each end, but that would sublimely remain as only the middle stretch of a road!

The beauty of ruins? That they’re no longer good for anything.

The sweetness of the past? Our memory of it, since to remember it is to make it present, and it isn’t present nor ever can be – absurdity, my love, absurdity.

And I who am saying all this – why am I writing this book? Because I realize it’s imperfect. Dreamed, it would be perfection; written, it becomes imperfect; that’s why I’m writing it. And above all else, because I advocate uselessness, absurdity,
– I write this book to lie to myself, to be unfaithful to my own theory.

And the supreme glory of all this, my love, is to think that perhaps none of it is true and that I don’t even believe it’s true.

And when lying begins to bring us pleasure, let’s give it the lie by telling the truth. And when lying causes us anxiety, let’s stop so that the suffering can’t become even perversely pleasurable.

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I’m suffering from a headache and the universe. Physical aches, more blatantly painful than moral ones, reflect in the spirit and set off tragedies not contained in them. They make the sufferer cross with everything, and everything naturally includes every star.

I do not share, have never shared, and can’t imagine ever sharing that degenerate concept that regards us, as living souls, to be consequences of a material thing called the brain, which originates and resides in another material thing known as the cranium. I cannot be a materialist, which I believe is what one calls an adherent to this concept, for I cannot establish a clear relationship – I mean a visual relationship – between a tangible mass of grey or otherwise coloured matter and this thing known as the I that behind my gaze sees the skies and thinks about them, and imagines skies that don’t exist. But even if I cannot fall into the pit of supposing that one thing is another just because they’re in the same place, like a wall and my shadow on it, or that my soul’s dependence on my brain is any greater than my dependence, when travelling, on the vehicle that carries me, I do believe there is a social relationship between what in us is pure spirit and what in us is the body’s spirit, such that quarrels can occur between them. And what usually occurs is that the more ordinary of the two persons gets on the other’s nerves.