The Book of Disquiet (57 page)

Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveller. What we see isn’t what we see but what we are.

452

The only real traveller with soul that I’ve known was an office boy at another firm where I was once employed. This young fellow collected promotional brochures for cities, countries and transportation companies; he had maps that he’d torn out of journals or that he’d asked for here and there; he had illustrations of landscapes, prints of exotic costumes, and pictures of boats and ships that he’d clipped out of newspapers and magazines. He would go to travel agencies in the name of some imaginary office, or perhaps in the name of a real office, perhaps even the one where he worked, and he would ask for brochures about trips to Italy, brochures about excursions to India, brochures listing the boat connections between Portugal and Australia.

He was not only the greatest – because truest – traveller I’ve known, he was also one of the happiest people I’ve had the privilege to meet. I regret not knowing what’s become of him, or rather, I pretend I should regret it; in fact I don’t, because by now, ten years or more after the brief period when I knew him, he must be a grown-up, a responsible idiot who fulfils his duties, perhaps as a married man, somebody’s provider – dead, that is, while still alive. And maybe he has even travelled in body, he who travelled so well in his soul.

I just remembered: he knew the exact route of the train from Paris to Bucharest as well as the routes of all the trains in England, and as he mispronounced the strange names, I could see the glowing certainty of his greatness of soul. Today, yes, he probably exists as a dead man, but perhaps one day, in his old age, he will remember how it’s not only better but also truer to dream of Bordeaux than to actually go there.

Then too, all of this may have some other explanation: he may just have been imitating someone. Or… Yes, I sometimes think, given the appalling difference between the intelligence of children and the stupidity of adults, that in childhood we’re accompanied by a guardian spirit who lends us his own astral intelligence, and that later, perhaps with regret but compelled by a higher law, he abandons us – like animal mothers after they’ve nursed their young – to our destiny as fattened pigs.

453

From the terrace of this café I look at life with tremulous eyes. I see just a little of its vast diversity concentrated in this square that’s all mine. A slight daze like the beginning of drunkenness reveals to me the soul of things. Visible, unanimous life proceeds outside me in the clear and distinct steps of passing pedestrians, in the regulated fury of all their motions. In this moment when my feelings are but a lucid and confused mistake, when my senses have stagnated and everything seems like something else, I spread my wings without moving, like an imaginary condor.

Man of ideals that I am, perhaps my greatest ambition is really no more than to keep sitting at this table in this café.

Everything is futile, like stirring dead ashes, and hazy like the moment before dawn breaks.

And the light strikes things so perfectly and serenely, gilding them with sadly smiling reality! All the world’s mystery descends until I see it take shape as banality and street.

Ah, the mysteries grazed by ordinary things in our very midst! To think that right here, on the sunlit surface of our complex human life, Time smiles uncertainly on the lips of Mystery! How modern all this sounds! And yet how ancient, how hidden, how full of some other meaning besides the one we see glowing all around us!

454

Reading the newspaper is always unpleasant from an aesthetic point of view, and often from a moral point of view as well, even for those who don’t worry much about morality.

Reading about the effects of wars and revolutions – there’s always one or the other in the news* – doesn’t make us feel horror but tedium. What really disturbs our soul isn’t the cruel fate of all the dead and wounded, the sacrifice of all who die in action or who die without
seeing action, but the stupidity that sacrifices lives and property to some inevitably futile cause. All ideals and all ambitions are a hysteria of prattling women posing as men. No empire justifies breaking a child’s doll. No ideal is worth the sacrifice of a toy train. What empire is useful or what ideal profitable? It’s all humanity, and humanity is always the same – variable but unimprovable, with fluctuations but unprogressive.
Vis-à-vis
the intransigent march of all things, the life that we were given without knowing why and that we’ll lose we don’t know when, the ten thousand chess games that constitute our life in common and in conflict, the tedium of uselessly contemplating what we’ll never accomplish ..... –
vis-à-vis
all that, what can the wise man do but ask to retire, to be excused from having to think about life (since living it is already burdensome enough), to have a little sun and fresh air and at least the dream that there’s peace on the other side of the hills?

455

All those unfortunate occasions in life when we’ve been ridiculous or boorish or woefully late should be seen, in the light of our inner serenity, as the vicissitudes of travel. We are but tourists in this world, travelling willingly or unwillingly between nothing and nothing or between everything and everything, and we shouldn’t worry too much about the bumps along the way and the mishaps of the journey. I take comfort in this thought, either because there’s something in it that’s comforting, or simply because I take comfort in it. But fictitious comfort, if I don’t think about it, is real enough.

And there are so many things that comfort! There’s the blue sky above, clear and calm, where odd-shaped clouds are always floating. There’s the light breeze, which in the country shakes the thick branches of trees, while in the city it whips the laundry hanging from the fourth and fifth floors. There’s warmth when it’s warm, and coolness when it’s cool, and always a memory with its nostalgia, its hope, and a magic smile at the window of the world, and what we want knocking on the door of what we are, like beggars who are the Christ.

456

How long since I last wrote something! In the past few days I’ve lived through centuries of wavering renunciation. I’ve stagnated, like a forsaken pond, among landscapes that don’t exist.

Meanwhile I’ve been going through the varied monotony of every day, the never-equal succession of the equal hours, life. Everything has been going well. If I’d been sleeping, it wouldn’t have gone any differently. I’ve stagnated, like a pond that doesn’t exist, among forsaken landscapes.

It often happens that I don’t know myself, which is typical in those who know themselves. I look at myself in the various disguises that make me alive. Of all that changes, I possess whatever remains the same; of all that is accomplished, whatever amounts to nothing.

I remember far-off inside me, as if I were journeying within, the monotony of that old house in the country, so different from the monotony I feel now… I spent my childhood in that house, but I couldn’t say (if I ever wanted to) whether it was happier or sadder than my life today. It was a different self that lived back then. That life and this one are different, diverse, incomparable. The same monotonies that link them on the outside are undoubtedly different on the inside. They’re not just two monotonies, but two lives.

Why do I bother to remember? Weariness. Remembering is a repose, for it means not doing. For even greater repose, I sometimes remember what never was, and my memories of the countryside where I really lived can’t begin to compare, in sharpness and nostalgia, to my memories that inhabit – floorboard by creaking floorboard – the vast rooms of yesteryear that I never inhabited.

I’ve become so entirely the fiction of myself that any natural feeling I may have is immediately transformed, as soon as it’s born, into an imaginary feeling. Memories turn into dreams, dreams into my forgetting what I dreamed, and knowing myself into not thinking of myself.

I’ve so stripped myself of my own being that existence consists of dressing up. I’m only myself when disguised. And all around me expiring, unknown sunsets gild the landscapes I’ll never see.

457

Modern things include

(1) the development of mirrors;
(2) wardrobes.

We evolved, body and soul, into clothed creatures. Since the soul always conforms to the body, it developed an intangible suit. We advanced to having a soul that’s basically clothed, in the same way that we advanced – as physical humans – to the category of clothed animals.

The point isn’t just that our suit has become an integral part of us; it’s the complexity of this suit and the curious lack of any real relationship between it and the features that make our body and our body’s movements naturally elegant.

Were I asked to discuss the social causes responsible for my soul’s condition, I would speechlessly point to a mirror, a clothes hanger, and a pen.

458

In the light morning fog of mid-spring, the downtown area wakes up groggy and the sun rises as if sluggishly. There’s a calm joy in the slightly cold air, a kind of non-breeze softly blows, and life vaguely shivers from the cold that has ceased – not from the bit of cold that lingers but from the memory of the cold; not from today’s weather but in comparison with the approaching summer.

The shops are still closed except for the cafés and dairy bars, but the stillness isn’t one of torpor, like on Sundays – it’s just stillness. A blond tinge streaks the air that’s emerging from the night, and through the dissipating fog the blueness lightly blushes. The first signs of movement dot the streets, with each pedestrian standing out distinctly, while up above hazy figures can be seen stirring in the few open windows. The clanging trams trace their yellow, numbered furrows in mid-air. Little by little the streets begin to undesert.

I drift without thoughts or emotions, just sense impressions. I woke up early and came out to the street without preconceptions. I observe as if in a reverie. I see as if deep in thought. And a gentle mist of emotion absurdly rises up in me. The fog that’s disappearing outside seems to be seeping into me.

I realize that I’ve been inadvertently thinking about my life. I hadn’t noticed, but that’s what I was doing. I thought I was no more in my leisurely stroll than a reflector of given images, a blank screen on which reality projects colours and light instead of shadows. But I was unwittingly more than that. I was also my self-denying soul, and even my abstract observing was a denial.

As the mist diminishes, the air darkens, imbued by a pale light that seems to have incorporated the mist. I suddenly notice that it’s much noisier and that many more people exist. The steps of the now more numerous pedestrians are less hurried. And then, breaking in on everyone else’s lesser haste, the sprightly fishwives pop into view, bakers come swaying under their monstrously large breadbaskets, and the diverse sameness of the street vendors is only demonotonized by the contents of their baskets, in which the colours vary more than the actual objects. The unequal cans of the milkmen jangle like absurd hollow keys. The policemen stand stock-still in the intersections, like civilization’s uniformed denial of the invisibly rising day.

How I would love right now to be able to see all this as somebody whose only relation to it was visual – to view everything as an adult traveller who has just arrived at the surface of life! To not have learned from birth to attach predetermined meanings to all these things. To be able to see them in their natural self-expression, irrespective of the expressions that have been imposed on them. To be able to recognize the fishwife in her human reality, independent of her being called a fishwife and my knowing that she exists and sells fish. To see the policeman as God sees him. To notice everything for the first time, not as apocalyptic revelations of life’s Mystery, but as direct manifestations of Reality.

Bells or a large clock strike what, without counting, I know must be eight o’clock. I awaken from myself because of the banality of measured time, that cloister which society imposes on time’s continuity, a border to contain the abstract, a boundary around the
unknown. I see that the mist which has completely quit the sky (except for the quasi-blue that still lingers in the blueness) has indeed penetrated into my soul, and has likewise penetrated to the depths of things where they have contact with my soul. I’ve lost the vision of what I was seeing. My eyes see, but I am blind. I’ve begun to perceive things with the banality of knowledge. What I see is no longer Reality, it’s just Life.

…Yes, the life to which I also belong, and which also belongs to me; and no longer Reality, which belongs only to God or to itself, which contains neither mystery nor truth, and which – since it is real or pretends to be real – exists somewhere invariably, free from having to be temporal or eternal, an absolute image, the external equivalent to the idea of a soul.

I turn and walk slowly, though faster than I think, to the door that will lead me back up to my rented room. But I don’t enter; I hesitate; I keep going. Praça da Figueira,* gaping with variously coloured wares and filling up with customers, blocks the horizon from my view. I advance slowly, lifelessly, and my vision is no longer mine, it’s no longer anything: it’s merely the vision of a human animal that inexorably inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality, and all the other illusions that form the civilization in which I feel and perceive.

Where are the living?

459

I’d like to be in the country to be able to like being in the city. I like being in the city in any case, but I’d like it twice over if I were in the country.

460

The greater the sensibility and the subtler its capacity for feeling, the more absurdly it shivers and shudders over little things. It takes extraordinary intelligence to feel anxiety because of an overcast day. Humanity, basically insensitive, doesn’t get anxious over the weather, because there’s always weather; humanity doesn’t feel the rain unless it’s falling on its head.