The Book of Disquiet (13 page)

I’m like someone searching at random, not knowing what object he’s looking for nor where it was hidden. We play hide-and-seek with no one. There’s a transcendent trick in all of this, a fluid divinity we can only hear.

Yes, I reread these pages that represent worthless hours, brief illusions or moments of calm, large hopes channelled into the landscape, sorrows like closed rooms, certain voices, a huge weariness, the unwritten gospel.

We all have our vanity, and that vanity is our way of forgetting that there are other people with a soul like our own. My vanity consists of a few pages, passages, doubts…

I reread? A lie! I don’t dare reread. I can’t reread. What good would it do me to reread? The person in the writing is someone else. I no longer understand a thing…

I weep over my imperfect pages, but if future generations read them, they will be more touched by my weeping than by any perfection I might have achieved, since perfection would have kept me from weeping and, therefore, from writing. Perfection never materializes. The saint weeps, and is human. God is silent. That is why we can love the saint but cannot love God.

That noble and divine timidity which guards
the soul’s treasures and regalia…

How I’d love to infect at least one soul with some kind of poison, worry or disquiet! This would console me a little for my chronic failure to take action. My life’s purpose would be to pervert. But do my words ring in anyone else’s soul? Does anyone hear them besides me?

We generally colour our ideas of the unknown with our notions of the known. If we call death a sleep, it’s because it seems like sleep on the outside; if we call death a new life, it’s because it seems like something different from life. With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make believe they’re happy.

But that’s how all life is, or at least that particular system of life generally known as civilization. Civilization consists in giving something a name that doesn’t belong to it and then dreaming over the result. And the false name joined to the true dream does create a new
reality. The object does change into something else, because we make it change. We manufacture realities. The raw material remains the same, but our art gives it a form that makes it into something not the same. A pinewood table is still pinewood, but it’s also a table. We sit at the table, not at the pinewood. Although love is a sexual instinct, it’s not with sexual instinct that we love but with the conjecture of some other feeling. And that conjecture is already some other feeling.

I don’t know what subtle effect of light, or vague noise, or memory of a fragrance or melody, intoned by some inscrutable external influence, prompted these divagations when I was walking down the street and which now, seated in a café, I leisurely and distractedly record. I don’t know where I was going with my thoughts, nor where I would wish to go. Today there’s a light, warm and humid fog, sad with no threats, monotonous for no reason. I’m grieved by a feeling that I can’t place; I’m lacking an argument apropos I don’t know what; I have no willpower in my nerves. Beneath my consciousness I’m sad. And I write these carelessly written lines not to say this and not to say anything, but to give my distraction something to do. I slowly cover, with the soft strokes of a dull pencil (I’m not sentimental enough to sharpen it), the white sandwich paper that they gave me in this café, for it suits me just fine, as would any other paper, as long as it was white. And I feel satisfied. I lean back. The afternoon comes to a monotonous and rainless close, in an uncertain and despondent tone of light. And I stop writing because I stop writing.

Often enough the surface and illusion catch me, their prey, and I feel like a man. Then I’m happy to be in the world, and my life is transparent. I float. And it gives me pleasure to get my pay-cheque and go home. I feel the weather without seeing it, and there’s some organic sensation that pleases me. If I contemplate, I don’t think. On these days I’m particularly fond of gardens.

There’s something strange and pathetic in the very substance of public gardens that I’m only really aware of when I’m not very aware
of myself. A garden is a synopsis of civilization – an anonymous modification of nature. There are plants there, but also streets – yes, streets. Trees grow, but there are benches beneath their shade. On the broad walkways facing the four sides of the city, the benches are larger and are almost always occupied.

I don’t mind seeing flowers in orderly rows, but I hate the public use of flowers. If the rows of flowers were in closed parks, if the trees shaded feudal retreats, if the benches were vacant, then my useless contemplation of gardens could console me. But gardens in cities, useful as well as ordered, are for me like cages, in which the coloured spontaneities of the trees and flowers have only enough room to have one, space enough not to escape, and beauty all alone, without the life that belongs to beauty.

But there are days when this is the landscape that belongs to me, and I enter it like an actor in a tragicomedy. On these days I’m in error, but at least in a certain way I’m happier. When I’m distracted, I start imagining that I really have a house or home to return to. When I forget, I become a normal man, reserved for some purpose, and I brush down another suit and read the newspaper from front to back.

But the illusion never lasts long, partly because it doesn’t last and partly because night arrives. And the colours of the flowers, the shade of the trees, the geometry of streets and flower beds – it all fades and shrinks. Above this error in which I feel like a man, the enormous stage setting of stars suddenly appears, as if daylight had been a curtain hiding it from view. And then my eyes forget the amorphous audience, and I wait for the first performers with the excitement of a child at the circus.

I’m liberated and lost.

I feel. I shiver with fever. I’m I.

The weariness caused by all illusions and all that they entail – our losing them, the uselessness of our having them, the pre-weariness of having to have them in order to lose them, the regret of having had
them, the intellectual chagrin of having had them while knowing full well they would end.

The consciousness of life’s unconsciousness is the oldest tax levied on the intelligence. There are unconscious forms of intelligence – flashes of wit, waves of understanding, mysteries and philosophies – that are like bodily reflexes, that operate as automatically as the liver or kidneys handle their secretions.

It’s raining hard, harder, still harder… It’s as if something were going to collapse in the blackness outside…

The city’s uneven, mountainous mass looks to me today like a plain, a plain covered by rain. All around, as far as my gaze reaches, everything is the pale black colour of rain.

I’m full of odd sensations, all of them cold. Right now it seems to me that the landscape is all a fog, and that the buildings are the fog that hides it.

A pre-neurosis born of what I’ll be when I no longer am grips my body and soul. An absurd remembrance of my future death sends a shiver down my spine. In the fog of my intuition, I feel like dead matter fallen in the rain and mourned by the howling wind. And the chill of what I won’t feel gnaws at my present heart.

If I have no other virtue, I at least have the permanent novelty of free, uninhibited sensation.

Today, walking down the Rua Nova do Almada, I happened to gaze at the back of the man walking ahead of me. It was the ordinary back of an ordinary man, a simple sports coat on the shoulders of an incidental pedestrian. He carried an old briefcase under his left arm,
and his right hand held the curved handle of a rolled-up umbrella, which he tapped on the ground to the rhythm of his walking.

I suddenly felt something like tenderness for that man. I felt the tenderness one feels for common human banality, for the daily routine of the family breadwinner going to work, for his humble and happy home, for the happy and sad pleasures that necessarily make up his life, for the innocence of living without analysing, for the animal naturalness of that coat-covered back.

My eyes returned to the man’s back, the window through which I saw these thoughts.

I had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and the most self-absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they’re sleeping. For me there’s no discernible difference between killing a child and killing a sleeping man.

This man’s back is sleeping. His entire person, walking ahead of me at the very same speed, is sleeping. He walks unconsciously, lives unconsciously. He sleeps, for we all sleep. All life is a dream. No one knows what he’s doing, no one knows what he wants, no one knows what he knows. We sleep our lives, eternal children of Destiny. That’s why, whenever this sensation rules my thoughts, I feel an enormous tenderness that encompasses the whole of childish humanity, the whole of sleeping society, everyone, everything.

It’s an immediate humanitarianism, without aims or conclusions, that overwhelms me right now. I feel a tenderness as if I were seeing with the eyes of a god. I see everyone as if moved by the compassion of the world’s only conscious being. Poor hapless men, poor hapless humanity! What are they all doing here?

I see all the actions and goals of life, from the simple life of lungs to the building of cities and the marking off of empires, as a drowsiness, as involuntary dreams or respites in the gap between one reality and another, between one and another day of the Absolute. And like an abstractly maternal being, I lean at night over both the good and bad children, equal when they sleep and are mine. I feel for them with an infinite capacity for tenderness.

I tear my gaze from the back of the man ahead of me and look at all the other people walking down this street, and I embrace each and every one of them with the same cold, absurd tenderness that came to me from the back of the unconscious man I’m following. The whole lot is just like him: the girls chatting on their way to the workshop, the young men laughing on their way to the office, the big-bosomed maids returning with their heavy purchases, the delivery boys running their first errands – all of this is one and the same unconsciousness, diversified among different faces and bodies, like marionettes moved by strings leading to the same fingers of an invisible hand. They go on their way with all the manners and gestures that define consciousness, and they’re conscious of nothing, for they’re not conscious of being conscious. Whether clever or stupid, they’re all equally stupid. Whether old or young, they’re all the same age. Whether men or women, all are of the same sex that doesn’t exist.

The cause of my profound sense of incompatibility with others is, I believe, that most people think with their feelings, whereas I feel with my thoughts.

For the ordinary man, to feel is to live, and to think is to know how to live. For me, to think is to live, and to feel is merely food for thought.

It’s curious that what little capacity I have for enthusiasm is aroused by those most unlike me in temperament. I admire no one in literature more than the classical writers, who are the ones I least resemble. Forced to choose between reading only Chateaubriand or Vieira,* I would choose Vieira without a moment’s hesitation.

The more a man differs from me, the more real he seems, for he depends that much less on my subjectivity. And that’s why the object of my close and constant study is the same common humanity that I loathe and stay away from. I love it because I hate it. I like to look at it because I hate to feel it. The landscape, admirable as a picture, rarely makes a comfortable bed.

Amiel* said that a landscape is a state of emotion, but the phrase is a flawed gem of a feeble dreamer. As soon as the landscape is a landscape, it ceases to be a state of emotion. To objectify is to create, and no one would say that a finished poem is a state of thinking about writing one. Seeing is perhaps a form of dreaming, but if we call it seeing instead of dreaming, it’s so we can distinguish between the two.

But what good are these speculations in linguistic psychology? Independently of me the grass grows, the rain falls on the grass that grows, and the sun shines on the patch of grass that grew or will grow; the hills have been there for ages, and the wind blows in the same way as when Homer heard it, even if he didn’t exist. It would be better to say that a state of emotion is a landscape, for the phrase would contain not the lie of a theory but the truth of a metaphor.

These incidental words were dictated to me by the panorama of the city as seen from the look-out of São Pedro de Alcântara,* under the universal light of the sun. Every time I contemplate a wide panorama, forgetting the five feet six inches of height and the one hundred and thirty-five pounds in which I physically consist, I smile a supremely metaphysical smile for those who dream that dreaming is a dream, and I love the truth of the absolutely external with a noble purity of understanding.