The Book of Disquiet (17 page)

Somebody said about somebody else that for him the figures of dreams had the same shape and substance as the figures of life. Although I can see why somebody might say the same thing about me, I wouldn’t agree. For me, the figures of dreams aren’t identical to those
of life. They’re parallel. Each life – that of dreams and that of the world – has a reality all its own that’s just as valid as the other, but different. Like things near versus things far away. The figures of dreams are nearer to me, but .....

The truly wise man is the one who can keep external events from changing him in any way. To do this, he covers himself with an armour of realities closer to him than the world’s facts and through which the facts, modified accordingly, reach him.

Today I woke up very early, with a sudden and confused start, and I slowly got out of bed, suffocating from an inexplicable tedium. No dream had caused it; no reality could have created it. It was a complete and absolute tedium, but founded on something. The obscure depths of my soul had been the battleground where unknown forces had invisibly waged war, and I shook all over from the hidden conflict. A physical nausea, prompted by all of life, was born in the moment I woke up. A horror at the prospect of having to live got up with me out of bed. Everything seemed hollow, and I had the chilling impression that there is no solution for whatever the problem may be.

An extreme nervousness made my slightest gestures tremble. I was afraid I might go mad – not from insanity but from simply being there. My body was a latent shout. My heart pounded as if it were talking.

Taking wide, false steps that I vainly tried to take differently, I walked barefoot across the short length of the room and diagonally through the emptiness of the inner room, where in a corner there’s a door to the hallway. With jerky and incoherent movements I hit the brushes on top of the dresser, I knocked a chair out of place, and at a certain point my swinging hand struck one of the hard iron posts of
my English bed. I lit a cigarette, which I smoked subconsciously, and only when I saw that ashes had fallen on the headboard – how, if I hadn’t leaned against it? – did I understand that I was possessed, or something of the sort, in fact if not in name, and that my normal, everyday self-awareness had intermingled with the abyss.

I received the announcement of morning – the cold faint light that confers a vague whitish blue on the unveiled horizon – like a grateful kiss from creation. Because this light, this true day, freed me – freed me from I don’t know what. It gave an arm to my as-yet-unrevealed old age, it cuddled my false childhood, it helped my overwrought sensibility find the repose it was desperately begging for.

Ah, what a morning this is, awakening me to life’s stupidity, and to its great tenderness! I almost cry when I see the old narrow street come into view down below, and when the shutters of the corner grocer reveal their dirty brown in the slowly growing light, my heart is soothed, as if by a real-life fairy tale, and it begins to have the security of not feeling itself.

What a morning this grief is! And what shadows are retreating? What mysteries have taken place? None. There’s just the sound of the first tram, like a match to light up the soul’s darkness, and the loud steps of my first pedestrian, which are concrete reality telling me in a friendly voice not to be this way.

There are times when everything wearies us, including what we would normally find restful. Wearisome things weary us by definition, restful things by the wearying thought of procuring them. There are dejections of the soul past all anxiety and all pain; I believe they’re known only by those who elude human pains and anxieties and are sufficiently diplomatic with themselves to avoid even tedium. Reduced, in this way, to beings armoured against the world, it’s no wonder that at a certain point in their self-awareness the whole set of armour should suddenly weigh on them and life become an inverted anxiety, a pain not suffered.

I am at one of those points, and I write these lines as if to prove that I’m at least alive. All day long I’ve worked as if in a half-sleep, doing my sums the way things are done in dreams, writing left to right across my torpor. All day long I’ve felt life weighing on my eyes and against my temples – sleep in my eyes, pressure from inside my temples, the consciousness of all this in my stomach, nausea, despondency.

To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction. I refuse to look at the day to find out what it can offer that might distract me and that, being recorded here in writing, might cover up the empty cup of my not wanting myself. I refuse to look at the day, and with my shoulders hunched forward I ignore whether the sun is present or absent outside in the subjectively sad street, in the deserted street where the sound of people passes by. I ignore everything, and my chest hurts. I’ve stopped working and don’t feel like budging. I’m looking at the grimy white blotting paper, tacked down at the corners and spread out over the advanced age of the slanted desk top. I examine the crossed out scribbles of concentration and distraction. There are various instances of my signature, upside down and turned around. A few numbers here and there, wherever. A few confused sketches, sketched by my absent-mindedness. I look at all this as if I’d never seen a blotter, like a fascinated bumpkin looking at some newfangled thing, while my entire brain lies idle behind the cerebral centres that control vision.

I feel more inner fatigue than will fit in me. And there’s nothing I want, nothing I prefer, nothing to flee.

I always live in the present. I don’t know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing. I have no hopes and no nostalgia. Knowing what my life has been up till now – so often and so completely the opposite of what I wanted –, what can I assume about my life tomorrow, except that it will be what I don’t assume, what I don’t want, what happens to me from the outside, reaching me even via my
will? There’s nothing from my past that I recall with the futile wish to repeat it. I was never more than my own vestige or simulacrum. My past is everything I failed to be. I don’t even miss the feelings I had back then, because what is felt requires the present moment – once this has passed, there’s a turning of the page and the story continues, but with a different text.

Brief dark shadow of a downtown tree, light sound of water falling into the sad pool, green of the trimmed lawn – public garden shortly before twilight: you are in this moment the whole universe for me, for you are the full content of my conscious sensation. All I want from life is to feel it being lost in these unexpected evenings, to the sound of strange children playing in gardens like this one, fenced in by the melancholy of the surrounding streets and topped, beyond the trees’ tallest branches, by the old sky where the stars are again coming out.

If our life were an eternal standing by the window, if we could remain there for ever, like hovering smoke, with the same moment of twilight forever paining the curve of the hills… If we could remain that way for beyond for ever! If at least on this side of the impossible we could thus continue, without committing an action, without our pallid lips sinning another word!

Look how it’s getting dark!… The positive quietude of everything fills me with rage, with something that’s a bitterness in the air I breathe. My soul aches… A slow wisp of smoke rises and dissipates in the distance… A restless tedium makes me think no more of you…

All so superfluous! We and the world and the mystery of both.

Life is whatever we conceive it to be. For the farmer who considers his field to be everything, the field is an empire. For a Caesar whose empire is still not enough, the empire is a field. The poor man possesses an empire, the great man a field. All that we truly possess are our own sensations; it is in them, rather than in what they sense, that we must base our life’s reality.

This has nothing to do with anything.

I’ve dreamed a great deal. I’m tired from having dreamed but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because dreaming is forgetting, and forgetting doesn’t weigh a thing; it’s a dreamless sleep in which we’re awake. In dreams I’ve done everything. I’ve also woken up, but so what? How many Caesars I’ve been! And the great men of history – how mean-spirited! Caesar, after his life was spared by a merciful pirate, ordered a search to find the pirate, who was then crucified. Napoleon, in the will he wrote in Saint Helena, made a bequest to a common criminal who tried to assassinate Wellington. O greatness of spirit no greater than that of the squint-eyed neighbour lady! O great men of another world’s cook! How many Caesars I’ve been and still dream of being.

How many Caesars I’ve been, but not the real ones. I’ve been truly imperial while dreaming, and that’s why I’ve never been anything. My armies were defeated, but the defeat was fluffy, and no one died. I lost no flags. My dream didn’t get as far as the army; my flags never turned the corner into full dreamed view. How many Caesars I’ve been, right here, on the Rua dos Douradores. And the Caesars I’ve been still live in my imagination; but the Caesars that were are dead, and the Rua dos Douradores – Reality, that is – cannot know them.

I throw an empty matchbox towards the abyss that’s the street beyond the sill of my high window without balcony. I sit up in my chair and listen. Distinctly, as if it meant something, the empty matchbox resounds on the street, declaring to me its desertedness. Not another sound can be heard, except the sounds of the whole city. Yes, the
sounds of the city on this long Sunday – so many, all at odds, and all of them right.

How little, from the real world, forms the support of the best reflections: the fact of arriving late for lunch, of running out of matches, of personally, individually throwing the matchbox out the window, of feeling out of sorts for having eaten late, the fact it’s Sunday virtually guaranteeing a lousy sunset, the fact I’m nobody in the world, and all metaphysics.

But how many Caesars I’ve been!

I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower. I dissent from life and am proud of it.

No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it. Collective thought is stupid because it’s collective. Nothing passes into the realm of the collective without leaving at the border – like a toll – most of the intelligence it contained.

In youth we’re twofold. Our innate intelligence, which may be considerable, coexists with the stupidity of our inexperience, which forms a second, lesser intelligence. Only later on do the two unite. That’s why youth always blunders – not because of its inexperience, but because of its non-unity.

Today the only course left for the man of superior intelligence is abdication.

To conform is to submit, and to conquer is to conform, to be conquered. Thus every victory is a debasement. The conqueror inevitably loses all the virtues born of frustration with the
status quo
that led him to the fight that brought victory. He becomes satisfied, and only those who conform – who lack the conqueror’s mentality – are satisfied. Only the man who never achieves his goal conquers. Only the man who is forever discouraged is strong. The best and most regal course is to abdicate. The supreme empire belongs to the emperor who abdicates from all normal life and from other men, for the preservation of his supremacy won’t weigh on him like a load of jewels.

Sometimes, when I lift my dazed head from the books where I record other people’s accounts and the absence of a life I can call my own, I feel a physical nausea, which might be from hunching over, but which transcends the numbers and my disillusion. I find life distasteful, like a useless medicine. And that’s when I feel, and can clearly picture, how easy it would be to get rid of this tedium, if I had the simple strength of will to really want to get rid of it.

We live by action – by acting on desire. Those of us who don’t know how to want – whether geniuses or beggars – are related by impotence. What’s the point of calling myself a genius, if I’m after all an assistant bookkeeper? When Cesário Verde* made sure the doctor knew that he was not Senhor Verde, an office worker, but Cesário Verde the poet, he used one of those self-important terms that reek of vanity. What he always was, poor man, was Senhor Verde, an office worker. The poet was born after he died, for it was only then that he was appreciated as a poet.

To act – that is true wisdom. I can be what I want to be, but I have
to want whatever it is. Success consists in being successful, not in having the potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but there’s no palace until it’s built.

My pride was stoned by blind men, my disillusion trampled on by beggars.

‘I want you only to dream of you,’ they tell the beloved woman in verses they never send – they who dare not tell her anything. This ‘I want you only to dream of you’ is a verse from an old poem of mine. I record the memory with a smile, and don’t even comment on the smile.

I’m one of those souls women say they love but never recognize when they meet us – one of those souls that they would never recognize, even if they recognized us. I endure the sensitivity of my feelings with an attitude of disdain. I have all the qualities for which romantic poets are admired, and even the lack of those qualities, which makes one a true romantic poet. I find myself partially described in novels as the protagonist of various plots, but the essence of my life and soul is never to be a protagonist.

I don’t have any idea of myself, not even the kind that consists in the lack of an idea of myself. I’m a nomad in my self-awareness. The herds of my inner riches scattered during the first watch.