The Book of Disquiet (41 page)

There are days when everyone I meet, and especially the people I’m forced to have daily contact with, appear as symbols, and individually or together they form a prophetic or occult writing that obscurely describes my life. The office becomes a page with people for its words; the street is a book; the words I exchange with familiar or unfamiliar faces are phrases for which I have no dictionary, though I have an idea of what they mean. They speak, they tell, but it’s not of themselves that they speak or tell; they’re words, as I’ve said, that don’t disclose their meaning, but they allow glimpses. In my twilight vision I only vaguely distinguish what these sudden glass panes on the surfaces of things let show from the interior that they veil and reveal. I understand without knowledge, like a blind man when someone tells him about colours.

Walking along the street, I often hear snatches of private conversations,
and they’re almost all about another woman, another man, a friend’s boyfriend or someone else’s girlfriend .....

Just to hear these shadows of human speech (which is all that occupies most conscious lives) fills me with a sickening tedium, an anguished feeling of being exiled among spiders, and a sudden awareness of my humiliation among real people, condemned to being looked upon by the landlord and the whole neighbourhood as a tenant just like everyone else on the block. And it’s with loathing that I peer through the bars of the storeroom’s back windows, seeing everybody’s rubbish heaped up in the rain in the grimy courtyard which is my life.

I loathe the happiness of all these people who don’t know they’re unhappy. Their human life is full of what, in a true sensibility, would produce a surfeit of anxieties. But since their true life is vegetative, their sufferings come and go without touching their soul, and they live a life that can be compared only to that of a man with a toothache who won a fortune – the genuine good fortune of living unawares, the greatest gift granted by the gods, for it is the gift of being like them, superior just as they are (albeit in a different fashion) to happiness and pain.

That’s why, in spite of everything, I love them all. My dear vegetables!

I’d like to develop a code of inertia for superior souls in modern societies.

Society would govern itself spontaneously if it didn’t contain sensitive and intelligent people. You can be sure that they’re the only thing that hinders it. Primitive societies were happy because they didn’t have such people.

Unfortunately, superior souls would die if expelled from society,
because they don’t know how to work. And without any stupid blanks between them, perhaps they would die of boredom. But my concern here is with overall human happiness.

Each superior soul who appeared in society would be exiled to the Island of the superiors.* The superiors would be fed, like animals in cages, by normal society.

Believe me: if there were no intelligent people to point out humanity’s various woes, humanity wouldn’t even notice them. And sensitive people who suffer cause the rest to suffer by association.

For the time being, since we live in society, our one duty as superiors is to reduce to a minimum our participation in the life of the tribe. We shouldn’t read newspapers, for example, or should read them only to find out what anecdotal and unimportant things are happening. You can’t imagine the delight I get from the provincial news round-up. The very names make doors to the indefinite open up in me.

The highest honour for a superior man is to not know the name of his country’s chief of state, or whether he lives under a monarchy or a republic.

He should be careful to position his soul in such a way that passing things and events can’t disturb him. Otherwise he’ll have to take an interest in others, in order to look out for himself.

There’s an aesthetics to wasting time. For those who cultivate sensations there’s an unwritten handbook on inertia, with recipes for all the forms of lucidity. To develop the right strategy for fighting against the notion of social mores, against the impulses of our instincts and against the solicitations of sentiment requires a study that not every aesthete is prepared to undertake. A rigorous aetiology of our scruples should be followed by an ironic diagnosis of our concessions to normality. We must also learn how to ward off life’s intrusions; a
caution is necessary to make us impervious to outside opinions, and a velvety indifference to insulate our soul against the invisible blows of coexisting with others.

A life of aesthetic quietism, to prevent the insults and humiliations of life and the living from getting any closer than a loathsome periphery of our sensibility, outside the walls of our conscious soul.

All of us, in some part or other, are loathsome. We all harbour a crime we’ve committed, or a crime our soul is begging us to commit.

One of my constant preoccupations is to understand how other people can exist, how there can be souls that aren’t mine, consciousnesses that have nothing to do with my own, which – because it’s a consciousness – seems to me like the only one. I accept that the man standing before me, who speaks with words like mine and gesticulates as I do or could do, is in some sense my fellow creature. But so are the figures from illustrations that fill my imagination, the characters I meet in novels, and the dramatic personae that move on stage through the actors who represent them.

No one, I suppose, genuinely admits the real existence of another person. We may concede that the person is alive and that he thinks and feels as we do, but there will always be an unnamed element of difference, a materialized inequality. There are figures from the past and living images from books that are more real to us than the incarnate indifferences that talk to us over shop counters, or happen to glance at us in the trams, or brush against us in the dead happenstance of the streets. Most people are no more for us than scenery, generally the invisible scenery of a street we know by heart.

I feel more kinship and intimacy with certain characters described in books and certain images I’ve seen in prints than I feel with many so-called real people, who are of that metaphysical insignificance known as flesh and blood. And ‘flesh and blood’ in fact describes them rather well: they’re like chunks of meat displayed in the window of a
butcher’s, dead things bleeding as if they were alive, shanks and cutlets of Destiny.

I’m not ashamed of feeling this way, as I’ve discovered that’s how everyone feels. What seems to lie behind people’s mutual contempt and indifference, such that they can kill each other like assassins who don’t really feel they’re killing, or like soldiers who don’t think about what they’re doing, is that no one pays heed to the apparently abstruse fact that other people are also living souls.

On certain days, in certain moments, brought to me by I don’t know what breeze and opened to me by the opening of I don’t know what door, I suddenly feel that the corner grocer is a thinking entity, that his assistant, who at this moment is bent over a sack of potatoes next to the entrance, is truly a soul capable of suffering.

When I was told yesterday that the employee of the tobacco shop had committed suicide, it seemed like a lie. Poor man, he also existed! We had forgotten this, all of us, all who knew him in the same way as all those who never met him. Tomorrow we’ll forget him even better. But he evidently had a soul, for he killed himself. Passion? Anxiety? No doubt… But for me, as for all humanity, there’s only the memory of a dumb smile and a shabby sports coat that hung unevenly from the shoulders. That’s all that remains to me of this man who felt so much that he killed himself for feeling, since what else does one kill himself for? Once, as I was buying cigarettes from him, it occurred to me that he would go bald early. As it turns out, he didn’t have time enough to go bald. That’s one of the memories I have of him. What other one can I have, if even this one is not of him but of one of my thoughts?

I suddenly see his corpse, the coffin where they placed him, the so alien grave where they must have lowered him, and it dawns on me that the cashier of the tobacco shop, with crooked coat and all, was in a certain way the whole of humanity.

It was only a flash. What’s clear to me now, today, as the human being I am, is that he died. That’s all.

No, others don’t exist… It’s for me that this heavy-winged sunset lingers, its colours hard and hazy. It’s for me that the great river shimmers below the sunset, even if I can’t see it flow. It’s for me that this square was built overlooking the river, whose waters are now rising. Was the cashier of the tobacco shop buried today in the common
grave? Then the sun isn’t setting for him today. But because I think this, and against my will, it has also stopped setting for me.

… ships passing in the night that neither signal nor recognize each other.

I realize now that I’ve failed, and it only surprises me that I didn’t foresee that I was going to fail. What was there in me to suggest I might triumph? I had neither the conqueror’s blind force nor the madman’s sure vision. I was lucid and sad, like a cold day.

Clear things console me, and sunlit things console me. To see life passing by under a blue sky makes up for a lot. I forget myself indefinitely, forgetting more than I could ever remember. The sufficiency of things fills my weightless, translucent heart, and just to look is a sweet satisfaction. I’ve never been more than a bodiless gaze, whose only soul was a slight breeze that passed by and saw.

I have something of the spirit of a bohemian, of those who let life slip away, like something that slips through one’s fingers because the gesture to seize it falls asleep at the mere idea. But I never had the outward compensation of the bohemian spirit – the carefree acceptance of come-and-go emotions. I was never more than an isolated bohemian, which is an absurdity; or a mystic bohemian, which is an impossibility.

I’ve lived certain moments of respite in the presence of Nature, moments sculpted out of tender isolation, that will always be like medals for me. In these moments I forgot all of my life’s goals, all of the paths I wanted to follow. An immense spiritual tranquillity fell into the blue lap of my aspirations and allowed me to enjoy being nothing. But I’ve probably never enjoyed an incorruptible moment,
free of any underlying spirit of failure and gloom. In all my moments of spiritual liberation there was a dormant sorrow, vaguely blooming in gardens beyond the walls of my consciousness, and the scent and the very colour of those sad flowers intuitively passed through the stone walls, whose far side (where the roses bloomed) never ceased being a hazy near side in the obscure mystery of who I am, in the drowsiness of my daily existence.

It was in an inner sea that the river of my life ended. All around my dreamed mansion the trees were yellow with autumn. This circular landscape is my soul’s crown of thorns. The happiest moments of my life were dreams, and dreams of sorrow, and I saw myself in their ponds like a blind Narcissus who enjoyed the coolness as he bent over the water, aware of his reflection there through an inner, nocturnal vision that was confided to his abstract emotions and maternally adored in the recesses of his imagination.

Your necklaces of imitation pearls loved with me my finest hours. Carnations were our preferred flower, perhaps because they didn’t suggest pomp. Your lips solemnly celebrated the irony of your own smile. Did you really understand your destiny? It was because you knew it without understanding it that the mystery written in the sadness of your eyes had cast a pall on your resigned lips. Our Homeland was too far away for roses. In the cascades of our gardens the water was pellucid with silences. In the tiny hollows of the rocks over which the water flowed, there were secrets from our childhood and dreams the same size as our toy soldiers of old, which we could station on the cascades’ stones, in the static execution of a huge military operation, with nothing lacking in our dreams, and nothing lagging in our imagination.

I know I’ve failed. I enjoy the vague voluptuosity of failure like one who, in his exhaustion, appreciates the fever that laid him up.

I had a certain talent for friendship, but I never had any friends, either because they simply didn’t turn up, or because the friendship I had imagined was an error of my dreams. I’ve always lived alone, and ever more alone as I’ve become more self-aware.

Towards the end of summer, when the dull sun’s heat had lost its harshness, autumn began before it was autumn, with a mild and endlessly indefinite sadness, as if the sky didn’t feel like smiling. Its blue was sometimes lighter, sometimes greener, from the lofty colour’s own lack of substance. There was a kind of forgetfulness in the subdued purple tones of the clouds. It was no longer a torpor but a tedium that filled the lonely expanses where the clouds go by.

The real beginning of autumn was announced by a coldness in the air’s non-coldness, by a subduing of the still unsubdued colours, by something of shadow and distance in the tint of the landscapes and the fuzzy countenance of things. Nothing was going to die yet, but everything – as in a still unformed smile – looked longingly back at life.