The Book of Disquiet (44 page)

I’ve ceased, like the sun in my landscape. Nothing remains of what I said or saw except for an already fallen night, full of a lifeless glimmer of lakes on a lowland with no wild ducks, fluid and dead, humid and sinister.

No, I don’t believe in the landscape. I don’t say it because I believe in Amiel’s* ‘the landscape is a state of emotion’, one of the better verbal moments of his unbearable interiorizing. I say it because I don’t believe.

Day after day, in my ignoble and profound soul, I register the impressions that form the external substance of my self-awareness. I put them in vagabond words that desert me as soon as they’re written, wandering on their own over slopes and meadows of images, along avenues of concepts, down footpaths of confusions. None of this is of any use to me, because nothing is of use to me. But writing makes me calmer, as when a sick man breathes easier without the sickness having passed.

Some people absent-mindedly scribble lines and absurd names on their desk blotter. These pages are the scribbles of my intellectual self-unawareness. I trace them in a stupor of feeling whatever I feel, like a cat in the sun, and I sometimes reread them with a vague, belated astonishment, as when I remember something I forgot ages ago.

When I write, I pay myself a solemn visit. I have special chambers, remembered by someone else in the interstices of my imagining, where I take delight in analysing what I don’t feel, and I examine myself like a picture in a dark corner.

I lost my ancient castle before I was born. The tapestries of my ancestral palace were sold before I existed. My manor house from before I had life fell into ruins, and only in certain moments, when the moon shines in me over the river’s reeds, do I shiver with nostalgia for the place where the toothless remains of the walls blackly stand out against the dark-blue sky made less dark by a milky yellow tinge.

I sphinxly discern myself. And from the lap of the queen I’m missing falls the forgotten ball of thread that’s my soul – a little mishap of her useless embroidery. It rolls under the inlaid chest of drawers, where part of me follows it like a pair of eyes, until it vanishes in a nameless, mortuary horror.

I never sleep. I live and I dream; or rather, I dream in life and in my sleep, which is also life. There’s no break in my consciousness: I’m aware of what’s around me if I haven’t fallen asleep yet or if I sleep fitfully, and I start dreaming as soon as I’m really asleep. And so I’m a perpetual unfolding of images, connected or disconnected but always pretending to be external, situated among people in the daylight, if I’m awake, or among phantoms in the non-light that illumines dreams, if I’m asleep. I honestly don’t know how to distinguish one state from the other, and it may be that I’m actually sleeping when I’m awake and that I wake up when I fall asleep.

Life is a ball of yarn that someone got all tangled. It would make sense if it were rolled up tight, or if it were unrolled and completely stretched out. But such as it is, life is a problem without shape, a confusion of yarn leading nowhere.

I’m only half asleep, and as I think these things which I’ll write down later (I’m already dreaming of the sentences I’ll use), I’m seeing the landscapes of my vague dreams and hearing the patter of the rain outside, which makes my dreams even vaguer. They’re riddles from the void, quivering with nothingness, and through them trickles the useless, external moaning of the constant rain, the one incessantly repeated detail of the auditory landscape. Hope? None. The wind-whipped shower of grief noisily pours down from the invisible sky. I keep on sleeping.

It was undoubtedly in the promenades of the park that the tragedy resulting in life occurred. There were two of them, both beautiful, and they wanted to be something else; their love was waiting for them in the tedium of the future, and their nostalgia for what was yet to come arrived as the daughter of the love they hadn’t experienced. And so with no desires or hopes, by the light of the moon filtering through the nearby woods, they strolled hand in hand through the desert of the abandoned pathways. They were perfect children, because they weren’t really children. Taking path after path, cutting silhouettes among the trees, they moved like cardboard figures across the stage setting of no one. And finally, ever closer and more separate, they
vanished from sight in the vicinity of the pools, and the patter of the vague rain that’s now letting up is the sound of the fountains they were heading to. I am the love they shared, which is why I’m able to hear them on this night when I can’t sleep, and also why I’m able to live without joy.

If only I had been the Madame of a harem! What a pity this didn’t happen to me!

What remains at the end of this day is what remained yesterday and will remain tomorrow: the boundless, insatiable longing to be always the same and other.

Come down from your unreality by the steps of my dreams and fatigues. Come down and replace the world.

Should I one day take an earthly woman to wife, pray for me the following: that she at any rate be sterile. But also ask, should you pray for me, that I never come to have this hypothetical wife.

Only sterility is noble and worthy. Only to kill what never was is lofty, perverse* and absurd.

I don’t dream of possessing you. Why should I? It would only debase my dream life. To possess a body is to be banal. And to dream of possessing a body is perhaps even worse, if that’s possible: it’s to dream of being banal – the supreme horror.

And since we wish to be sterile, let us also be chaste, for there is nothing more shameful and ignoble than to forswear what in Nature is fertile while holding on to the part we like in what we’ve forsworn. There are no halfway noble attitudes.

Let us be chaste like dead lips,* pure like dreamed bodies, and resigned to being this way, like mad nuns.

May our love be a prayer… Anoint me with seeing you, and I will make the moments I dream of you into a rosary, with my tediums for Our Fathers and my anxieties for Hail Marys.

Let us remain eternally like a male figure in one stained-glass window opposite a female figure in another stained-glass window… And between us humanity passing by, shadows whose footsteps coldly echo… Murmurs of prayers, secrets of ..... Sometimes the air fills up with
incense. At other times a statuesque figure sprinkles holy water on this side and that side… And we will always be the same stained-glass windows, with the same colours when the sun strikes us, the same outlines when the night falls… The centuries will not touch our vitreous silence… In the world outside civilizations will come and go, revolutions will break out, feasts will whirl and rage, peaceful and orderly peoples will carry on… While we, my unreal love, will always have the same useless expression, the same false existence, and the same .....

Until one day, at the end of various centuries and empires, the Church will finally collapse and everything will cease…

But we, oblivious to it, will remain – I don’t know how, or in what space, or for how long – eternal stained-glass windows, hours of naïve design and coloration executed by some artist who for ages has slept in a Gothic tomb on which two angels, their hands pressed together, freeze the idea of death in marble.

The things we dream have just one side. We can’t walk around them to see what’s on the other side. The problem with the things of life is that we can look at them from all sides. The things we dream have, like our souls,* only the side that we see.

I hereby excuse you from appearing in my idea of you.

Your life .....

This is not my love; it’s merely your life.

I love you the way I love the sunset or the moonlight: I want the moment to remain, but all I want to possess in it is the sensation of possessing it.

Nothing is more oppressive than the affection of others – not even the hatred of others, since hatred is at least more intermittent than affection; being an unpleasant emotion, it naturally tends to be less frequent in those who feel it. But hatred as well as love is oppressive; both seek us, pursue us, won’t leave us alone.

My ideal would be to live everything through novels and to use real life for resting up – to read my emotions and to live my disdain of them. For someone with a keen and sensitive imagination, the adventures of a fictional protagonist are genuine emotion enough, and more, since they are experienced by us as well as the protagonist. No greater romantic adventure exists than to have loved Lady Macbeth
with true and directly felt love. After a love like that, what can one do but take a rest, not loving anyone in the real world?

I don’t know the meaning of this journey I was forced to make, between one and another night, in the company of the whole universe. I know I can read to amuse myself. Reading seems to me the easiest way to pass the time on this as on other journeys. I occasionally lift my eyes from the book where I’m truly feeling and glance, as a foreigner, at the scenery slipping by – fields, cities, men and women, fond attachments, yearnings – and all this is no more to me than an incident in my repose, an idle distraction to rest my eyes from the pages I’ve been reading so intently.

Only what we dream is what we truly are, because all the rest, having been realized, belongs to the world and to everyone. If I were to realize a dream, I’d be jealous, for it would have betrayed me by allowing itself to be realized. ‘I’ve achieved everything I wanted,’ says the feeble man, and it’s a lie; the truth is that he prophetically dreamed all that life achieved through him. We achieve nothing. Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, ‘Look at me move.’

Whatever be this interlude played out under the spotlight of the sun and the spangles of the stars, surely there’s no harm in knowing it’s an interlude. If what’s beyond the theatre doors is life, then we will live, and if it’s death, we will die, and the play has nothing to do with this.

That is why I never feel so close to truth, so initiated into its secrets, as on the rare occasions when I go to the theatre or the circus: then I know that I’m finally watching life’s perfect representation. And the actors and actresses, the clowns and magicians, are important and futile things, like the sun and the moon, love and death, the plague, hunger and war among humanity. Everything is theatre. Is it truth I want? I’ll go back to my novel…

The most abject of all needs is to confide, to confess. It’s the soul’s need to externalize.

Go ahead and confess, but confess what you don’t feel. Go ahead
and tell your secrets to get their weight off your soul, but let the secrets you tell be secrets you’ve never had.

Lie to yourself before you tell that truth. Expressing yourself is always a mistake. Be resolutely conscious: let expression, for you, be synonymous with lying.

I don’t know what time is. I don’t know what its real measure is, presuming it has one. I know that the clock’s measure is false, as it divides time spatially, from the outside. I know that our emotions’ way of measuring is just as false, dividing not time but our sensation of it. The way our dreams measure it is erroneous, for in dreams we only brush against time, now leisurely, now hurriedly, and what we live in them is fast or slow, depending on something in their flowing that I can’t grasp.

Sometimes I think that everything is false, and that time is just a frame placed around things that are extraneous to it. In the remembrance I have of my past life, the times are arranged in absurd levels and planes, so that I’m younger in a certain episode from my serious-minded fifteenth year than in another from my childhood surrounded by toys.

My mind gets confounded if I think about these things. I sense there’s a mistake in all this, but I don’t know where it is. It’s as if I were watching a magic show and knew I was being tricked, but couldn’t work out the technique, or mechanism, behind the trick.

And then I’m visited by thoughts which are absurd but which I can’t reject as completely absurd. I wonder if a man who slowly thinks in a fast-moving car is going fast or slow. I wonder if the identical speeds of a suicide who jumps into the sea and a man on a terrace who accidentally falls in are equal. I wonder if my actions of smoking a cigarette, writing this passage and obscurely thinking – all of which occupy the same interval of time – are truly synchronous.

We can imagine that one of two wheels on the same axle will always be in front of the other, if only by a fraction of a millimetre. A
microscope would magnify this fractional distance until it became almost unbelievable – impossible, were it not real. And why shouldn’t the microscope be right rather than our poor eyesight?