The Book of Disquiet (64 page)

And thus we died our life, so individually intent on dying it that we never noticed that we were only one, that we were each an illusion of the other, and that each of us – as a separate self – was nothing on the inside but an echo of that self…

A fly buzzes, uncertain and minute…

Faint and dispersed but definite sounds dawn in my awareness, filling my consciousness of our room with the fact day has broken… Our room? Mine and who else’s, if I’m here alone? I don’t know. Everything blends and all that remains is a fleeting mist of reality in
which my uncertainty founders and my self-awareness is lulled to sleep by opiums…

Morning has broken, as if it had fallen from the pallid summit of Time…

The embers of our dreams have died out, my love, in the hearth of our life…

Let us give up the illusion of hope, which betrays; of love, which wearies; of life, which surfeits but never satisfies; and even of death, which brings more than we want and less than we hope for.

Let us give up, O Veiled One, even our tedium, which wears out its own self and dares not to be all the anxiety that it is.

Let us not weep, nor hate, nor desire…

Let us cover with a sheet of fine linen, O Silent Soulmate, the dead, stiff profile of our Imperfection…

I see possession as an absurd lake – very large, very dark, and very shallow. The water only seems deep because it’s dirty.

Death? But death is part of life. Do I die completely? I know nothing about life. Do I survive myself? I keep on living.

Dreaming? But dreaming is part of life. Do we live our dreams? We live. Do we only dream them? We die. And death is part of life.

Life pursues us like our own shadow. And that shadow disappears only when there’s nothing but shadow. Only when we surrender to it does life stop pursuing us.

The most painful thing about dreaming is our not existing. In reality, we cannot dream.

What does it mean to possess? We don’t know. So how is it possible to possess anything? You will say that we don’t know what life is, and yet we live… But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is – is that living?

Be it atoms or souls, nothing interpenetrates, which is why possession is impossible. From truth to a handkerchief – nothing is possessable. Property isn’t a theft: it’s nothing.*

For some indefinite number of months you’ve seen me looking at you, constantly looking at you, always with the same hesitant and solicitous gaze. I know you’ve noticed this. And since you’ve noticed, you must have thought it strange that this gaze, which can’t really be called shy, has never intimated a meaning. Always attentive, vague and unchanging, as if satisfied to be only the sadness of all this… Nothing else… And when you’ve thought about this – regardless of what you feel when you think about me – you must have considered my possible intentions. You must have reasoned, without being too convinced, that I’m either an eccentric version of the shy type or else something on the order of a madman.

I can assure you, Madam, with respect to my habit of looking at you, that I am not merely bashful nor positively mad. I am, first and foremost, something else, as I shall explain, without much hope you’ll believe me. How often I’ve whispered to my dream of you: ‘Do your duty as a useless amphora; fulfil your calling as a mere vessel.’

What nostalgia I felt for the idea I wanted to have of you when I learned, one day, that you were married! What a tragic day in my life that was! I wasn’t jealous of your husband. It had never even occurred to me to wonder if you had one. I simply felt nostalgia for my idea of you. Were I to learn the absurd fact that a woman in a painting – yes, a painting – was married, I would feel just as sorry.

Possess you? I don’t know how that might be done. And even if I had the human stain of knowing how, what a disgrace I would be to myself, what a flagrant insult to my own greatness were I even to think of putting myself on a par with your husband!

Possess you? One evening when you happen to be alone on a dark street, an attacker can subdue and possess you. He can even fertilize
you, leaving behind a trace of himself in your womb. If possessing you means to possess your body, what good is that?

The attacker doesn’t possess your soul? But how is a soul possessed? And is there a lover clever enough to be able to possess your ‘soul’.....? I leave the job to your husband. Or do you expect me to stoop to his level?

How many hours I’ve spent in secret company with my idea of you! How much we’ve loved each other in my dreams! But I swear that even there I’ve never dreamed of possessing you. I’m a courteous and chaste man, even in my dreams. I have respect for the mere idea of a beautiful woman.

♦

I wouldn’t know how to make my soul interested in having my body possess yours. The very idea makes me trip in myself over unseen obstacles, and I get all tangled up in obscure inner webs. Imagine what would happen to me if I really wanted to possess you!

I would, I repeat, be incapable of trying to do it. I can’t even make myself dream of doing it.

These, Madam, are the words I have to write in response to your involuntarily interrogative glance. It is in this book that you’ll first read this letter to you. If you don’t realize it’s for you, it won’t matter. I write to entertain myself more than to tell you anything. Only business letters are addressed to other people. The rest of one’s letters, at least for a superior soul, should be exclusively from and to oneself.

I have nothing else to say to you. Be assured that I esteem you as much as I can. I should be pleased if you sometimes think of me.

Ah, if only you understood your duty to be merely a dreamer’s dream. To be nothing but the censer in the cathedral of reveries. To trace your gestures like dreams, like mere windows opening on to new landscapes in your soul. To model your body so perfectly after dreams that no one could look at you without thinking of something else, since you
would call to mind everything in the world but you, and to see you would be to hear music and to sleepwalk across vast landscapes with stagnant ponds, through hazy and quiet forests lost in the depths of ages past, where other invisible couples experience feelings we don’t have.

The only thing I’d ever want you for is to not have you. If I were dreaming and you appeared, I’d want to be able to imagine I was still dreaming, perhaps without even seeing you, though perhaps noticing that the moonlight had filled the stagnant ponds with
and that echoes of songs were suddenly rippling through the great inexplicit forest, lost in impossible ages.

My vision of you would be the bed where my soul would lie down and sleep, like a sick child, to dream once more of other skies. If you could talk? Yes, but only if hearing you wouldn’t be hearing you but seeing great bridges joining the two dark shores of a moonlit river leading to the ancient sea where the caravels are forever ours.

You smile? I hadn’t realized, but the stars were coursing my inner skies. You call me in my sleep. I hadn’t noticed, but from that far-flung boat whose dreamed sail was cutting the moonlight, I can see distant coasts.

My life: a tragedy booed off stage by the gods,* never getting beyond the first act.

Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.

The logical reward of my detachment from life is the incapacity I’ve created in others to feel anything for me. There’s an aureole of indifference, an icy halo, that surrounds me and repels others. I still haven’t succeeded in not suffering from my solitude. It’s hard to achieve that distinction of spirit whereby isolation becomes a repose without anguish.

I put no faith in the friendship I was shown, and I wouldn’t have put any in love had I been shown love, which wouldn’t even have been possible. Although I never harboured illusions about those who
claimed to be my friends, I inevitably managed to feel disillusioned with them – such is my complex and subtle destiny of suffering.

I never doubted that everyone would let me down, and I was always dumbfounded when they did. When the thing I was expecting happened, it always hit me like something unexpected.

Having never discovered qualities in myself that might attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me. This opinion of myself would be stupidly modest, if facts on facts – those unexpected facts I expected – didn’t always confirm it.

I can’t even imagine receiving affection out of pity, for although physically ungainly and unappealing, I’m not organically malformed enough to enter the sphere of those who deserve the world’s pity, nor do I have the winsomeness that attracts pity even when it’s not clearly deserved; and what in me deserves pity can’t have it, for there is no pity for the lame in spirit. So I fell into the centre of gravity of the world’s disdain, in which I tend towards the fellow feeling of nobody.

My entire life has been a struggle to adapt to this circumstance without being overwhelmed by its cruelty and humiliation.

It takes a certain intellectual courage for a man to frankly recognize that he’s nothing more than a human tatter, an abortion that survived, a madman not mad enough to be committed; and once he recognizes this, it takes even more moral courage to devise a way of adapting to his destiny, to accept without protest and without resignation, without any gesture or hint of a gesture, the organic curse imposed on him by Nature. To want not to suffer from this is to want too much, for it’s beyond human capacity to accept what’s obviously bad as if it were something good; and if we accept it as the bad thing it is, then we can’t help but suffer.

To conceive of myself from the outside was my ruin – the ruin of my happiness. I saw myself as others see me, and I despised myself – not because I had character traits that made me worthy of contempt, but because I saw myself through the eyes of others, and felt the contempt they feel towards me. I experienced the humiliation of knowing myself. Since there’s nothing noble about this calvary, and no resurrection three days later, I couldn’t help but suffer from its disgrace.

I realized that nobody could love me unless he were completely
lacking in aesthetic sensibility, in which case I would then despise him; and even a fond feeling towards me couldn’t be any more than a whim of someone’s basic indifference.

To see clearly into ourselves and into how others see us! To stare into the face of that truth! And in the end the cry of Christ on Calvary, when he stared into the face of
his
truth: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

There’s nothing that so intimately reveals and so perfectly conveys the substance of my innate misfortune as the type of daydream I most cherish, the personal balsam I most often choose to allay the anxiety I feel for existing. The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life. I love life too much to want it to be over; I love not living too much to have an active craving for life.

That’s why, of all my dreams, the one I’m about to write down is my favourite. Sometimes at night, when the house is still because the landlords have gone out or fallen silent, I close my window and its heavy shutters; wearing an old suit, I sink down in my easy chair, and I slide into this dream in which I’m a retired major in a small-town hotel, hanging on after dinner in the company of several other guests who are more sober than I – the lingering major, sitting there for no reason.

I imagine myself born that way. I’m not interested in the boyhood of the retired major, nor in the military ranks through which he ascended to arrive at the place I yearn for. Independent of Time and of Life, the major I imagine myself to be doesn’t have any kind of past life, nor does he or did he ever have relatives; he exists externally in the life he lives at the small-town hotel, already weary of the jokes and the talk of the other guests who linger there with him.

§ To have sure and definite opinions, instincts, passions, and a dependable, recognizable character – all of this leads to the horror of transforming
our soul into a fact, into a material and external thing. To live in a sweet, fluid state of ignorance about things and about oneself is the only lifestyle that suits a wise man and makes him warm.