The Book of Disquiet (28 page)

If, on thinking this, I look up to see if reality can quench my thirst, I see inexpressive façades, inexpressive faces, inexpressive gestures. Stones, bodies, ideas – all dead. All movements are one great standstill. Nothing means anything to me. Nothing is known to me, not because it’s unfamiliar but because I don’t know what it is. The world has slipped away. And in the bottom of my soul – as the only reality of this moment – there’s an intense and invisible grief, a sadness like the sound of someone crying in a dark room.

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I sorely grieve over time’s passage. It’s always with exaggerated emotion that I leave something behind, whatever it may be. The miserable rented room where I lived for a few months, the dinner table at the provincial hotel where I stayed for six days, even the sad waiting room at the station where I spent two hours waiting for a train – yes, their loss grieves me. But the special things of life – when I leave them behind and realize with all of my nerves’ sensibility that I’ll never see or have them again, at least not in that exact same moment – grieve me metaphysically. A chasm opens up in my soul and a cold breeze of the hour of God blows across my pallid face.

Time! The past! Something – a voice, a song, a chance fragrance – lifts the curtain on my soul’s memories… That which I was and will never again be! That which I had and will never again have! The dead! The dead who loved me in my childhood. Whenever I remember them, my whole soul shivers and I feel exiled from all hearts, alone in the night of myself, weeping like a beggar before the closed silence of all doors.

198

H
OLIDAY
N
OTES

The small cove with its small beach, cut off from the world by two miniature promontories, was my retreat from myself during those three days of holiday. The beach was reached by a crudely built stairway that began with wooden steps at the top and continued, halfway down, with steps cut directly into the rock, with a rusty iron handrail for support. And each time I went down that old stairway, and especially on the part made of stone, I stepped out of my own existence and found myself.

Occultists say (or at least some of them do) that the soul has supreme moments when it recalls, with the emotions or with some part of memory, a moment or an aspect or a shadow from a previous
incarnation. And since the soul returns to a time that is closer than the present to the beginning and origin of things, it experiences a sensation of childhood and of liberation.

In descending that now little-used stairway and slowly stepping out on to the forever deserted beach, it was as if I were using some magical technique to find myself nearer the monad that I perhaps am. Certain aspects and characteristics of my daily existence – represented in my normal self by desires, aversions, worries – vanished from me like fugitives from the law, fading into the shadows beyond recognition, and I attained a state of inward distance in which it was hard to remember yesterday or to believe that the self who lives in me day after day really belongs to me. My usual emotions, my regularly irregular habits, my conversations with others, my adaptations to the world’s social order – all of this seemed like things I’d read somewhere, like inert pages of a published biography, or details from some novel, in one of the middle chapters we read while thinking about something else, and the story-line slackens until it finally slithers away on the ground.

There on the beach, with no sound but that of the ocean waves and of the wind passing high overhead, like a large invisible aeroplane, I experienced dreams of a new sort – soft and shapeless things, marvels that made a deep impression, without images or emotions, clear like the sky and the water, and reverberating like the white whorls of ocean rising up from the depths of a vast truth: a tremulously slanting blue in the distance that acquired glistening, muddy-green hues as it approached, breaking with a great hissing its thousand crashing arms to scatter them over darkish sand where they left dry foam, and then gathering into itself all undertows, all return journeys to that original freedom, all nostalgias for God, all memories (like this one, shapeless and painless) of a prior state, blissful because it was so good or because it was different, a body made of nostalgia with a soul of foam, repose, death, the everything or the nothingness which – like a huge ocean – surrounds the island of castaways that is life.

And I slept without sleeping, already straying from what I’d seen through my feelings, a twilight of myself, a ripple of water among trees, the peace of wide rivers, the coolness of sad evenings, the slow panting in the white breast of the childhood sleep of contemplation.

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The sweetness of having neither family nor companions, that pleasant taste as of exile, in which the pride of the expatriate subdues with a strange sensuality our vague anxiety about being far from home – all of this I enjoy in my own way, indifferently. Because one of the tenets of my mental attitude is that our attention to what we feel shouldn’t be unduly cultivated, and even dreams should be regarded with condescension, with an aristocratic awareness that they couldn’t exist without us. To give too much importance to a dream would be to give too much importance to something which, after all, broke away from us and set itself up as reality, at least as far as it could, thereby losing its right to special treatment from us.

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Commonness is a hearthstone. Banality is a mother’s lap. After a long incursion into lofty poetry, up to the heights of sublime yearning, to the cliffs of the transcendent and the occult, it tastes better than good, it feels like all that is warm in life, to return to the inn with its happily laughing fools and to drink with them as one more fool, as God made us, content with the universe we were given and leaving the rest to those who climb mountains to do nothing at the top.

I’m not impressed should someone tell me that a certain man I consider crazy or stupid surpasses a common man in many achievements and particulars of life. Epileptics have amazing strength when they go into seizure; paranoiacs have an ability to reason that few normal men can match; religious maniacs bring multitudes of believers together as few (if any) demagogues can, and with a force of conviction that the latter can’t inspire in their followers. And all that this proves is that craziness is craziness. I prefer a defeat that knows the beauty of flowers to a victory in the desert, full of blindness in the soul, alone with its isolated nothingness.

How often even my futile dreaming makes me loathe my inner life
and feel physically nauseated by mysticisms and contemplations. How quickly I then race from my apartment where I dream to the office, and when I see the face of Moreira it’s as if I had finally docked at a port. When all is said and done, I prefer Moreira to the astral world; I prefer reality to truth; I prefer life, yes, to the very God who created it. Since this is the life he gave me, this is the life I’ll live. I dream because I dream, but I don’t suffer the indignity of considering my dreams anything more than my personal theatre, even as I don’t consider wine – though I enjoy drinking it – to be a source of nourishment or a vital necessity.

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Since early morning and against the solar custom of this bright city, the fog had wrapped a weightless mantle (which the sun slowly gilded) around the rows of houses, the cancelled open spaces, and the shifting heights of land and of buildings. But as the hours advanced towards midday, the gentle mist began to unravel until, with breaths like flapping shadows of veils, it expired altogether. By ten o’clock, the tenuous blueing of the sky was the only evidence that there had been fog.

The city’s features were reborn once the blurry mask slipped away. As if a window had been opened, the already dawned day dawned. There was a slight change in all the sounds, which had also suddenly returned. A blue tint infiltrated even the stones of the streets and the impersonal auras of pedestrians. The sun was warm, but still humidly so, filtered by the vanished fog.

The awakening of a city, with or without fog, moves me far more than the breaking of dawn in the country. It’s much more of a rebirth, there’s much more to look forward to, when the sun – instead of just gilding the grasses, the shrubs’ silhouettes and the trees’ countless green hands with its murky, then moist, and finally luminously gold light – multiplies its possible effects on windows (in myriad reflections), walls (painting them different colours) and rooftops (shading each one uniquely) to make a glorious morning absolutely distinct from so many
other distinctive realities. A dawning in the country does me good; a dawning in the city good and bad, and so it does me more than just good. Yes, because the greater hope it stirs in me has, like all hopes, that slightly bitter, nostalgic taste of not being reality. The country morning exists; the city morning promises. The former makes one live; the latter makes one think. And I’m doomed always to feel, like the world’s great damned men, that it’s better to think than to live.

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After the heat began to wane at summer’s end, it sometimes happened in late afternoon that certain softer hues in the broad sky and certain strokes of cold breezes already signalled the coming of autumn. There was still no discolouring or falling of leaves, nor yet that vague anxiety we naturally feel when we see death all around us, since we know ours will also come. But there was a sort of flagging of all effort, a vague slumber fallen over the last signs of action. Ah, with so much sad indifference in these afternoons, the autumn begins in us before it begins in things.

Each new autumn is closer to the last autumn we’ll have, and the same is true of spring or summer; but autumn, by its nature, reminds us that all things will end, which is something we’re apt to forget when we look around us in spring or summer.

It’s still not autumn, there’s still no yellow of fallen leaves in the air, still none of that damp sadness that marks the weather when it’s on its way to becoming winter. But there is a hint of expected sadness – a sorrow dressed for the journey – in our hazy awareness of colours being smattered, of the wind’s different sound, of that ancient stillness which spreads in the falling night across the ineluctable presence of the universe.

Yes, we will all pass, we will pass everything. Nothing will remain of the man who wore feelings and gloves, who talked about death and local politics. Just as one and the same light illumines the faces of saints and the gaiters of pedestrians, so too the same lack of light will cause darkness to engulf the nothing that remains of some having been
saints and others having used gaiters. In the vast whirlwind where the whole world listlessly turns like so many dry leaves, kingdoms count no more than the dresses of seamstresses, and the pigtails of blonde girls go round in the same mortal whirl as the sceptres that stood for empires. All is nothing, and in the entrance hall to the Invisible, whose open door reveals merely a closed door beyond, all things dance, servants of the wind which churns them without hands – all things, big and small, which for us and in us formed the perceptible system of the universe. All is shadow mixed with dust, and there’s no voice but in the sounds made by what the wind lifts up or sweeps forward, nor silence except from what the wind abandons. Some of us, light leaves, and therefore less earthbound, ascend high in the hall’s whirl and fall farther away from the circle of the heavy. Others, almost invisible but still equally dust, different only if seen close up, form their own layer in the whirlwind. Still others, tree trunks in miniature, are dragged around and come to a halt here and there. One day, when everything is finally and fully revealed, that other door will open and all that we were – rubbish of stars and souls – will be swept outside the house, so that what exists can start over.

My heart hurts me like a foreign body. My brain sleeps all that I feel. Yes, it’s the beginning of autumn which brings to the air and to my soul that unsmiling light whose lifeless yellow tinges the irregular, rounded edges of the sunset’s several clouds. Yes, it’s the beginning of autumn and the clear awareness, in the limpid hour, of the anonymous inadequacy of everything. Autumn, yes, autumn, the one that’s here or that’s yet to come, and the foretasted weariness of all acts, the foretasted disillusion of all dreams. What can I hope for and where would it come from? Already, in what I think of myself, I’m there among the leaves and dust of the entrance hall, in the meaningless orbit of nothing at all, making sounds of life on the clean flagstones gilded by the last rays of a sun setting I don’t know where.

All that I’ve thought, all that I’ve dreamed, all that I have or haven’t done – all will go in autumn, like used matches strewn over the floor and pointing various ways, or papers crumpled into fake balls, or the great empires, all religions, the philosophies that the drowsy children of the abyss invented for sport. All that constituted my soul, from my lofty ambitions to my humble rented room, from the gods I had to the
boss – Senhor Vasques – that I also had, all will go in autumn, all in autumn, in the tender indifference of autumn. All in autumn, yes, all in autumn.

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We don’t even know if what ends with daylight terminates in us as useless grief, or if we are just an illusion among shadows, and reality just this vast silence without wild ducks that falls over the lakes where straight and stiff reeds swoon. We know nothing. Gone is the memory of the stories we heard as children, now so much seaweed; still to come is the tenderness of future skies, a breeze in which imprecision slowly opens into stars. The votive lamp flickers uncertainly in the abandoned temple, the ponds of deserted villas stagnate in the sun, the name once carved into the tree now means nothing, and the privileges of the unknown have been blown over the roads like torn-up paper, stopping only when some object blocked their way. Others will lean out the same window as the rest; those who have forgotten the evil shadow will keep sleeping, longing for the sun they never had; and I, venturing without acting, will end without regret amid soggy reeds, covered with mud from the nearby river and from my sluggish weariness, under vast autumn evenings in some impossible distance. And through it all, behind my daydream, I’ll feel my soul like a whistle of stark anxiety, a pure and shrill howl, useless in the world’s darkness.