The Book of Disquiet

  From any trip, even a short one, I return as from a slumber full of dreams – in a dazed confusion, with one sensation stuck to another, feeling drunk from what I saw.

  I can’t rest for lack of good health in my soul. I can’t move because of something lacking between my body and soul; it’s not movement that I’m missing, but the very desire to move.

  Often enough I’ve wanted to cross the river – those ten minutes from the Terreiro do Paço to Cacilhas.* And I’ve always felt intimidated by so many people, by myself, and by my intention. Once or twice I’ve made the trip, nervous the whole way, setting my foot on dry land only after I’d returned.

  When one feels too intensely, the Tagus is an endless Atlantic, and Cacilhas another continent, or even another universe.

  123

  Renunciation is liberation. Not wanting is power.

  What can China give me that my soul hasn’t already given me? And if my soul can’t give it to me, how will China give it to me? For it’s with my soul that I’ll see China, if I ever see it. I could go and seek riches in the Orient, but not the riches of the soul, because I am my soul’s riches, and I am where I am, with or without the Orient.

  Travel is for those who cannot feel. That’s why travel books are always so unsatisfying as books of experience. They’re worth only as much as the imagination of the one who writes them, and if the writer has imagination, he can as easily enchant us with the detailed, photographic description – down to each tiny coloured pennant – of scenes he imagined as he can with the necessarily less detailed description of the scenes he thought he saw. All of us are near-sighted, except on the inside. Only the eyes we use for dreaming truly see.

  There are basically only two things in our earthly experience: the universal and the particular. To describe the universal is to describe what is common to all human souls and to all human experience – the broad sky, with day and night occurring in it and by it; the flowing of rivers, all with the same fresh and nunnish water; the vast waving mountains known as oceans, which hold the majesty of height in the secret of their depths; the fields, the seasons, houses, faces, gestures; clothes and smiles; love and wars; gods both finite and infinite; the formless Night, mother of the world’s origin; Fate, the intellectual monster that is everything… Describing these or any other universals, my soul speaks the primitive and divine language, the Adamic tongue that everyone understands. But what splintered, Babelish language would I use to describe the Santa Justa Lift,* the Reims Cathedral, the breeches worn by the Zouaves, or the way Portuguese is pronounced in the province of Trás-os-Montes? These are surface differences, the ground’s unevenness, which we can feel by walking but not by our abstract feeling. What’s universal in the Santa Justa Lift is the mechanical technology that makes life easier. What’s true in the Reims Cathedral is neither Reims nor the Cathedral but the religious splendour of buildings dedicated to understanding the human soul’s depths. What’s eternal in the Zouaves’ breeches is the colourful fiction of clothes, a human language whose social simplicity is, in a certain way, a new nakedness. What’s universal in local accents is the homely tone of voice in those who live spontaneously, the diversity within groups, the multicoloured parade of customs, the differences between peoples, and the immense variety of nations.

  Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.

  124

  (Chapter on Indifference or something like that)

  Every soul worthy of itself desires to live life in the Extreme. To be satisfied with what one is given is for slaves. To ask for more is for children. To conquer more is for madmen, because every conquest is .....

  To live life in the Extreme means to live it to the limit, but there are three ways of doing this, and it’s up to the superior soul to choose one of the ways. The first way to live life in the extreme is by possessing it to an extreme degree, via a Ulyssean journey through all experiential sensations, through all forms of externalized energy. Few people, however, in all the ages of the world, have been able to shut their eyes with a fatigue that’s the sum of all fatigues, having possessed everything in every way.

  Indeed few can get life to yield to them completely, body and soul, making them so sure of its love that jealous thoughts become impossible. But this must surely be the desire of every superior, strong-willed soul. When this soul, however, realizes that it can never accomplish such a feat, that it lacks the strength to conquer all parts of the Whole, then there are two other roads it can follow. One is total renunciation, formal and complete abstention, whereby it transfers to the sensible sphere whatever cannot be wholly possessed in the sphere of activity and energy; better to supremely not act than to act spottily, inadequately and in vain, like the superfluous, inane, vast majority of men. The other road is that of perfect equilibrium, the search for the Limit in Absolute Proportion, whereby the longing for the Extreme passes from the will and emotion to the Intelligence, one’s entire ambition being not to live all life or to feel all life but to organize all life, to consummate it in intelligent Harmony and Coordination.

  The longing to understand, which in noble souls often replaces the longing to act, belongs to the sphere of sensibility. To replace energy with the Intelligence, to break the link between will and emotion, stripping the material life’s gestures of any and all interest – this, if achieved, is worth more than life, which is so hard to possess in its entirety and so sad when possessed only in part.

  The argonauts said* that it wasn’t necessary to live, only to sail. We, argonauts of our pathological sensibility, say that it’s not necessary to live, only to feel.

  125

  Your ships, Lord, didn’t make a greater voyage than the one made by my thought, in the disaster of this book. They rounded no cape and sighted no far-flung beach – beyond what daring men had dared and what minds had dreamed – to equal the capes I rounded with my imagination and the beaches where I landed with my .....

  Thanks to your initiative, Lord, the Real World was discovered. The Intellectual World will be discovered thanks to mine.

  Your argonauts* grappled with monsters and fears. In the voyage of my thought, I also had monsters and fears to contend with. On the path to the abstract chasm that lies in the depths of things there are horrors that the world’s men don’t imagine and fears to endure that human experience doesn’t know. The cape of the common sea beyond which all is mystery is perhaps more human than the abstract path to the world’s void.

  Separated from their native soil, banished from the path leading back to their homes, forever widowed from the tranquillity of life being the same, your emissaries finally arrived, when you were already dead, at the oceanic end of the Earth. They saw, materially, a new sky and new earth.

  I, far away from the paths to myself, blind to the vision of the life I love,..... I too have finally arrived at the vacant end of things, at the imponderable edge of creation’s limit, at the port-in-no-place of the World’s abstract chasm.

  I have entered, Lord, that Port. I have wandered, Lord, over that sea. I have gazed, Lord, at that invisible chasm.

  I dedicate this work of supreme Discovery to the memory of your Portuguese name, creator of argonauts.

  126

  I have times of great stagnation. It’s not, as happens to everyone, that I let days and days go by without sending a postcard in response to the urgent letter I received. It’s not, as happens to no one, that I indefinitely postpone what’s easy and would be useful, or what’s useful and would be pleasurable. There’s more subtlety in my self-contradiction. I stagnate in my very soul. My will, emotions and thought stop functioning, and this suspension lasts for days on end; only the vegetative life of my soul – words, gestures, habits – expresses me to others and, through them, to myself.

  In these periods of shadowy
subsistence, I’m unable to think, feel or want. I can’t write more than numbers and scribbles. I don’t feel, and the death of a loved one would strike me as having happened in a foreign language. I’m helpless. It’s as if I were sleeping and my gestures, words and deliberate acts were no more than a peripheral respiration, the rhythmic instinct of some organism.

  Thus the days keep passing, and if I added them all up, who knows how much of my life they would amount to? It sometimes occurs to me, when I shake off this state of suspension, that perhaps I’m not as naked as I suppose, that perhaps there are still intangible clothes covering the eternal absence of my true soul. It occurs to me that thinking, feeling and wanting can also be stagnations, on the threshold of a more intimate thinking, a feeling that’s more mine, a will lost somewhere in the labyrinth of who I really am.

  However it may be, I’ll let it be. And to whatever god or gods that be, I’ll let go of who I am, according as luck and chance determine, faithful to a forgotten pledge.

  127

  I don’t get indignant, because indignation is for the strong; I’m not resigned, because resignation is for the noble; I don’t hold my peace, because silence is for the great. And I’m neither strong, nor noble, nor great. I suffer and I dream. I complain because I’m weak. And since I’m an artist, I amuse myself by making my complaints musical and by arranging my dreams according to my idea of what makes them beautiful.

  I only regret not being a child, since then I could believe in my dreams, and not being a madman, since then I could keep everyone around me from getting close to my soul .....

  Taking dreams for reality, living too intensely what I dream, has given this thorn to the false rose of my dreamed life: that not even dreams cheer me, because I see their defects.

  Not even by colourfully painting my window can I block out the noise of the life outside, which doesn’t know I’m observing it.

  Happy the creators of pessimistic systems! Besides taking refuge in the fact of having made something, they can exult in their explanation of universal suffering, and include themselves in it.

  I don’t complain about the world. I don’t protest in the name of the universe. I’m not a pessimist. I suffer and complain, but I don’t know if suffering is the norm, nor do I know if it’s human to suffer. Why should I care to know?

  I suffer, without knowing if I deserve to. (A hunted doe.)

  I’m not a pessimist. I’m sad.

  128

  I’ve always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I’m not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.

  Nothing would bother me more than if they found me strange at the office. I like to revel in the irony that they don’t find me at all strange. I like the hair shirt of being regarded by them as their equal. I like the crucifixion of being considered no different. There are martyrdoms more subtle than those recorded for the saints and hermits. There are torments of our mental awareness as there are of the body and of desire. And in the former, as in the latter, there’s a certain sensuality .....

  129

  The office boy was tying up the day’s packages in the twilight coolness of the empty office. ‘What a thunderclap!’ the cruel bandit said to no one, in the loud voice of a ‘Good morning!’ My heart started beating again. The apocalypse had passed. There was a respite.

  And with what relief – a flashing light, a pause, the hard clap – did this now near, then retreating thunder relieve us of what had been. God had ceased. My lungs breathed heavily. I realized it was stuffy in the office. I noticed that there were other people besides the office boy. They had all been silent. I heard something crisp and tremulous: it was one of the Ledger’s large and heavy pages that Moreira, checking something, had abruptly turned.

  130

  I often wonder what I would be like if, shielded from the winds of fate by the screen of wealth, I’d never been brought by the dutiful hand of my uncle to an office in Lisbon, nor risen from it to other offices, all the way up to this paltry pinnacle as a competent assistant bookkeeper, with a job that’s like a siesta and a salary that I can live on.

  I realize that if I’d had this imagined past, I wouldn’t now be able to write these pages, which are at least something, and therefore better than all the pages I would only have dreamed of writing in better circumstances. For banality is a form of intelligence, and reality – especially if stupid or crude – is a natural complement of the soul.

  My job as a bookkeeper is responsible for a large part of what I’m able to feel and think, since this occurs as a denial and evasion of that selfsame job.

  If I had to list, in the blank space of a questionnaire, the main literary influences on my intellectual development, I would immediately jot down the name of Cesário Verde,* but I would also write in the names of Senhor Vasques my boss, of Moreira the head bookkeeper, of Vieira the local sales representative, and of António the office boy. And as the crucial address of them all I would write LISBON in big letters.

  The fact is that not only Cesário Verde, but also my co-workers, have served as correction coefficients for my vision of the world. I think that’s the term (whose exact meaning I obviously don’t know) for the treatment given by engineers to mathematics so that it can be applied to life. If it is the right term, then that’s what I meant. If it isn’t, then let’s imagine it could be, the intention substituting for the failed metaphor.

  And if I think, with all the lucidity I can muster, about what my life has apparently been, I see it as a coloured thing – a chocolate wrapper or a cigar band – swept from the dirty tablecloth by the brisk brush of the housemaid (who’s listening overhead) and landing in the dustpan with the crumbs and the crusts of reality proper. It stands out from other things with a similar destiny by its privilege of getting to ride in the dustpan as well. And above the maid’s brushing the gods continue their conversation, indifferent to the affairs of the world’s servants.

  Yes, if I’d been wealthy, shielded, spruce, ornamental, I wouldn’t even have been this brief episode of pretty paper among crumbs; I would have remained on a lucky dish – ‘Thank you but no’ – and have retreated to the sideboard to grow old. This way, rejected after my useful substance has been eaten, I go to the rubbish bin with the dust of what’s left of Christ’s body, and I can’t imagine what will follow and among what stars, but something – inevitably – will follow.

  131

  Since I have nothing to do and nothing to think about doing, I’m going to describe my ideal on this sheet of paper –

  Note

  The sensibility of Mallarmé in the style of Vieira;* to dream like Verlaine in the body of Horace; to be Homer in the moonlight.

  To feel everything in every way; to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind; not to desire much except with the imagination; to suffer with haughtiness; to see clearly so as to write accurately; to know oneself through diplomacy and dissimulation; to become naturalized as a different person, with all the necessary documents; in short, to use all sensations but only on the inside, peeling them all down to God and then wrapping everything up again and putting it back in the shop window like the sales assistant I can see from here with the small tins of a new brand of shoe polish.

  All these ideals, possible or impossible, now end. Now I face reality, which isn’t even the sales assistant (whom I don’t see), only his hand, the absurd tentacle of a soul with a family and a fate, and it twists like a spider without a web while putting back tins of polish in the window.

  And one of the tins fell, like the Fate of us all.*

  132

  The more I contemplate the spectacle of the world and the ever-changing state of things, the more profoundly I’m convinced of the inherent fiction of everything, of the false importance exhibited by all realities. And in this contemplation (which has occurred to all thinking souls at one time or another), the colourful parade of customs and fas
hions, the complex path of civilizations and progress, the grandiose commotion of empires and cultures – all of this strikes me as a myth and a fiction, dreamed among shadows and ruins. But I’m not sure whether the supreme resolution of all these dead intentions – dead even when achieved – lies in the ecstatic resignation of the Buddha, who, once he understood the emptiness of things, stood up from his ecstasy saying, ‘Now I know everything’, or in the jaded indifference of the emperor Severus: ‘Omnia fui, nihil expedit – I’ve been everything, nothing’s worth the trouble.’

  133

  …the world – a dunghill of instinctive forces that nevertheless shines in the sun with pale shades of light and dark gold.

  The way I see it, plagues, storms and wars are products of the same blind force, sometimes operating through unconscious microbes, sometimes through unconscious waters and thunderbolts, and sometimes through unconscious men. For me, the difference between an earthquake and a massacre is like the difference between murdering with a knife and murdering with a dagger. The monster immanent in things, for the sake of his own good or his own evil, which are apparently indifferent to him, is equally served by the shifting of a rock on a hilltop or by the stirring of envy or greed in a heart. The rock falls and kills a man; greed or envy prompts an arm, and the arm kills a man. Such is the world – a dunghill of instinctive forces that nevertheless shines in the sun with pale shades of light and dark gold.

  To oppose the brutal indifference that constitutes the manifest essence of things, the mystics discovered it was best to renounce. To deny the world, to turn our backs on it as on a swamp at whose edge we suddenly find ourselves standing. To deny, like the Buddha, its absolute reality; to deny, like Christ, its relative reality; to deny .....