The Book of Disquiet

  Abstract things are hard to understand, because they don’t easily command the reader’s attention, so I’ll use a simple example to make my abstractions concrete. Let’s suppose that, for some reason or other (which might be that I’m tired of keeping the books or bored because I have nothing to do), I’m overwhelmed by a vague sadness about life, an inner anxiety that makes me nervous and uneasy. If I try to translate this emotion with close-fitting words, then the closer the fit, the more they’ll represent my own personal feeling, and so the less they’ll communicate it to others. And if there is no communicating it to others, it would be wiser and simpler to feel it without writing it.

  But let’s suppose that I want to communicate it to others – to make it into art, that is, since art is the communication to others of the identity we feel with them, without which there would be no communication and no need for it. I search for the ordinary human emotion that will have the colouring, spirit and shape of the emotion I’m feeling right now for the inhuman, personal reason of being a weary bookkeeper or a bored Lisboan. And I conclude that the ordinary emotion which in ordinary souls has the same characteristics as my emotion is nostalgia for one’s lost childhood.

  Now I have the key to the door of my theme. I write and weep about my lost childhood, going into poignant detail about the people and furniture of our old house in the country. I recall the joy of having no rights or responsibilities, of being free because I still didn’t know how to think or feel – and this recollection, if it’s well written and visually effective, will arouse in my reader exactly the same emotion I was feeling, which had nothing to do with childhood.

  I’ve lied? No, I’ve understood. That lying, except for the childish and spontaneous kind that comes from wanting to be dreaming, is merely the recognition of other people’s real existence and of the need to conform that existence to our own, which cannot be conformed to theirs. Lying is simply the soul’s ideal language. Just as we make use of words, which are sounds articulated in an absurd way, to translate into real language the most private and subtle shifts of our thoughts and emotions (which words on their own would never be able to translate), so we make use of lies and fiction to promote understanding among ourselves, something that the truth – personal and incommunicable – could never accomplish.

  Art lies because it is social. And there are two great forms of art: one that speaks to our deepest soul, the other to our attentive soul. The first is poetry, the second is the novel. The first begins to lie in its very structure; the second in its very intention. One purports to give us the truth through lines that keep strict metres, thus lying against the nature of speech; the other purports to give us the truth by means of a reality that we all know never existed.

  To feign is to love. Whenever I see a pretty smile or a meaningful gaze, no matter whom the smile or gaze belongs to, I always plumb to the soul of the smiling or gazing face to discover what politician wants to buy our vote or what prostitute wants us to buy her. But the politician that buys us loved at least the act of buying us, even as the prostitute loved being bought by us. Like it or not, we cannot escape universal brotherhood. We all love each other, and the lie is the kiss we exchange.

  261

  In me all affections take place on the surface, but sincerely. I’ve always been an actor, and in earnest. Whenever I’ve loved, I’ve pretended to love, pretending it even to myself.

  262

  Today I was struck by an absurd but valid sensation. I realized, in an inner flash, that I’m no one. Absolutely no one. In that flash, what I’d supposed was a city proved to be a barren plain, and the sinister light that showed me myself revealed no sky above. Before the world existed, I was deprived of the power to be. If I was reincarnated, it was without myself, without my I.

  I’m the suburbs of a non-existent town, the long-winded commentary on a book never written. I’m no one, no one at all. I don’t know how to feel, how to think, how to want. I’m the character of an unwritten novel, wafting in the air, dispersed without ever having been, among the dreams of someone who didn’t know how to complete me.

  I always think, I always feel, but there’s no logic in my thought, no emotions in my emotion. I’m falling from the trapdoor on high through all of infinite space in an aimless, infinitudinous,* empty descent. My soul is a black whirlpool, a vast vertigo circling a void, the racing of an infinite ocean around a hole in nothing. And in these waters which are more a churning than actual waters float the images of all I’ve seen and heard in the world – houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and syllables of voices all moving in a sinister and bottomless swirl.

  And amid all this confusion I, what’s truly I, am the centre that exists only in the geometry of the abyss: I’m the nothing around which everything spins, existing only so that it can spin, being a centre only because every circle has one. I, what’s truly I, am a well without walls but with the walls’ viscosity, the centre of everything with nothing around it.

  It’s not demons (who at least have a human face) but hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it’s the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything.

  If only I knew how to think! If only I knew how to feel!

  My mother died too soon for me to ever know her…

  263

  As prone as I am to tedium, it’s odd that until now I’ve never seriously thought about just what it is. Today my soul is in that state of limbo where neither life nor anything else really appeals, and I’ve decided, since I’ve never done it before, to analyse tedium through my impressionistic thoughts, even though whatever analysis I dream up will naturally be somewhat factitious.

  I don’t know if tedium is merely the waking equivalent of a vagrant’s drowsy stupor, or if it is something more noble. In my own experience, tedium occurs frequently but unpredictably, without following a set pattern. I can go an entire listless Sunday without tedium, or I can suddenly experience it, like a cloud overhead, in the middle of concentrated labour. As far as I can tell, it isn’t related to my state of health (or lack thereof), nor does it result from causes residing in my visible, tangible self.

  To say that it’s a metaphysical anxiety in disguise, that it’s an acute disillusion incognito, that it’s a voiceless poetry of the bored soul sitting at the window which looks out on to life – to say this or something similar can colour tedium, like a child who colours over the outlines of a figure and effaces them, but it’s no more to me than a din of words echoing in the cellar of the mind.

  Tedium… To think without thinking, but with the weariness of thinking; to feel without feeling, but with the anxiety of feeling; to shun without shunning, but with the disgust that makes one shun – all of this is in tedium but is not tedium itself, being at best a paraphrase or translation of it. In terms of our immediate sensation, it’s as if the drawbridge had been raised over the moat of the soul’s castle, such that we can only gaze at the lands around the castle, without ever being able to set foot on them. There’s something in us that isolates us from ourselves, and the separating element is as stagnant as we are, a ditch of filthy water around our self-alienation.

  Tedium… To suffer without suffering, to want without desire, to think without reason… It’s like being possessed by a negative demon, like being bewitched by nothing at all. Wizards and witches, by making images of us and subjecting them to torments, can supposedly cause those torments to be reflected in us through an astral transference. Transposing this image, I would say that my tedium is like the fiendish reflection of an elfin demon’s sorceries, applied not to my image but to its shadow. It’s on my internal shadow, on the outside of my inner soul, that papers are pasted or needles are poked. I’m like the man that sold his shadow,* or, rather, like the shadow that was sold.
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  Tedium… I work hard. I fulfil what the moralists of action would say is my social duty. I fulfil that duty, or fate, without too much effort and without gross incompetence. But sometimes right in the middle of my work, or in the middle of the rest which, according to the same moralists, I deserve and ought to enjoy, my soul overflows with a bitter inertia, and I’m tired, not of working or of resting, but of me.

  Why of me, if I wasn’t thinking about myself? Of what other thing, if I wasn’t thinking about anything? The mystery of the universe that descends on my bookkeeping or on my repose? The universal sorrow of living which is suddenly particularized in my soul-turned-medium? Why so ennoble someone whose identity isn’t even certain? It’s a sensation of emptiness, a hunger without appetite, as noble as the sensations that come to our physical brain and stomach when we smoke too much or suffer from indigestion.

  Tedium… Perhaps, deep down, it is the soul’s dissatisfaction because we didn’t give it a belief, the disappointment of the sad child (who we are on the inside) because we didn’t buy it the divine toy. Perhaps it is the insecurity of one who needs a guiding hand and who doesn’t feel, on the black path of profound sensation, anything more than the soundless night of not being able to think, the empty road of not being able to feel…

  Tedium… Those who have Gods don’t have tedium. Tedium is the lack of a mythology. For people without beliefs, even doubt is impossible, even their scepticism will lack the strength to question. Yes, tedium is the loss of the soul’s capacity for self-delusion; it is the mind’s lack of the non-existent ladder by which it might firmly ascend to truth.

  264

  I know, by analogy, what it means to overeat. I know it through my sensations, not my stomach. There are days when they’ve eaten too much, and my body gets heavy, my gestures are clumsy, and I don’t feel like moving a muscle.

  On these occasions, like a thorn in the side, a vestige of my vanished imagination nearly always emerges from out of my undisturbed torpor. And I make plans founded on ignorance, I raise edifices based on hypotheses, and I’m dazzled by what’s bound to never happen.

  At these strange times, my moral as well as material life are mere appendages to who I am. I forget not only about the notion of duty but also about the idea of being, and I feel physically tired of the whole universe. I sleep what I know and what I dream with an equal intensity that makes my eyes sore. Yes, at these times I know more about myself than I’ve ever known, and I’m every snooze of every beggar lying under the trees on the estate of Nobody.

  265

  The idea of travelling seduces me vicariously, as if it were the perfect idea for seducing someone I’m not. All the world’s vast panorama traverses my alert imagination like a colourful tedium; I trace a desire as one who’s tired of making gestures, and the anticipated weariness of potential landscapes scourges the flower of my drooping heart like a harsh wind.

  And as with journeys, so with books, and as with books, so with everything… I dream of an erudite life in the quiet company of the ancients and the moderns, a life in which I would renew my emotions via the emotions of others, and fill myself with contradictory thoughts based on the contradiction between the meditators and those who almost thought (and who are the majority of writers). But the very idea of reading vanishes as soon as I pick up a book from the table, the physical act of reading abolishing all desire to read. In the same way, the idea of travelling withers if I happen to go near a platform or port of departure. And I return to the two worthless things that I (likewise worthless) am certain of: my daily life as an inconspicuous passer-by, and the waking insomnia of my dreams.

  And as with books, so with everything… As soon as something occurs to me that might interrupt the silent procession of my days, I lift my eyes with heavy protest towards the sylph who belongs to me and who, poor thing, might have been a siren had she only learned to sing.

  266

  When I first came to Lisbon I used to hear, from the apartment above ours, the sound of scales played on a piano, the monotonous practising of a girl I never actually saw. Today I realize that in the cellar of my soul, by some mysterious process of infiltration, those scales persist, audible if the door below is opened, played over and over by the girl who is now someone else, a grown woman, or dead and enclosed in a white place where verdant cypresses blackly wave.

  I’m no longer the child I was back then, but the sound of the playing is the same in my memory as it was in reality, so that whenever it gets up from where it pretends to be sleeping, it has the same slow finger work, the same rhythmic monotony. When I feel or think about it, I’m overwhelmed by a vague and anxious sadness that’s my own.

  I don’t mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost. It’s not the concrete passing of my own days but the abstract flight of time that torments my physical brain with the relentless repetition of the piano scales from upstairs, terribly anonymous and far away. It’s the huge mystery of nothing lasting which incessantly hammers things that aren’t really music, just nostalgia, in the absurd depths of my memory.

  I summon up, insensibly, the vision of the sitting room that I never saw, where the pupil I never met is still playing today, finger by careful finger, the forever identical scales of what’s already dead. I see, I see more and more, I reconstruct by seeing. And the entire household of the upstairs apartment, for which today I feel a nostalgia I didn’t feel yesterday, is fictitiously constructed by my uncertain contemplation.

  I suspect, however, that all of this is vicarious, that the nostalgia I feel isn’t truly mine or truly abstract but is the emotion intercepted from an unidentified third party, for whom these emotions, which in me are literary, are – as Vieira* would say – literal. Conjectured feelings are what grieve and torment me, and the nostalgia that makes my eyes well with tears is conceived and felt through imagination and projection.

  And with a relentlessness that comes from the world’s depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a piano student keep playing over and over, up and down the physical backbone of my memory. It’s the old streets with other people, the same streets that today are different; it’s dead people speaking to me through the transparency of their absence; it’s remorse for what I did or didn’t do; it’s the rippling of streams in the night, noises from below in the quiet building.

  I feel like screaming inside my head. I want to stop, to break, to smash this impossible phonograph record that keeps playing inside me, where it doesn’t belong, an intangible torturer. I want my soul, a vehicle taken over by others, to let me off and go on without me. I’m going crazy from having to hear. And in the end it is I – in my odiously impressionable brain, in my thin skin, in my hypersensitive nerves – who am the keys played in scales, O horrible and personal piano of our memory.

  And always, always, as if in a part of my brain that had become autonomous, the scales play, play, play, below me and above me, in the first building I lived in when I came to Lisbon.

  267

  It’s the last death of Captain Nemo. Soon I too will die.

  All of my childhood was deprived, in that moment, of any possibility of enduring.

  268

  Smell is a strange way of seeing. It evokes sentimental scenes, sketched all of a sudden by the subconscious. I’ve often experienced this. I’m walking down a street. I see nothing, or rather, I look all around and see the way everyone sees. I know I’m walking down a street and don’t know that it exists with two sides comprised of variously shaped buildings made by human hands. I’m walking down a street. The smell of bread from a bakery nauseates me with its sweetness, and my childhood rises up from a distant neighbourhood, and another bakery emerges from that fairyland which is everything we ever had that has died. I’m walking down a street. Suddenly I smell the fruit on the slanted rack of the small grocery, and my short life in the country – I can’t say from when or where – has trees in the background a
nd peace in what can only be my childhood heart. I’m walking down a street. I’m unexpectedly thrown off balance by the smell of crates from the crate-maker’s: my dear Cesário!* You appear before me and at last I’m happy, for I’ve returned by way of memory to the only truth, which is literature.

  269

  One of my life’s greatest tragedies is to have already read The Pickwick Papers. (I can’t go back and read them for the first time.)

  270

  Art frees us, illusorily, from the squalor of being. While feeling the wrongs and sufferings endured by Hamlet, prince of Denmark, we don’t feel our own, which are vile because they’re ours and vile because they’re vile.

  Love, sleep, drugs and intoxicants are elementary forms of art, or rather, of producing the same effect as art. But love, sleep and drugs all have their disillusion. Love wearies or disappoints. We wake up from sleep, and while sleeping we haven’t lived. And we pay for drugs with the ruin of the very body they served to stimulate. But in art there is no disillusion, since illusion is accepted from the start. There’s no waking up from art, because we dream but don’t sleep in it. Nor do we pay a tax or penalty for having enjoyed art.