The Book of Disquiet

  301

  The only way you can have new sensations is by forging a new soul. It’s useless to try to feel new things without feeling them in a new way, and you can’t feel in a new way without changing your soul. For things are what we feel they are – how long have you known this without yet knowing it? – and the only way for there to be new things, for us to feel new things, is for there to be some novelty in how we feel them.

  Change your soul. How? That’s for you to figure out.

  From the time we’re born until we die, our soul slowly changes, like the body. Find a way to make it change faster, even as our body changes more rapidly when suffering or recovering from certain diseases.

  We should never stoop down to delivering lectures, lest anyone think we have opinions or would condescend to speak with the public. Let the public read us, if they wish.

  The lecturer, moreover, resembles an actor – an errand boy of Art, a figure despised by any good artist.

  302

  I’ve discovered that I’m always attentive to, and always thinking about, two things at the same time. I suppose everyone is a bit like that. Certain impressions are so vague that only later, because we remember them, do we even realize we had them. I believe these impressions form a part – perhaps the internal part – of the dual attention we all possess. In my case the two realities that hold my attention are equally vivid. This is what constitutes my originality. This, perhaps, is what constitutes my tragedy, and what makes it comic.

  Hunched over the ledger, I attentively record the entries that tell the useless history of an obscure firm, while at the same time and with equal attention my thoughts follow the route of a non-existent ship past landscapes of an unreal Orient. For me the two things are equally visible and equally distinct: the ruled pages on which I carefully write the commercial epic of Vasques & Co., and the deck where I carefully observe – beyond the ruled pattern of the floorboards’ tarred joints – the rows of lounge chairs and the stretched legs of passengers relaxing on the voyage. (If I were run over by a child’s bicycle, the child’s bicycle would become part of my history.) The smoking room blocks the view; that’s why only their legs can be seen.

  As I dip my pen in the inkwell, the door of the smoking room opens up – almost right next to where I feel I am – to reveal the face of the stranger. He turns his back to me and walks towards the others. His gait is slow and his hips don’t tell much. He’s English. I begin another entry. I try to figure out where I was going wrong. The Marques account should be debited rather than credited. (I see him as a chubby and affable jokester, and suddenly the ship disappears.)

  303

  The world belongs to those who don’t feel. The essential condition for being a practical man is the absence of sensibility. The chief requisite for the practical expression of life is will, since this leads to action. Two things can thwart action – sensibility and analytic thought, the latter of which is just thought with sensibility. All action is by nature the projection of our personality on to the external world, and since the external world is largely and firstly made up of human beings, it follows that this projection of personality is basically a matter of crossing other people’s path, of hindering, hurting or overpowering them, depending on the form our action takes.

  To act, then, requires a certain incapacity for imagining the personalities of others, their joys and sufferings. Sympathy leads to paralysis. The man of action regards the external world as composed exclusively of inert matter – either intrinsically inert, like a stone he walks on or kicks out of his path, or inert like a human being who couldn’t resist him and thus might as well be a stone as a man since, like a stone, he was walked on or kicked out of the way.

  The best example of the practical man is the military strategist, in whom extreme concentration of action is joined to its extreme importance. All life is war, and the battle is life’s synthesis. The strategist is a man who plays with lives like the chess player with chess pieces. What would become of the strategist if he thought about how each of his moves brings night to a thousand homes and grief to three thousand hearts? What would become of the world if we were human? If man really felt, there would be no civilization. Art gives shelter to the sensibility that action was obliged to forget. Art is Cinderella, who stayed at home because that’s how it had to be.

  Every man of action is basically cheerful and optimistic, because those who don’t feel are happy. You can spot a man of action by the fact he’s never out of sorts. A man who works in spite of being out of sorts is an auxiliary to action. He can be a bookkeeper, as it were, in the vast general scheme of life, as I happen to be in my own particular life, but he cannot be a ruler over things or men. Rulership requires insensibility. Whoever governs is happy, since to be sad one has to feel.

  Today my boss, Senhor Vasques, closed a deal that brought a sick man and his family to ruin. As he negotiated the deal he completely forgot that this man existed, except as the opposing commercial party. After the deal was closed, he was touched by sensibility. Only afterwards, of course, since otherwise the deal would never have been made. ‘I feel sorry for the fellow,’ he told me. ‘He’s going to wind up being destitute.’ Then, lighting up a cigar, he added: ‘Well, if he needs anything from me’ – meaning some kind of charity – ‘I won’t forget that I have him to thank for a good business deal and a few thousand escudos.’

  Senhor Vasques isn’t a crook; he’s a man of action. The loser in this game can indeed count on my boss’s charity in the future, for he’s a generous man.

  Senhor Vasques is like all men of action, be they business leaders, industrialists, politicians, military commanders, social and religious idealists, great poets, great artists, beautiful women, or children who do what they please. The one who ordains is the one who doesn’t feel. The one who succeeds is the one who thinks only of what is needed for success. The remaining general lot of humanity – amorphous, sensitive, imaginative and fragile – is no more than the backdrop against which these stage actors perform until the puppet show ends, no more than the flat and lifeless chess board over which the pieces move until they’re put away by the Great Player, who, fooling himself with a double personality, plays against his own person* and is always entertained.

  304

  Faith is the instinct of action.

  305

  My vital habit of disbelieving everything (especially instinctive things) and my natural inclination to insincerity neutralize all obstacles to the constant application of my method.

  What I basically do is convert other people into my dreams. I take up their opinions, which I develop through my reason and intuition in order to make them my own (having no opinions, I can adopt theirs as well as any others) and to conform them to my taste, turning their personalities into things that have an affinity with my dreams.

  I’ve so favoured dreaming over real life that I’m able, in my verbal encounters (the only kind I have), to keep on dreaming and to keep following, through the opinions and feelings of others, the fluid course of my own amorphous personality.

  Other people are channels or conduits in which the ocean’s water flows according to their fancy, and the shimmering of that water in the sunlight defines their curved path much better than their empty dryness could do.

  Although it sometimes seems to my hasty analysis that I’m the parasite of others, what really occurs is that I force them to be parasites of my subsequent emotion. My life inhabits the shells of their personalities. I reproduce their footsteps in my spirit’s clay, absorbing them so thoroughly into my consciousness that I, in the end, have taken their steps and walked in their paths even more than they.

  Due to my habit of dividing myself, following two distinct mental operations at the same time, it’s generally the case that as I lucidly and intensely adapt myself to what others are feeling, I simultaneously undertake a rigorously objective analysis of their unknown self, what they think and are. And thus in my dreaming, without ever interrupting
my reverie, I not only live the distilled essence of their sometimes dead emotions, I also discover and classify the intricate links between their various intellectual and spiritual energies, which were often lying dormant in their soul.

  Nor, while all this is going on, do their physiognomies and dress and gestures escape my notice. I live their dreams, their instinctive nature, and their body and its postures all at the same time. In a sweeping, unified dispersion, I ubiquitize* myself in them, and at each moment of our conversation I create, and am, a multitude of selves – conscious and unconscious, analysed and analytical – joined together as in a spread fan.

  306

  I belong to a generation that inherited disbelief in the Christian faith and created in itself a disbelief in all other faiths. Our fathers still had the believing impulse, which they transferred from Christianity to other forms of illusion. Some were champions of social equality, others were wholly enamoured of beauty, still others had faith in science and its achievements, and there were some who became even more Christian, resorting to various Easts and Wests in search of new religious forms to entertain their otherwise hollow consciousness of merely living.

  We lost all of this. We were born with none of these consolations. Each civilization follows the particular path of a religion that represents it; turning to other religions, it loses the one it had, and ultimately loses them all.

  We lost the one, and all the others with it.

  And so we were left, each man to himself, in the desolation of feeling ourselves live. A ship may seem to be an object whose purpose is to sail, but no, its purpose is to reach a port. We found ourselves sailing without any idea of what port we were supposed to reach. Thus we reproduced a painful version of the argonauts’ adventurous precept:* living doesn’t matter, only sailing does.

  Without illusions, we live by dreaming, which is the illusion of those who can’t have illusions. Living off our inner selves has diminished us, for the complete man is the one who doesn’t know himself. Without faith, we have no hope, and without hope we have no real life. Having no idea of the future, we likewise have no idea of today, because today, for the man of action, is nothing but a prologue to the future. The energy to fight was stillborn in us, for we were born without the fighting spirit.

  Some of us stagnated in the idiotic conquest of the ordinary, contemptibly seeking our daily bread without ever sweating for it, without making a conscious effort, without the nobility of achievement.

  Others of us, more high-minded, spurned state and society, wanting and desiring nothing, and trying to take to the calvary of oblivion the cross of simply existing – an impossible endeavour for whoever doesn’t have, like the bearer of the Cross, the consciousness of a divine origin.

  Still others, busy on the outside of the soul, devoted themselves to the cult of noise and confusion, thinking they were living whenever they heard themselves, and supposing they loved whenever they brushed love’s outward forms. Living was painful because we knew we were alive; dying didn’t scare us, for we had lost the normal notion of what death is.

  But those who formed the Terminal Race, the spiritual limit of the Deadly Hour, didn’t even have courage enough for true denial and asylum. What we lived was in denial, discontent and disconsolation, but we lived it within, without moving, forever closed (at least in the way we lived) inside the four painted walls of our room and the four stone walls of our inability to act.

  307

  AESTHETICS OF DISCOURAGEMENT

  Since we can’t extract beauty from life, let’s at least try to extract beauty from not being able to extract beauty from life. Let’s make our failure into a victory, into something positive and lofty, endowed with columns, majesty and our mind’s consent.

  If life has given us no more than a prison cell, let’s at least decorate it as best we can – with the shadows of our dreams, their colourful patterns engraving our oblivion on the static surface of the walls.

  Like every dreamer, I’ve always felt that my calling was to create. Since I’ve never been able to make an effort or carry out an intention, creation for me has always meant dreaming, wanting or desiring, and action has meant dreaming of the acts I wish I could perform.

  308

  I called my incapacity for living genius, and I dressed up my cowardice by calling it refinement. I placed myself – God gilded with false gold – on an altar of cardboard painted to look like marble.

  But I didn’t succeed in fooling myself, nor […] my self-delusion.

  309

  The pleasure of praising ourselves…

  RAINY LANDSCAPE

  It smells to me of coldness, of regret, of the hopelessness of every road and of every ideal ever dreamed up.

  Women today take so much care with how they look and move that they give the excruciating impression of being ephemeral and irreplaceable.

  Their and embellishments so paint and colour them that they become more decorative than carnally alive. Friezes, pictures, paintings – that’s all they amount to, visually speaking.

  The mere gesture of wrapping a shawl around their shoulders is done with a greater awareness of its visual effect than ever before. The shawl used to be part of a woman’s basic attire; now it’s an optional feature, depending solely on notions of aesthetic taste.

  In these colourful times when almost nothing escapes being turned into art, everything plucks petals from the conscious sphere and merges into flights of fancy.

  These female figures are all like fugitives from pictures that were never painted. Some of them are too full of details… Certain profiles stand out too sharply, as if they were trying to look unreal, so detached are their pure lines from the background.

  310

  My soul is a secret orchestra, but I don’t know what instruments – strings, harps, cymbals, drums – strum and bang inside me. I only know myself as the symphony.

  Every effort is a crime, because every gesture is a dead dream.

  Your hands are captive doves. Your lips are silent doves (that come to coo before my eyes).

  All of your gestures are birds. You’re a swallow when you stoop, a condor when you look at me, and an eagle in your disdainful lady’s ecstasies. I look at you and see a pond full of flapping wings .....

  You are nothing but wings .....

  Rain, rain, rain…

  Groaning, unrelenting rain .....

  My body makes even my soul shiver, not with a coldness that’s in the air, but with a coldness that comes from watching the rain.

  Every pleasure is a vice, because to seek pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the only black vice is to do what everyone else does.

  311

  Sometimes, without expecting it and with no reason to expect it, the oppressiveness of common life makes me gag, and I feel physically nauseated by the voice and gestures of my so-called fellow man. It’s an instant physical nausea, automatically felt in my stomach and head, an impressive but stupid consequence of my alert sensibility. Everyone who talks to me, each face whose eyes gaze at me, hits me like an insult or a piece of filth. I brim with disgust at the whole lot. I get dizzy from feeling myself feel them.

  And in these moments of abdominal distress, there’s nearly always a man, a woman or even a child that stands before me as a live representative of the banality that torments me. Not a representative according to my subjective, pondered emotion but by an objective truth, outwardly corresponding to what I inwardly feel and appearing to me by analogical magic as the perfect example for the rule I conceive.

  312

  There are days when everyone I meet, and especially the people I’m forced to have daily contact with, appear as symbols, and individually or together they form a prophetic or occult writing that obscurely describes my life. The office becomes a page with people for its words; the street is a book; the words I exchange with familiar or unfamiliar faces are phrases for which I have no dictionary, though I have an idea of what they mean. They speak, they tell, b
ut it’s not of themselves that they speak or tell; they’re words, as I’ve said, that don’t disclose their meaning, but they allow glimpses. In my twilight vision I only vaguely distinguish what these sudden glass panes on the surfaces of things let show from the interior that they veil and reveal. I understand without knowledge, like a blind man when someone tells him about colours.

  Walking along the street, I often hear snatches of private conversations, and they’re almost all about another woman, another man, a friend’s boyfriend or someone else’s girlfriend .....

  Just to hear these shadows of human speech (which is all that occupies most conscious lives) fills me with a sickening tedium, an anguished feeling of being exiled among spiders, and a sudden awareness of my humiliation among real people, condemned to being looked upon by the landlord and the whole neighbourhood as a tenant just like everyone else on the block. And it’s with loathing that I peer through the bars of the storeroom’s back windows, seeing everybody’s rubbish heaped up in the rain in the grimy courtyard which is my life.

  313

  I loathe the happiness of all these people who don’t know they’re unhappy. Their human life is full of what, in a true sensibility, would produce a surfeit of anxieties. But since their true life is vegetative, their sufferings come and go without touching their soul, and they live a life that can be compared only to that of a man with a toothache who won a fortune – the genuine good fortune of living unawares, the greatest gift granted by the gods, for it is the gift of being like them, superior just as they are (albeit in a different fashion) to happiness and pain.