The Book of Disquiet

  THE RIVER OF POSSESSION

  That all of us are different is an axiom of our true nature.* We only look like each other from a distance – to the extent, therefore, that we are not ourselves. That’s why life is for the indefinite; the only people who get along well are those who never define themselves, those who are equally nobody.

  Each of us is two, and when two people meet, come into contact or join together, it’s rare that the four of them can agree. If the man who dreams in the man who acts is so frequently at odds with him, how can he help but be at odds with the man who acts and the man who dreams in the Other?

  Each life, because it’s life, is a distinct force, and each of us naturally tends towards himself, stopping at other people along the way. If we have enough self-respect to find ourselves interesting..... Every coming together is a conflict. The other is always an obstacle for those who seek. Only those who don’t seek are happy, because only those who don’t seek find; since they seek nothing, they already have it, and to already have – whatever it may be – is to be happy, just as not to think is the best part of being rich.

  Within me I look at you, imagined bride, and we start to clash even before you exist. My habit of dreaming things vividly gives me an accurate notion of reality. Whoever dreams to excess must give reality to his dreams. Whoever gives reality to his dreams must give them the equilibrium of reality. Whoever gives the equilibrium of reality to his dreams will suffer from the reality of dreaming as much as from the reality of life, and from the unreality of his dreams as much as from his feeling that life is unreal.

  I’m waiting for you, in a state of reverie, in our bedroom that has two doors; I dream I hear you coming, and in my dream you enter by the door on the right. If, when you actually enter, it’s by the door on the left, there will already be a difference between you and my dream. The whole of the human tragedy is summed up in this tiny example of how the people we think about are never the people we think they are.

  Love demands identification with something different, which isn’t even possible in logic, much less in real life. Love wants to possess. It wants to make into its own that which must remain outside it; otherwise the distinction between what it is in itself and what it makes into itself will be lost. Love is surrender. The greater the surrender, the greater the love. But total surrender also surrenders its consciousness of the other. The greatest love is therefore death, or forgetting, or renunciation – all forms of love that make love an absurdity.

  On the ancient terrace of the seaside palace, we will meditate in silence on the difference between us. I was the prince and you the princess, on the terrace by the sea. Our love was born in our meeting, the way beauty was born when the moon met the waves.

  Love wants to possess, but it doesn’t know what possession is. If I’m not my own, how can I be yours, or you mine? If I don’t possess my own being, how can I possess an extraneous being? If I’m even different from my own identical self, how can I be identical to a completely different self?

  Love is a mysticism that wants to be materialized, an impossibility that our dreams always insist must be possible.

  I’m talking metaphysics? But all of life is a metaphysics in the darkness, with a vague murmur of the gods and only one way to follow, which is our ignorance of the right way.

  The most insidious aspect of my decadence is my love of health and clarity. I’ve always felt that a handsome body and the carefree rhythm of a youthful stride were more useful in the world than all the dreams that exist in me. It’s with a joy of the old in spirit that I sometimes observe, without envy or desire, the casual couples that the afternoon brings together and that walk arm-in-arm towards the unconscious consciousness of youth. I enjoy them as I enjoy a truth, without considering whether it applies to me. If I compare them to myself, I still enjoy them, but as one who enjoys a truth that hurts, the pain of the hurt being compensated by the pride of having understood the gods.

  I’m the opposite of the Platonic* symbolists, for whom every being and every event is the shadow and only the shadow of a reality. Everything for me, rather than a point of arrival, is a point of departure. For the occultist everything ends in everything; for me everything begins in everything.

  I proceed, as they do, by way of analogy and suggestion, but the small garden that to them suggests the soul’s order and beauty, to me suggests merely the larger garden where, far away from humans, this unhappy life perhaps could be happy. Each thing suggests to me not the reality of which it is the shadow, but the reality for which it is the path.

  The garden of Estrela,* in late afternoon, suggests to me a park from olden times, in the centuries before the soul became disenchanted.

  SELF-EXAMINATION

  One who lives life falsely, in dreams, is still living life. Renunciation is an act. Dreaming is a confession of one’s need to live, with real life simply being replaced by unreal life, to compensate for the irrepressible urge to live.

  What does all this amount to but the search for happiness? And does anyone search for anything else?

  Have constant daydreaming and endless analysis given me anything essentially different from what life would have given me?

  Withdrawing from people didn’t help me find myself, nor.....

  This book is a single state of soul, analysed from all sides, investigated in all directions.

  Has this attitude at least brought me something new? Not even this consolation is mine. Everything was already said long ago, by Heraclitus and Ecclesiastes: Life is a child’s game in the sand… vanity and vexation of spirit… And in that single phrase of poor Job: My soul is weary of my life.

  I listen to myself dream. I lull myself with the sound of my images. Strange melodies inside me spell out .

  A phrase that resonates with images is worth so many gestures! A metaphor can make up for so many things!

  I listen to myself… Inside me there are ceremonies, cortèges… Spangles in my tedium… Masked balls… I observe my soul with astonishment…

  Kaleidoscope of fragmented sequences.....

  Splendour of intensely experienced sensations… Royal beds in deserted castles, jewels of dead princesses, sea coves seen through castle loopholes… Honour and power will doubtless come, and the happiest souls will have cortèges in their exile… Sleeping orchestras, threads embroidering silks…

  In Pascal:

  In Vigny: In you.....

  In Amiel,* so completely in Amiel:… (certain phrases)…

  In Verlaine and the symbolists:

  I feel so sick inside, and without even a little originality in my sickness… I do what countless others have done before me… I suffer what’s old and hackneyed… Why do I even think these things, when so many have already thought and suffered them?…

  And yet I have after all introduced something new, although I’m not responsible for it. It came from the Night and glows in me like a star… All of my effort couldn’t have produced it or snuffed it out… I’m a bridge between two mysteries, with no idea of how I got built.

  THE SENSATIONIST

  In this twilight of spiritual disciplines, with beliefs dying out and the old cults gathering dust, our sensations are the only reality we have left. The only scruples we have at this point, and the only science that satisfies, are those of our sensations.

  I’m more convinced than ever that inferior adornment is the highest and most enlightened destiny we can confer on our souls. If my life could be lived in tapestries of the spirit, I’d have no depths of despair to bemoan.

  I belong to a generation – or rather, to part of a generation – that lost all respect for the past and all belief or hope in the future. And so we live off the present with the hunger and eagerness of those who have no other home. And since it is in our sensations, and particularly in the useless sensations of our dreams, that we find a present which remembers neither past nor future, we smile indulgently at our inner life while yawning with disdain at the quantitative reality of things
.

  Perhaps we are not all that different from those who, in real life, think only of amusing themselves. But the sun of our egoistic concern is setting, and it’s in colours of twilight and contradiction that our hedonism is slowly cooling.

  We’re convalescents. Most of us are people who never learned an art or a trade, not even the art of enjoying life. Since we’re basically averse to prolonged social contact, even the greatest of friends tend to bore us after half an hour; we long to see them only when we think about seeing them, and the best moments we spend with them occur in our dreams. I don’t know if this is indicative of superficial friendship. Perhaps not. What I do know is that the things we love, or think we love, have their full weight and worth only when simply dreamed.

  We don’t care for shows. We despise actors and dancers. Every show is a coarse imitation of what should have been only dreamed.

  We’re indifferent to other people’s opinion – not innately, but because of an education of our sentiments that has generally been forced on us by various painful experiences. But we treat others courteously and even like them, with an indifferent sort of interest, because everyone is interesting and convertible into dreams and into other people.....

  With no aptitude for loving, we are wearied by the mere thought of the words we would have to say in order to be loved. Besides, who among us wants to be loved? The ‘on le fatigait en l’aimant’* apropos René is not quite the right motto for us. The very idea of being loved wearies us, and to the point of panic.

  My life is an unrelenting fever, an unquenchable thirst. Real life afflicts me like a hot day, and there’s something mean about the way it afflicts me.

  SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION

  For those who choose to make dreams their life, and to make a religion and politics out of cultivating sensations like plants in a hothouse, the sign that they’ve successfully taken the first step is when they feel the tiniest things in an extraordinary and extravagant way. That’s all there is to the first step. To know how to sip a cup of tea with the extreme voluptuousness that the normal man experiences only when overcome by joy at seeing his ambition suddenly fulfilled or himself suddenly cured of a terrible nostalgia, or when he’s in the final, carnal acts of love; to be able to achieve in the vision of a sunset or in the contemplation of a decorative detail that intensity of feeling which generally can’t occur through sight or hearing but only by way of the carnal senses – touch, taste and smell – when they sculpt the object of sensation on our consciousness; to be able to convert our interior vision, the hearing in our dreams, and all imagined senses and the senses of the imagination into tangible receptors like the five senses that receive the outside world: these are some of the sensations (and similar examples can be imagined) that the trained cultivator of his own feelings is able to experience with a convulsive fervour, and I mention them so as to give a rough but concrete idea of what I’m trying to convey.

  Arriving at this degree of sensation, however, causes the lover of sensations to feel griefs – both from the outside and from inside himself – with the same conscious intensity. It is when he realizes, and because he realizes, that to feel in the extreme can mean not only extreme pleasure but also acute suffering that the dreamer is led to take the second step in his self-ascension.

  I’ll leave aside the step that he might or might not take and that, if he can and does take it, will determine certain of his attitudes and affect the general way he proceeds – I mean the step of completely isolating himself from the real world, which of course he can take only if he’s rich. For I suppose it’s clear by reading between the lines that the dreamer, depending on his relative possibility of isolation and self-dedication, should with greater or lesser intensity concentrate on his work of pathologically stimulating his sensitivity to things and dreams. The man who must actively live and associate with people – and even in this case it’s possible to reduce intimacy with others to a minimum (intimacy with people, and not mere contact, is what’s detrimental) – will have to freeze the entire surface of his social self, so that every fraternal and friendly gesture he receives will slide off and not enter or make a lasting impression. This seems hard to do but isn’t. People are easy to drive away: all we have to do is not go near them. Anyway, I’ll pass over this point and return to what I was explaining.

  The creation of an automatically heightened and complex awareness of the simplest and commonest sensations leads not only to a vast increase in the enjoyment we get from feeling but also, as I’ve said, to a tremendous upsurge in the amount of pain we experience. The second step for the dreamer should therefore be to avoid pain. He shouldn’t avoid it like the Stoics or the early Epicureans, by abandoning the nest, for that will harden him against pleasure as well as against pain. He should, instead, seek pleasure in pain, and then learn how to feel pain falsely – to feel some kind of pleasure, that is, whenever he feels pain. There are various paths for reaching this goal. One is to hyperanalyse our pain (but only after we’ve first trained ourselves to react to pleasure by exclusively feeling it, with no analysis). This is an easier technique than it seems, at least for superior souls. To analyse pain and to get in the habit of submitting all pains to analysis, until we do it automatically, by instinct, will endow every pain imaginable with the pleasure of analysing it. Once our ability and instinct to analyse grow large enough, our practice of it will absorb everything, and there will be nothing left of pain but an indefinite substance for analysis.

  Another method, more subtle and more difficult, is to develop the habit of incarnating the pain in an ideal figure. First we must create another I, charged with suffering – in and for us – everything we suffer. Next we need to create an inner sadism, completely masochistic, that enjoys its suffering as if it were someone else’s. This method, which on first reading seems impossible, isn’t easy, but it is eminently attainable, presenting no special difficulties for those who are well versed in lying to themselves. Once this is achieved, pain and suffering acquire an absolutely tantalizing flavour of blood and disease, an incredibly exotic pungency of decadent gratification! The feeling of pain resembles the anguished, troubled height of convulsions, and suffering – the long and slow kind – has the intimate yellow which colours the vague bliss of a profoundly felt convalescence. And an exquisite exhaustion tinged with disquiet and melancholy evokes the complex sensation of anguish that our pleasures arouse, in the thought that they will vanish, as well as the melancholy pre-weariness we feel in our sensual delights, when we think of the weariness they’ll bring.

  There is a third method for subtilizing pains into pleasures and for making doubts and worries into a soft bed. It consists in intensely concentrating on our anxieties and sufferings, making them so fiercely felt that by their very excess they bring the pleasure of excess, while by their violence they suggest the pleasure that hurts for being so pleasurable and the gratification that smacks of blood for having wounded us. This can only happen, of course, in souls dedicated to pleasure by habit and by education. And when, as in me – refiner that I am of fallacious refinements, an architect dedicated to building myself out of sensations subtilized through the intellect, through abdication from life, through analysis and through pain itself –, all three methods are employed simultaneously, when every felt pain (felt so quickly there’s no time for the soul to plan any defence) is automatically analysed to the core, ruthlessly foisted on an extraneous I, and buried in me to the utmost height of pain, then I truly feel like a victor and a hero. Then life stops for me, and art grovels at my feet.

  Everything I’ve been describing is just the second step that the dreamer must take to reach his dream.

  Who besides me has been able to take the third step, which leads to the sumptuous threshold of the Temple? This is the step which is indeed hard to take, for it requires an inward effort vastly greater than any effort we make in life, but it also rewards us to the heights and depths of our soul in a way that life never could. This step is – once eve
rything else has been completely and simultaneously carried out, the three subtle methods having been applied to exhaustion – to immediately pass the sensation through pure intelligence, filtering it through a higher analysis that shapes it into a literary form with its own substance and character. Then I have completely fixed the sensation. Then I have made the unreal real and have given the unattainable an eternal pedestal. Then, within myself, I have been crowned Emperor.

  Don’t imagine that I write to publish, or merely to write, or to produce art. I write because this is the final goal, the supreme refinement, the organically illogical refinement, of my cultivation of the states of soul. If I take one of my sensations and unravel it so as to use it to weave the inner reality I call ‘The Forest of Estrangement’ or ‘A Voyage I Never Made’, you can be sure I don’t do it for the sake of a lucid and shimmering prose, nor even for the sake of the pleasure I get from that prose – though I’m quite glad to have it as an additional final touch, like a splendidly falling curtain over my dreamed stage settings – but to give complete exteriority to what is interior, thereby enabling me to realize the unrealizable, to conjoin the contradictory and, having exteriorized my dream, to give it its most powerful expression as pure dream. Yes, this is my role as a stagnator of life, chiseller of inaccuracies, sick pageboy of my soul and Queen, reading to her at twilight not the poems from the book of my Life that lies open on my knees, but the poems that I invent and pretend to read, and that she pretends to hear, while somewhere and somehow the Evening is softening – over this metaphor raised up in me into Absolute Reality – the last hazy light of a mysterious spiritual day.