The Book of Disquiet (14 page)

The Tagus in the background is a blue lake, and the hills of the far shore are a flattened Switzerland. A small ship – a black cargo steamer – departs from Poço do Bispo* in the direction of the estuary, which I can’t see. May the Gods all preserve for me (until my present form ceases) this clear and sunlit view of external reality, the instinctive awareness of my unimportance, the cosiness of being small, and the solace of being able to imagine myself happy.

On arriving at the solitary summits of natural elevations, we experience a feeling of privilege; with our own added height, we’re higher than the summits themselves. Nature’s utmost, at least in that place, is beneath our own two feet. Our position makes us kings of the visible world. Everything around us is lower: life is a descending slope or a low-lying plain next to the elevation and pinnacle we’ve become.

Everything we are is due to chance and trickery, and this height we boast isn’t ours; we’re no taller on the summit than our normal height. The hill on which we tread elevates us; it’s the height we’re at that makes us higher.

A rich man breathes easier; a famous man is freer; a title of nobility is itself a small hill. Everything is artifice, but not even the artifice is ours. We climb it, or were brought to it, or we were born in the house on the hill.

Great, however, is the man who realizes that the difference in distance from the valley to the sky and from the hill to the sky makes no difference. Should the flood waters rise, we’re better off in the hills. But when God curses us as Jupiter, with lightning bolts, or as Aeolus, with high winds, then the best cover will be to have remained in the valley, and the best defence to lie low.

Wise is the man who has the potential for height in his muscles but who renounces climbing in his consciousness. By virtue of his gaze, he has all hills, and by virtue of his position, all valleys. The sun that gilds the summits will gild them more for him than for someone at the top who must endure the bright light; and the palace perched high in the woods will be more beautiful for those who see it from the valley than for those who, imprisoned in its rooms, forget it.

I take comfort in these reflections, since I can’t take comfort in life. And the symbol merges with reality when, as a transient body and soul in these low-lying streets that lead to the Tagus, I see the luminous heights of the city glowing, like a glory from beyond, with the various lights of a sun that has already set.

The blue of the sky showing between the still clouds was smudged with transparent white.

The boy at the back of the office suspended for a moment the cord going round the eternal package.

‘I can only remember one other like this,’ he statistically remarked.

A cold silence. The sounds from the street seemed to be cut by a knife. Then there was a long, cosmically held breath, a kind of generalized dread. The entire universe had stopped dead. Moments, moments, moments… Silence blackened the darkness.

All of a sudden, live steel .....

How human the metallic peal of the trams! How happy the landscape of simple rain falling on the street resurrected from the chasm!

Oh Lisbon, my home!

I don’t need fast cars or express trains to feel the delight and terror of speed. All I require is a tram and my gift for abstraction, which I’ve developed to an astonishing degree.

On a tram in motion I’m able, through my constant and instantaneous analysis, to separate the idea of the tram from the idea of speed, separating them so completely that they’re distinct things-inreality. Then I can feel myself riding not inside the tram but inside its Mere Speed. And should I get bored and want the delirium of excessive speed, I can transfer the idea to the Pure Imitation of Speed, increasing or decreasing it at will, extending it beyond the fastest possible speeds of trains.

I abhor running real risks, but it’s not because I’m afraid of feeling too intensely. It’s because they break my perfect focus on my sensations, and this disturbs and depersonalizes me.

I never go where there’s risk. I fear the tedium of dangers.

A sunset is an intellectual phenomenon.

I sometimes enjoy (in split fashion) thinking about the possibility of a future geography of our self-awareness. I believe that the future historian of his own sensations may be able to make a precise science out of the attitude he takes towards his self-awareness. We’re only in the beginnings of this difficult art – at this point just an art: the chemistry of sensations in its as yet alchemical stage. This scientist of tomorrow will pay special attention to his own inner life, subjecting it to analysis with a precision instrument created out of himself. I see no inherent obstacle to making, out of steels and bronzes of thought, a precision instrument for self-analysis. I mean steels and bronzes that are really steels and bronzes, but of the mind. Perhaps that’s the only way it can be made. Perhaps it will be necessary to formulate the idea of a precision instrument, concretely visualizing it, in order to undertake a rigorous inner analysis. And it will surely be necessary to reduce the mind to some kind of real matter with a space for it to exist in. All of this depends on an extreme refinement of our inner sensations, which, when taken as far as they can go, will doubtless reveal or create in us a space just as real as the space that’s occupied by material things and that, come to think of it, has no reality.

For all I know, this inner space may just be a new dimension of the other one. Perhaps scientific research will eventually discover that everything is dimensions of the same space, which is neither physical nor spiritual, so that in one dimension we live as bodies, and in another as souls. And perhaps there are other dimensions where we live other, equally real facets of ourselves. Sometimes I enjoy getting lost in the useless meditation of just how far this research might take us.

Perhaps it will be discovered that what we call God, so obviously on a plane beyond logic and space-time reality, is one of our modes of existence, a sensation of ourselves in another dimension of being.
This seems to me perfectly possible. Perhaps dreams are yet another dimension in which we live, or perhaps they’re a cross between two dimensions. As our body lives in length, in breadth and in height, it may be that our dreams live in the ideal, in the ego and in space – in space through their visible representation, in the ideal through their non-material essence, and in the ego through their personal dimension as something intimately ours. The ego itself, the I in each one of us, is perhaps a divine dimension. All of this is complex and will no doubt be determined in its time. Today’s dreamers are perhaps the great precursors of the ultimate science of the future. Of course I don’t believe in an ultimate science of the future, but that’s beside the point.

I periodically formulate metaphysics such as these, with the serious concentration of someone who’s truly at work to forge science. And it’s possible I may actually be forging it. I have to be careful not to take too much pride in this, since pride can undermine the strict impartiality of scientific objectivity.

There’s no pastime like the use of science, or things that smack of science, for futile ends, and so I often pass the time by intently studying my psyche as others see it. The pleasure I get from this sterile artifice is sometimes sad, sometimes painful.

I carefully study the overall impression I make on others, from which I then draw conclusions. I’m a fellow most people like, and they even have a vague and curious respect for me. But I don’t arouse ardent emotions. No one will ever passionately be my friend. That’s why so many are able to respect me.

Certain sensations are slumbers that fill up our mind like a fog and prevent us from thinking, from acting, from clearly and simply being. As if we hadn’t slept, something of our undreamed dreams lingers in us, and the torpor of the new day’s sun warms the stagnant surface of our senses. We’re drunk on not being anything, and our will is a bucket poured out on to the yard by the listless movement of a passing foot.

We look but don’t see. The long street bustling with clothed animals is like a flat-lying signboard whose letters move around and make no sense. The buildings are just buildings. We’re no longer able to give meaning to what we see, though we see perfectly well what’s there.

The banging of the crate-maker’s hammer reverberates close by, yet remotely. Each blow makes a distinctly separate sound, with an echo and without any point. The wagons creak as they do on days when storms threaten. Voices emerge from the air, not from throats. The river in the background is tired.

It’s not tedium that we feel. Nor is it grief. It’s a desire to sleep with another personality, to be able to forget everything with a pay increase. We feel nothing, unless maybe an automatism down below, which makes the legs we possess strike the feet inside our shoes against the ground, in the oblivious act of walking. Perhaps we don’t even feel that. There’s a squeezing in our head around the eyes, and as if fingers were plugging our ears.

It’s like a head-cold of the soul. And this literary image of being sick makes us wish that life were a convalescence, obliging us to stay off our feet. And the idea of convalescence makes us think of villas on the outskirts of town – not the gardens that surround them but their cosy interiors, far from the road and the turning wheels. No, we don’t feel anything. We consciously pass through the door we have to enter, and the fact we have to enter it is enough to put us to sleep. We pass through everything. Where’s your tambourine, O bear that just stands there?

Faint, like something just beginning, the low-tide smell wafted over the Tagus and putridly spread over the streets near the shore. The stench was crisply nauseating, with a cold torpor of lukewarm sea. I felt life in my stomach, and my sense of smell shifted to behind my eyes. Tall, sparse bundles of clouds alighted on nothing, their greyness disintegrating into a pseudo-white. A cowardly sky threatened the atmosphere, as if with inaudible thunder, made only of air.

There was even stagnation in the flight of the gulls; they seemed to be lighter than air, left there by someone. Nothing oppressed. The late afternoon disquiet was my own; a cool breeze intermittently blew.

My ill-starred hopes, born of the life I’ve been forced to live! They’re like this hour and this air, fogless fogs, unravelled basting of a false storm. I feel like screaming, to put an end to this landscape and my meditation. But the stench of ocean imbues my intent, and the low tide inside me has exposed the sludgy blackness that’s somewhere out there, though I can see it only by its smell.

All this stupid insistence on being self-sufficient! All this cynical awareness of pretended sensations! All this imbroglio of my soul with these sensations, of my thoughts with the air and the river – all just to say that life smells bad and hurts me in my consciousness. All for not knowing how to say, as in that simple and all-embracing phrase from the Book of Job, ‘My soul is weary of my life!’

Everything wearies me, including what doesn’t weary me. My happiness is as painful as my pain.

If only I could be a child sailing paper boats in a cistern on the farm, with a rustic canopy of criss-crossing trellis vines projecting chequers
of sunlight and green shade on the shiny dark surface of the shallow water.

There’s a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I can’t touch it.

Rationalize my sadness? What for, if rationalization takes effort? Sad people can’t make an effort.

I can’t even renounce those banal acts of life that I so abhor. To renounce is an effort, and I don’t have it in me to make any effort.

How often I regret not being the driver of that car or the coachman of that carriage! Or any imaginary banal Other whose life, because it’s not mine, deliciously fills me with desire for it and fills me with its otherness! If I were one of them, I wouldn’t dread life like a Thing, and the thought of life as a Whole wouldn’t crush the shoulders of my thinking.

My dreams are a stupid shelter, like an umbrella against lightning.

I’m so listless, so pathetic, so short on gestures and acts.

However deeply I delve into myself, all of my dreams’ paths lead to clearings of anxiety.

There are times when dreaming eludes even me, an obsessive dreamer, and then I see things in vivid detail. The mist in which I take refuge dissipates. And every visible edge cuts the skin of my soul. Every harsh thing I see wounds the part of me that recognizes its harshness. Every object’s visible weight weighs heavy inside my soul.

It’s as if my life amounted to being thrashed by it.

The carts in the street purr slow, distinct sounds in seeming accord with my drowsiness. It’s lunchtime but I’ve stayed in the office. It’s a warm day, a bit overcast. And the sounds, for some reason, which might be my drowsiness, are exactly like the day.

The fitful evening breeze blows I don’t know what vague caress (and the less it’s a caress, the gentler it is) across my forehead and my understanding. I know only that the tedium I suffer shifts and gives me a moment’s relief, as when a piece of clothing stops rubbing against a sore.

Pathetic sensibility that depends on a slight movement of air to achieve what little tranquillity it knows! But so is all human sensibility, and I doubt that the arrival of unexpected cash or an unexpected smile counts any more for other people than a briefly passing breeze counts for me.

I can think about sleeping. I can dream of dreaming. I see more clearly the objectivity of everything. The outer feeling of life is more agreeable to me. And all of this because a slight shift in the breeze delights the surface of my skin as I approach the street corner.

All that we love or lose – things, human beings, meanings – rubs our skin and so reaches the soul, and in the eyes of God the event is no more than this breeze that brought me nothing besides an imaginary relief, the propitious moment, and the wherewithal to lose everything splendidly.