The Book of Disquiet (38 page)

Let’s not even touch life with the tips of our fingers.

Let’s not even love in our minds.

May we never know the feel of a woman’s kiss, not even in our dreams.

Artisans of morbidity, let us excel in teaching others how to cast off all illusions. Spectators of life, let us peer over all walls, with the pre-weariness of knowing that we’ll see nothing new or beautiful.

Weavers of despair, let us weave only shrouds – white shrouds for the dreams we never dreamed, black shrouds for the days that we died, grey shrouds for the gestures we merely dreamed, and royal purple shrouds for our useless sensations.

On the hills and in the valleys and along swampy
shores, hunters hunt wolves, deer, and wild ducks. Let us hate them, not because they kill but because they enjoy themselves (and we don’t).

May our facial expression consist of a wan smile, like that of someone who’s about to cry, a far-away gaze, like that of someone who doesn’t want to see, and a disdain in all its features, as when someone despises life and lives only to despise it.

And may our disdain be for those who work and struggle, and our hatred for those who hope and trust.

I’m almost convinced that I’m never awake. I’m not sure if I’m not in fact dreaming when I live, and living when I dream, or if dreaming and living are for me intersected, intermingled things that together form my conscious self.

Sometimes, when I’m actively engaged in life and have as clear a notion of myself as the next man, my mind is beset by a strange feeling of doubt: I begin to wonder if I exist, if I might not be someone else’s dream. I can imagine, with an almost carnal vividness, that I might be the character of a novel, moving within the reality constructed by a complex narrative, in the long waves of its style.

I’ve often noticed that certain fictional characters assume a prominence never attained by the friends and acquaintances who talk and listen to us in visible, real life. And this makes me fantasize about whether everything in the sum total of the world might not be an interconnected series of dreams and novels, like little boxes inside larger boxes that are inside yet larger ones, everything being a story made up of stories, like
A Thousand and One Nights
, unreally taking place in the never-ending night.

If I think, everything seems absurd to me; if I feel, everything seems strange; if I want, it’s something in me that does the wanting. Whenever there’s action in me, I’m sure I wasn’t responsible for it. If I dream, it seems I’m being written. If I feel, it seems I’m being painted. If I want, it seems that I’ve been placed in a vehicle, like freight to be delivered, and that I continue with a movement I imagine is my own towards a destination I don’t want until I get there.

How confusing it all is! How much better it is to see rather than
think, to read rather than write! What I see may deceive me, but I don’t consider it mine. What I read may distress me, but I don’t have to feel bad for having written it. How painful everything is when we think of it as conscious thinkers, as contemplative beings whose consciousness has reached that second stage by which we know that we know! Although the day is gorgeous, I can’t help but think this way. To think or to feel? Or what third thing among the stage-sets in the back? Tedium of twilight and disarray, shut fans, weariness from having had to live…

We walked, still young, beneath the tall trees and the forest’s soft rustling. The moonlight made ponds out of the clearings that sprang into view along our aimless path, and their branch-tangled shores were more night than the night itself. The breeze of woodlands sighed among the trees. We talked about impossible things, and our voices were part of the night, the moon and the forest. We heard them as if they belonged to others.

The obscure forest wasn’t entirely pathless. Our steps wended along trails that we instinctively knew, among dappling shadows and streaks of cold, hard moonlight. We talked about impossible things, and the whole of that real-life landscape was just as impossible.

We worship perfection because we can’t have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.

We harbour a secret hatred of paradise. Our yearnings are like those of the poor wretch who hopes for the countryside in heaven. It’s not abstract ecstasies or marvels of the absolute that can enchant a feeling soul; it’s homesteads and hillsides, green islands in blue seas, wooded paths and restful hours spent on ancestral farms, even if we’ve never
had these things. If there’s no land in heaven, then better there were no heaven. Better that everything be nothing and that the plotless novel come to an end.

To achieve perfection would require a coldness foreign to man, and he would lose the human heart that makes him love perfection.

In awe we worship the impulse to perfection of great artists. We love their approximation to perfection, but we love it because it is only an approximation.

How tragic not to believe in human perfectibility!

And how tragic to believe in it!

If I had written
King Lear
, I would be plagued by remorse for the rest of my life. For the sheer greatness of this work grossly magnifies its defects, its monstrous defects, the tiniest things that stand between certain scenes and their possible perfection. It’s not the sun marred by spots; it’s a broken Greek statue. All that has ever been done is ridden with errors, faulty perspectives, ignorance, signs of bad taste, shortcomings and oversights. To write a masterpiece large enough to be great and perfect enough to be sublime is a task no one has had the fortune or divine capacity to accomplish. Whatever can’t be done in a single burst suffers from the unevenness of our spirit.

This thought causes my imagination to be overwhelmed by regret, by a painful certainty that I’ll never be able to do anything good and useful for Beauty. The only method for achieving Perfection is to be God. Our greatest effort takes time; the time it takes passes through various stages of our soul, and each stage of the soul, being unlike any other, taints the character of the work with its own personality. All we can be certain of when we write is that we write badly; the only
great and perfect works are the ones we never dream of realizing.

Listen still, with a sympathetic ear. Hear me out and then tell me if dreaming isn’t better than life…

Hard work never pays off. Effort never leads anywhere. Only abstention is noble and lofty, for it alone recognizes that realization is always inferior, that the work we produce is always the grotesque shadow of the work we dreamed.

How I would love to be able to record, in words on paper that could be read out loud and listened to, the dialogues of the characters in my imagined dramas! The action in these dramas flows perfectly and the dialogues are flawless, but the action isn’t spatially delineated in me such that I could materially project it, nor does the substance of these inner dialogues consist of actual words which I could listen to closely and transcribe on paper.

I love certain lyric poets precisely because they weren’t epic or dramatic poets, because they had the intuitive wisdom never to want to express more than an intensely felt or dreamed moment. What can be written unconsciously is the exact measure of the perfection that is possible. No Shakespearian drama satisfies like a lyric poem of Heine. The poetry of Heine is perfect, whereas all drama – of Shakespeare or anyone else – is inevitably imperfect. Ah, to be able to construct a complete Whole, to compose something that would be like a human body, with perfect harmony among all its parts, and with a life, a life of unity and congruency, uniting the scattered traits of its various parts!*

You who listen but hardly hear me have no idea what a tragedy this is! To lose father and mother, to attain neither glory nor happiness, to have neither friend nor lover – all of that can be endured; what cannot be endured is to dream something beautiful that’s impossible to achieve in word or deed.

The awareness that a work is perfect, the satisfaction of a work achieved… – soothing is the sleep under this shady tree in the calm of summer.

When I lean back and belong only remotely to life, then how fluently I dictate to my inertia the phrases I’ll never write and how clearly I describe in my meditation the landscapes I could never describe! I fashion complete sentences with not a word out of place; detailed dramatic plots unroll in my mind; I sense the verbal and metrical cadence of great poems in each and every word, and a great enthusiasm follows me like an invisible slave in the shadows. But if I get up from the chair, where these nearly actualized sensations loll, and step over to the table to write them down, then the words flee, the dramas die, and the vital nexus underlying the rhythmic murmur vanishes, leaving only a distant nostalgia, a vestige of sunlight on faraway mountains, a wind that stirs leaves on the edge of a wilderness, a kinship that’s never revealed, the orgy other people enjoy, the woman whom we expect to turn around and look but who never quite exists.

I’ve undertaken every project imaginable. The
Iliad
composed by me had a structural logic in its organic linking of epodes such as Homer could never have achieved. The meticulous perfection of my unwritten verses makes Virgil’s precision look sloppy and Milton’s power slack. My allegorical satires surpassed all of Swift’s in the symbolic exactitude of their rigorously interconnected particulars. How many Horaces* I’ve been!

And whenever I’ve stood up from the chair where in fact these things were not totally dreamed, I’ve experienced the double tragedy of realizing that they’re worthless and that they weren’t pure dream, that something of them remains on the abstract threshold of my thinking and their being.

I was a genius in more than dreams and in less than life. That is my tragedy. I was the runner who led the race until he fell down, right before the finishing line.

If in art there were the office of improver, then I would have a function in life, at least in my life as an artist.

To begin with somebody else’s creation, working only on improving it… Perhaps that is how the
Iliad
was written.

Anything but to have to struggle with original creation!

How I envy those who produce novels, those who begin them and write them and finish them! I can imagine novels chapter by chapter, sometimes with the actual phrases of dialogue and the narrative commentary in between, but I’m incapable of committing these dreams of writing to paper .....

Every form of action, from war to logical reasoning, is false; and every abdication is also false. If only I could not act and not abdicate from acting! That would be the Dream-Crown of my glory, the Sceptre-of-Silence of my greatness.

I don’t even suffer. My disdain for everything is so complete that I even disdain myself. The contempt I have for the sufferings of others I also have for my own. And so all my suffering is crushed under the foot of my disdain.

Ah, but this makes me suffer more… Because to value one’s own suffering is to gild it with the sun of pride. Intense suffering can give the sufferer the illusion of being the Chosen One of Pain. Thus .....

Like someone whose eyes, when lifted up after staring at a book for a long time, wince at the mere sight of a naturally bright sun, so too, when I lift my eyes from looking at myself, it hurts and stings me to see the vivid clarity and independence-from-me of the world outside, of the existence of others, of the position and correlation of movements in space. I stumble on the real feelings of others. The antagonism of their psyches towards mine shoves me and trips up my steps. I slide and tumble above and between the sounds of their strange words in my ears, the hard and definite falling of their feet on the actual floor, their motions that really exist, their various and complex ways of being persons who are not mere variants of my own.

And once I’ve hurled myself into these souls, I suddenly feel helpless and empty, as if I’d died and yet I live, a sore and pale shade, which the first breeze will knock to the ground and the first physical contact dissolve into dust.

And then I wonder: Was it worth all the effort I put into isolating and raising myself up? Was it worth making my life into a long-drawn-out calvary for the sake of my Crucified Glory? And even if I know that it was worth it, in these moments I’m overwhelmed by the feeling that it wasn’t and will never be worth it.

Money, children, lunatics .....

Wealth should never be envied except platonically. Wealth is freedom.

Money is beautiful, because it frees us.

To want to die in Peking and not be able to is one of the things that weigh on me like a feeling of impending doom.

The buyers of useless things are wiser than is commonly supposed – they buy little dreams. They become children in the act of acquisition. When people with money succumb to the charms of those useless little objects, they possess them with the joy of a child gathering sea shells on the beach – the image that best expresses the child’s happiness. He gathers shells on the beach! No two are ever alike for a child. He falls asleep with the two prettiest ones in his hand, and when they’re lost or taken from him (A crime! They’ve made off with outward bits of his soul! They’ve stolen pieces of his dream!), he weeps like a God robbed of a just-created universe.