The Book of Disquiet (45 page)

These considerations are useless? Indeed they are. They’re tricks of reason? I don’t deny it. But what is this thing that without any measure measures us, and without existing kills us? It’s in these moments, when I don’t even know if time exists, that it seems to me like a person, and I feel like going to sleep.

On evenings lit by kerosene lamps in large and echoing country houses, the old aunts of those who had them passed the time by playing solitaire while the maid dozed off to the simmering sound of the tea kettle […]. Someone in me who has taken my place feels nostalgia for this useless peace. The tea arrives and the old deck of cards is placed in a neat stack on a corner of the table. The shadow of the enormous china cabinet makes the dusky dining room still darker. The maid’s face sweats with sleepiness as she slowly hurries to finish. I see all of this, inside myself, with an anguish and nostalgia that aren’t related to anything. And I find myself considering the state of mind of someone playing solitaire.

It’s not in open fields or in large gardens that I see spring arrive. It’s in the several scrawny trees of a small city square. There the greenness stands out like a special gift and is joyful like a warm sorrow.

I love these lonely squares, tucked between streets with little traffic, and themselves with just as little. They are useless clearings, always there waiting, in between forgotten tumults. They’re a bit of village in the city.

I come to a square, walk up one of the streets that runs into it, then back down the same street. Seen from the other direction, the square is different, but the same peace gilds with sudden nostalgia – the setting sun – the view I didn’t see when I walked up the street.

Everything is useless, and I feel it as such. All that I’ve lived I’ve forgotten, as if I’d only vaguely heard it. All that I’ll be reminds me of nothing, as if I’d lived and forgotten it.

A sunset of mild sorrow hovers all around me. Everything turns chilly, not because it’s colder, but because I’ve entered a narrow street and the square is gone.

The not-cold, not-warm morning glided over the few houses dotting the slopes at the edge of town. A thin, wide-awake fog was disintegrating into shapeless shreds on the drowsy slopes. (It wasn’t cold except for the fact life had to resume.) And all of this – all this moist coolness of a gentle morning – was analogous to a happiness he had never been able to feel.

The tram slowly descended towards the avenues. As it approached the denser concentration of houses, he was vaguely seized by a sense of loss. Human reality was beginning to be visible.

In these early morning hours, when the shadows have vanished but their light weight still lingers, the spirit that yields to the moment’s suggestion hankers for arrival and the sun-bathed port of old. One would like not so much to have the moment stand still, as it does for solemn landscapes or for the moon when it so peacefully shines on the river, but to have had a different life, so that this moment could have a different flavour, more akin to one’s self.

The uncertain fog thinned even more. The sun penetrated things more deeply. The sounds of life were growing everywhere louder.

At times like these, the right thing would be never to arrive at the human reality for which our lives are destined. To hover imponderably in the fog and the morning, not in spirit but in spiritualized body, in
winged real-life – that is what would most satisfy our desire to seek a refuge, although there’s no reason to seek one.

To feel everything in fine detail makes us indifferent, save towards what we can’t obtain: sensations our soul is still too embryonic to grasp, human activities congruent with feeling things deeply, passions and emotions lost among more visible kinds of achievement.

The trees that lined the avenues were independent of all this.

The morning hour came to an end in the city, like the slope on the other side of the river when the boat touches the wharf. As long as it didn’t dock, it bore the scenic view of the far shore on its hull; the scenery fell away at the sound of the hull scraping against the rocks. A man whose trousers were rolled up past his knees placed a clamp on the rope; his gesture was definitive, perfectly natural, and it metaphysically concluded with my soul no longer being able to enjoy a doubtful anxiety. The boys on the wharf looked at me as at a normal man, one who would never feel such undue emotion for the practical aspects of docking a boat.

Heat, like an invisible piece of clothing, makes one feel like taking it off.

I was already feeling uneasy. Without warning the silence had stopped breathing.

Suddenly, the light of all hells* cracked like steel. I crouched like an animal against the top of the desk, my hands lying flat like useless paws. A soulless light had swept through all nooks and souls, and the sound of a nearby mountain tumbled down from on high, rending the hard veil of the abyss* with a boom. My heart stopped.
My throat gulped. My consciousness saw only a blot of ink on a sheet of paper.

After the heat had lulled and the light beginning of rain increased until it could be heard, there was a tranquillity that the air didn’t have when it was hot, a new peace in which the water blew its own breeze. So clear was the joy of this soft rain, with no darkness or threat of storm, that even those without raincoats or umbrellas (which was almost everyone) laughingly talked as they stepped quickly down the glistening street.

During an idle moment I walked over to the open office window – the heat had caused it to be opened, but the rain hadn’t caused it to be shut – and looked with intense and indifferent concentration, as is my custom, at what I just finished accurately describing before I saw it. Yes, there went the joy of two banal souls, smiling as they talked in the fine rain, walking more briskly than hurriedly in the veiled yet luminous, limpid day.

But suddenly, popping into my view from behind a corner, there appeared an old, mean-looking, poor and unhumble man who impatiently made his way in the rain that was letting up. He surely had no special aim, but at least he had impatience. I looked at him with concentration, no longer the careless kind applied to things, but the kind that discerns symbols. He was the symbol of nobody, which is why he was in a hurry. He was the symbol of those who were never anything; that is why he suffered. He belonged not to those who smile as they feel the rain’s joyful discomfort, but to the rain itself – a man so unconscious that he felt reality.

That’s not what I wanted to say, however. Something stepped in between my observation of the passer-by (whom I had at any rate lost from view, because I’d stopped looking at him) and the thread of my reflections; some mystery from the unobserved, some urgency of the soul, stepped in and prevented me from continuing. And in the depths of my distraction I hear, without hearing, the voices of the packers at
the far end of the office, where the warehouse begins, and without seeing I see the twine used for parcels, doubly knotted and doubly strung around the volumes wrapped in heavy brown paper, on the table next to the back window, among jokes and scissors.

To see is to have seen.

It’s a rule of life that we can, and should, learn from everyone. There are solemn and serious things we can learn from quacks and crooks, there are philosophies taught us by fools, there are lessons in faithfulness and justice brought to us by chance and by those we chance to meet. Everything is in everything.

In certain particularly lucid moments of contemplation, like those of early afternoon when I observantly wander through the streets, each person brings me a novelty, each building teaches me something new, each placard has a message for me.

My silent stroll is a continual conversation, and all of us – men, buildings, stones, placards and sky – are a huge friendly crowd, elbowing each other with words in the great procession of Destiny.

Yesterday I saw and heard a great man. I don’t mean a man reputed to be great, but a man who really is great. He is a man of worth, if there’s worth in this world, and people see it, and he knows they see it. Thus he meets all the conditions necessary for me to call him a great man. And that’s what I call him.

His physical appearance is that of a tired businessman. His face shows signs of fatigue, which could be from thinking too much, or simply from not leading a healthy life. His gestures are unremarkable. His gaze has a certain sparkle – the privilege of not being near-sighted. His voice is a bit garbled, as if the beginnings of a general paralysis
had affected this particular expression of his soul. And his soul, thus expressed, goes on about party politics, about the devaluation of the escudo, and about what’s wrong with his colleagues in greatness.

If I didn’t know who he is, I wouldn’t be able to tell by his appearance. I realize that great men need not conform to that heroic ideal of simple souls, whereby a great poet is always an Apollo in body and a Napoleon in expression, or at the very least a man of distinction with an expressive face. I realize that such notions are as absurd as they are human. But if we can’t expect everything, or almost everything, we can still expect something. And passing from the figure we see to the soul that speaks, although we can’t expect vivacity or verve, we should at least be able to count on intelligence and a hint of grandeur.

All this – these human disillusions – forces us to question what truth there is, if any, in our common notion of inspiration. It seems that this body of a businessman and this soul of a polite, educated fellow must, when all by themselves, be mysteriously endowed with some inner thing that’s extraneous to them. It seems that they don’t speak but that some voice speaks through them, uttering what would be falsehood if they said it.

These are casual and useless speculations. I sometimes regret indulging in them. They don’t diminish the worth of the man, nor increase his body’s expressiveness. But then, there isn’t anything that changes anything, and what we say or do merely brushes the tops of the hills, in whose valleys everything sleeps.

No one understands anyone else. We are, as the poet* said, islands in the sea of life; between us flows the sea that defines and separates us. However much one soul strives to know another, he can know only what is told him by a word – a shapeless shadow on the ground of his understanding.

I love expressions, because I know nothing of what they express. I’m like the master of St Martha:* I’m satisfied with what I’ve been given. I see, and that’s quite enough. Who can understand anything?

Perhaps it’s this scepticism
vis-à-vis
our understanding that makes me look at a tree and a face, a poster and a smile, in exactly the same way. (Everything is natural, everything artificial, everything equal.) Everything I see is for me the merely visible, whether it be the lofty blue sky tinted with the whitish green of a pre-dawn morning, or the false frown on the face of someone suffering the death of a loved one before witnesses.

Sketches, illustrations, pages we look at and then turn… My heart isn’t in them, and my gaze merely passes over them on the outside, like a fly over a sheet of paper.

Do I even know if I feel, if I think, if I exist? I know only that there’s an objective scheme of colours, shapes and expressions of which I’m the useless shifting mirror for sale.

Compared with real, ordinary men who walk down the streets of life with a natural, fortuitous goal in mind, those who sit around in cafés cut a figure that can be described only by comparing them to certain elves from dreams – creatures that aren’t exactly nightmarish or anguishing but whose remembrance, when we wake up, leaves a foul taste in our mouth that we don’t quite understand, a feeling of deep disgust that’s not for them, directly, but for something they embody.

I see the world’s true geniuses and conquerors – both great and small – sailing in the night of things, oblivious to what their haughty prows are cutting through, in that gulfweed sea of packing straw and crumbled cork.

Everything is summed up in those cafés, just like in the inner court behind the office building, which through the grating of the warehouse window looks like a jail cell for confining rubbish.

The search for truth – be it the subjective truth of belief, the objective truth of reality, or the social truth of money or power – always confers, on the searcher who merits a prize, the ultimate knowledge of its non-existence. The grand prize of life goes only to those who bought tickets by chance.

The value of art is that it takes us away from here.

It’s legitimate to break ordinary moral laws in obedience to a higher moral law. Hunger is no excuse for stealing a loaf of bread, but an artist can be excused for stealing ten thousand escudos to guarantee his sustenance and tranquillity for two years, provided his work seeks to advance human civilization; if it’s merely an aesthetic work, then the argument doesn’t hold.

We cannot love, son. Love is the most carnal of illusions. Listen: to love is to possess. And what does a lover possess? The body? To possess it we would have to incorporate it, to eat it, to make its substance our own. And this impossibility, were it possible, wouldn’t last, because our own body passes on and transforms, because we don’t even possess our body (just our sensation of it), and because once the beloved body were possessed it would become
ours
and stop being
other
, and so love, with the disappearance of the other, would likewise disappear.

Do we possess the soul? Listen carefully: no, we don’t. Not even our own soul is ours. And how could a soul ever be possessed? Between
one and another soul lies the impassable chasm of the fact that they’re two souls.

What do we possess? What do we possess? What makes us love? Beauty? And do we possess it when we love? If we vehemently, totally possess a body, what do we really possess? Not the body, not the soul, and not even beauty. When we grasp an attractive body, it’s not beauty but fatty and cellular flesh that we embrace; our kiss doesn’t touch the mouth’s beauty but the wet flesh of decaying, membranous lips; and even sexual intercourse, though admittedly a close and ardent contact, is not a
true
penetration, not even of one body into another. What do we possess? What do we really possess?