The Book of Disquiet (18 page)

In youth we’re twofold. Our innate intelligence, which may be considerable, coexists with the stupidity of our inexperience, which forms a second, lesser intelligence. Only later on do the two unite. That’s why youth always blunders – not because of its inexperience, but because of its non-unity.

Today the only course left for the man of superior intelligence is abdication.

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A
ESTHETICS OF
A
BDICATION

To conform is to submit, and to conquer is to conform, to be conquered. Thus every victory is a debasement. The conqueror inevitably loses all the virtues born of frustration with the
status quo
that led him to the fight that brought victory. He becomes satisfied, and only those who conform – who lack the conqueror’s mentality – are satisfied. Only the man who never achieves his goal conquers. Only the man who is forever discouraged is strong. The best and most regal course is to abdicate. The supreme empire belongs to the emperor who abdicates from all normal life and from other men, for the preservation of his supremacy won’t weigh on him like a load of jewels.

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Sometimes, when I lift my dazed head from the books where I record other people’s accounts and the absence of a life I can call my own, I feel a physical nausea, which might be from hunching over, but which transcends the numbers and my disillusion. I find life distasteful, like a useless medicine. And that’s when I feel, and can clearly picture, how easy it would be to get rid of this tedium, if I had the simple strength of will to really want to get rid of it.

We live by action – by acting on desire. Those of us who don’t know how to want – whether geniuses or beggars – are related by impotence. What’s the point of calling myself a genius, if I’m after all an assistant bookkeeper? When Cesário Verde* made sure the doctor knew that he was not Senhor Verde, an office worker, but Cesário Verde the poet, he used one of those self-important terms that reek of vanity. What he always was, poor man, was Senhor Verde, an office worker. The poet was born after he died, for it was only then that he was appreciated as a poet.

To act – that is true wisdom. I can be what I want to be, but I have
to want whatever it is. Success consists in being successful, not in having the potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but there’s no palace until it’s built.

My pride was stoned by blind men, my disillusion trampled on by beggars.

‘I want you only to dream of you,’ they tell the beloved woman in verses they never send – they who dare not tell her anything. This ‘I want you only to dream of you’ is a verse from an old poem of mine. I record the memory with a smile, and don’t even comment on the smile.

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I’m one of those souls women say they love but never recognize when they meet us – one of those souls that they would never recognize, even if they recognized us. I endure the sensitivity of my feelings with an attitude of disdain. I have all the qualities for which romantic poets are admired, and even the lack of those qualities, which makes one a true romantic poet. I find myself partially described in novels as the protagonist of various plots, but the essence of my life and soul is never to be a protagonist.

I don’t have any idea of myself, not even the kind that consists in the lack of an idea of myself. I’m a nomad in my self-awareness. The herds of my inner riches scattered during the first watch.

The only tragedy is not being able to conceive of ourselves as tragic. I’ve always clearly seen that I coexist with the world. I’ve never clearly felt that I needed to coexist with it. That’s why I’ve never been normal.

To act is to rest.

All problems are insoluble. The essence of there being a problem is that there’s no solution. To go looking for a fact means the fact doesn’t exist. To think is to not know how to be.

Sometimes I spend hours at the Terreiro do Paço,* next to the river,
meditating in vain. My impatience keeps trying to tear me away from that peace, and my inertia keeps holding me there. And in this state of bodily torpor that suggests sensuality only in the way the wind’s whispering recalls voices, I meditate on the eternal insatiability of my vague desires, on the permanent fickleness of my impossible yearnings. I suffer mainly from the malady of being able to suffer. I’m missing something I don’t really want, and I suffer because this isn’t true suffering.

The wharf, the afternoon and the smell of ocean all enter, together, into the composition of my anxiety. The flutes of impossible shepherds are no sweeter than the absence of flutes that right now reminds me of them. The distant idylls alongside streams grieve me in this inwardly analogous moment .....

108

It’s possible to feel life as a sickness in the stomach, the very existence of one’s soul as a muscular discomfort. Desolation of spirit, when sharply felt, stirs distant tides in the body, where it suffers pain by proxy.

I’m conscious of myself on a day when the pain of being conscious is, as the poet* says,

lassitude, nausea
,

and agonizing desire
.

109

(storm)

Dark silence lividly teems. Above the occasional creaking of a fast-moving cart, a nearby truck produces a thundering sound – a ridiculous mechanical echo of what’s really happening in the closely distant skies.

Again, without warning, magnetic light gushes forth, flickering. My heart beats with a gulp. A glass dome shatters on high into large bits. A new sheet of ruthless rain strikes the sound of the ground.

(Senhor Vasques) His wan face is an unnatural and befuddled green. I watch him take his laboured breaths with the kinship of knowing I’ll be no different.

110

After I’ve slept many dreams, I go out to the street with eyes wide open but still with the aura and assurance of my dreams. And I’m astonished by my automatism, which prevents others from really knowing me. For I go through daily life still holding the hand of my astral nursemaid; my steps are in perfect accord with the obscure designs of my sleeping mind. And I walk in the right direction; I don’t stagger; I react well; I exist.

But in the respites when I don’t have to watch where I’m going to avoid vehicles or oncoming pedestrians, when I don’t have to speak to anyone or enter a door up ahead, then I launch once more like a paper boat on to the waters of sleep, and once more I return to the fading illusion that cuddles my hazy consciousness of the morning now emerging amid the sounds of the vegetable carts.

And it is then, in the middle of life’s bustle, that my dream becomes a marvellous film. I walk along an unreal downtown street, and the reality of its non-existent lives affectionately wraps my head in a white cloth of false memories. I’m a navigator engaged in unknowing myself. I’ve overcome everything where I’ve never been. And this somnolence that allows me to walk, bent forward in a march over the impossible, feels like a fresh breeze.

Everyone has his alcohol. To exist is alcohol enough for me. Drunk from feeling, I wander as I walk straight ahead. When it’s time, I show up at the office like everyone else. When it’s not time, I go to the river to gaze at the river, like everyone else. I’m no different. And behind all this, O sky my sky, I secretly constellate and have my infinity.

111

Every man of today, unless his moral stature and intellectual level are that of a pygmy or a churl, loves with romantic love when he loves. Romantic love is a rarefied product of century after century of Christian influence, and everything about its substance and development can be explained to the unenlightened by comparing it to a suit fashioned by the soul or the imagination and used to clothe those whom the mind thinks it fits, when they happen to come along.

But every suit, since it isn’t eternal, lasts as long as it lasts; and soon, under the fraying clothes of the ideal we’ve formed, the real body of the person we dressed it in shows through.

Romantic love is thus a path to disillusion, unless this disillusion, accepted from the start, decides to vary the ideal constantly, constantly sewing new suits in the soul’s workshops so as to constantly renew the appearance of the person they clothe.

112

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept – our own selves – that we love.

This is true in the whole gamut of love. In sexual love we seek our own pleasure via another body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via our own idea. The masturbator may be abject, but in point of fact he’s the perfect logical expression of the lover. He’s the only one who doesn’t feign and doesn’t fool himself.

The relations between one soul and another, expressed through such uncertain and variable things as shared words and proffered gestures, are deceptively complex. The very act of meeting each other is a non-meeting. Two people say ‘I love you’ or mutually think it and feel it, and each has in mind a different idea, a different life, perhaps even a different colour or fragrance, in the abstract sum of impressions that constitute the soul’s activity.

Today I’m lucid as if I didn’t exist. My thinking is as naked as a
skeleton, without the fleshly tatters of the illusion of expression. And these considerations that I forge and abandon weren’t born from anything – at least not from anything in the front rows of my consciousness. Perhaps it was the sales representative’s disillusion with his girlfriend, perhaps a sentence I read in one of the romantic tales that our newspapers reprint from the foreign press, or perhaps just a vague nausea for which I can think of no physical cause…

The scholiast who annotated Virgil was wrong. Understanding is what wearies us most of all. To live is to not think.

113

Two or three days like the beginning of love…

The value of this for the aesthete is in the feelings it produces. To go further would be to enter the realm of jealousy, suffering and anxiety. In this antechamber of emotion there’s all the sweetness of love – hints of pleasure, whiffs of passion – without any of its depth. If this means giving up the grandeur of tragic love, we must remember that tragedies, for the aesthete, are interesting to observe but unpleasant to experience. The cultivation of life hinders that of the imagination. It is the aloof, uncommon man who rules.

No doubt this theory would satisfy me, if I could convince myself that it’s not what it is: a complicated jabber to fill the ears of my intelligence, to make it almost forget that at heart I’m just timid, with no aptitude for life.

114

A
ESTHETICS OF
A
RTIFICIALITY

Life hinders the expression of life. If I actually lived a great love, I would never be able to describe it.

Not even I know if this I that I’m disclosing to you, in these
meandering pages, actually exists or is but a fictitious, aesthetic concept I’ve made of myself. Yes, that’s right. I live aesthetically as someone else. I’ve sculpted my life like a statue made of matter that’s foreign to my being. Having employed my self-awareness in such a purely artistic way, and having become so completely external to myself, I sometimes no longer recognize myself. Who am I behind this unreality? I don’t know. I must be someone. And if I avoid living, acting and feeling, then believe me, it’s so as not to tamper with the contours of my invented personality. I want to be exactly like what I wanted to be and am not. If I were to give in to life, I’d be destroyed. I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can’t be one in my body. That’s why I’ve sculpted myself in quiet isolation and have placed myself in a hothouse, cut off from fresh air and direct light – where the absurd flower of my artificiality can blossom in secluded beauty.

Sometimes I muse about how wonderful it would be if I could string all my dreams together into one continuous life, a life consisting of entire days full of imaginary companions and created people, a false life which I could live and suffer and enjoy. Misfortune would sometimes strike me there, and there I would also experience great joys. And nothing about me would be real. But everything would have a sublime logic; it would all pulse to a rhythm of sensual falseness, taking place in a city built out of my soul and extending all the way to the platform next to an idle train, far away in the distance within me… And it would all be vivid and inevitable, as in the outer life, but with an aesthetics of the Dying Sun.

115

To organize our life in such a way that it becomes a mystery to others, that those who are closest to us will only be closer to not knowing us. That is how I’ve shaped my life, almost without thinking about it, but I did it with so much instinctive art that even to myself I’ve become a not entirely clear and definite individual.

116

To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarate, and the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning it into a slumber. The other arts make no such retreat – some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.

This isn’t the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, and a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings in a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.

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