The Book of Disquiet (21 page)

Erudition of the sensibility has nothing to do with the experience of
life. The experience of life teaches nothing, just as history teaches nothing. True experience comes from restricting our contract with reality while increasing our analysis of that contact. In this way our sensibility becomes broader and deeper, because everything is in us – all we need to do is look for it and know how to look.

What’s travel and what good is it? Any sunset is the sunset; one doesn’t have to go to Constantinople to see it. The sensation of freedom that travel brings? I can have it by going from Lisbon to Benfica,* and have it more intensely than one who goes from Lisbon to China, because if the freedom isn’t in me, then I won’t have it no matter where I go. ‘Any road,’ said Carlyle,* ‘this simple Entepfuhl road, will lead you to the end of the World.’ But the Entepfuhl road, if it is followed all the way to the end, returns to Entepfuhl; so that Entepfuhl, where we already were, is the same end of the world we set out to find.

Condillac begins his celebrated book* with: ‘No matter how high we climb or how low we descend, we never escape our sensations.’ We never disembark from ourselves. We never attain another existence unless we other ourselves by actively, vividly imagining who we are. The true landscapes are those that we ourselves create since, being their gods, we see them as they truly are, which is however we created them. None of the four corners of the world is the one that interests me and that I can truly see; it’s the fifth corner that I travel in, and it belongs to me.

Whoever has crossed all the seas has crossed only the monotony of himself. I’ve crossed more seas than anyone. I’ve seen more mountains than there are on earth. I’ve passed through more cities than exist, and the great rivers of non-worlds have flown sovereignly under my watching eyes. If I were to travel, I’d find a poor copy of what I’ve already seen without taking one step.

In the countries that others go to, they go as anonymous foreigners. In the countries I’ve visited, I’ve been not only the secret pleasure of the unknown traveller, but also the majesty of the reigning king, the indigenous people and their culture, and the entire history of the nation and its neighbours. I saw every landscape and every house because they were me, made in God from the substance of my imagination.

139

For a long time now I haven’t written. Months have gone by in which I haven’t lived, just endured, between the office and physiology, in an inward stagnation of thinking and feeling. Unfortunately, this isn’t even restful, since in rotting there’s fermentation.

For a long time now I haven’t written and haven’t even existed. I hardly even seem to be dreaming. The streets for me are just streets. I do my office work conscious only of it, though I can’t say without distraction: in the back of my mind I’m sleeping instead of meditating (which is what I usually do), but I still have a different existence behind my work.

For a long time now I haven’t existed. I’m utterly calm. No one distinguishes me from who I am. I just felt myself breathe as if I’d done something new, or done it late. I’m beginning to be conscious of being conscious. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll wake up to myself and resume the course of my own existence. I don’t know if that will make me more happy or less. I don’t know anything. I lift my pedestrian’s head and see that, on the hill of the Castle, the sunset’s reflection is burning in dozens of windows, in a lofty brilliance of cold fire. Around these hard-flamed eyes, the entire hillside has the softness of day’s end. I’m able at least to feel sad, and to be conscious that my sadness was just now crossed – I saw it with my ears – by the sudden sound of a passing tram, by the casual voices of young people, and by the forgotten murmur of the living city.

For a long time now I haven’t been I.

140

It sometimes happens, more or less suddenly, that in the midst of my sensations I’m overwhelmed by such a terrible weariness of life that I can’t even conceive of any act that might relieve it. Suicide seems a dubious remedy, and natural death – even assuming it brings unconsciousness – an insufficient one. Rather than the cessation of my
existence, which may or may not be possible, this weariness makes me long for something far more horrifying and profound: never to have existed at all, which is definitely impossible.

Now and then I seem to discern, in the generally confused speculations of the Indians, something of this longing that’s even more negative than nothingness. But either they lack the keenness of sensation to communicate what they think, or they lack the acuity of thought to really feel what they feel. The fact is that what I discern in them I don’t clearly see. The fact is that I think I’m the first to express in words the sinister absurdity of this incurable sensation.

And yet I do cure it, by writing about it. Yes, for every truly profound desolation, one that’s not pure feeling but has some intelligence mixed in with it, there’s always the ironic remedy of expressing it. If literature has no other usefulness, it at least has this one, though it serves only a few.

The ailments of our intelligence unfortunately hurt less than those of our feelings, and those of our feelings unfortunately less than those of the body. I say ‘unfortunately’ because human dignity would require it to be the other way around. There is no mental anguish
vis-à-vis
the unknown that can hurt us like love or jealousy or nostalgia, that can overwhelm us like intense physical fear, or that can transform us like anger or ambition. But neither can any pain that ravishes the soul be as genuinely painful as a toothache, a stomach-ache, or the pain (I imagine) of childbirth.

We’re made in such a way that the same intelligence that ennobles certain emotions or sensations, elevating them above others, also humbles them, when it extends its analysis to a comparison among them all.

I write as if sleeping, and my entire life is an unsigned receipt.

Inside the coop where he’ll stay until he’s killed, the rooster sings anthems to liberty because he was given two roosts.

141

R
AINY
L
ANDSCAPE

Each drop of rain is my failed life weeping in nature. There’s something of my disquiet in the endless drizzle, then shower, then drizzle, then shower, through which the day’s sorrow uselessly pours itself out over the earth.

It rains and keeps raining. My soul is damp from hearing it. So much rain… My flesh is watery around my physical sensation of it.

An anguished cold holds my poor heart in its icy hands. The grey
hours get longer, flattening out in time; the moments drag.

So much rain!

The gutters spew out little torrents of sudden water. A troubling noise of falling rain falls through my awareness that there are downspouts. The rain groans as it listlessly batters the panes .....

A cold hand squeezes my throat and prevents me from breathing life.

Everything is dying in me, even the knowledge that I can dream! I can’t get physically comfortable. Every soft thing I lean against hurts my soul with sharp edges. All eyes I gaze into are terribly dark in this impoverished daylight, propitious for dying without pain.

142

The most contemptible thing about dreams is that everyone has them. The delivery boy who dozes against the lamppost in between deliveries is thinking about something in his darkened mind. I know what he’s thinking about: the very same things into which I plummet, between one and another ledger entry, in the summer tedium of the stock-still office.

143

I pity those who dream the probable, the reasonable and the accessible more than those who fantasize about the extraordinary and remote. Those who have grandiose dreams are either lunatics who believe in what they dream and are happy, or they’re mere daydreamers whose reveries are like the soul’s music, lulling them and meaning nothing. But those who dream the possible will, very possibly, suffer real disillusion. I can’t be too disappointed over not having become a Roman emperor, but I can sorely regret never once having spoken to the seamstress who at the street corner turns right at about nine o’clock every morning. The dream that promises us the impossible denies us access to it from the start, but the dream that promises the possible interferes with our normal life, relying on it for its fulfilment. The one kind of dream lives by itself, independently, while the other is contingent on what may or may not happen.

That’s why I love impossible landscapes and the vast empty stretches of plains I’ll never see. The historical ages of the past are sheer wonder, because I know from the outset that I can’t be part of them. I sleep when I dream of what doesn’t exist; dreaming of what might exist wakes me up.

It’s midday in the deserted office, and I lean out one of the balcony windows overlooking the street down below. My distraction, aware of the movement of people in my eyes, is too steeped in its meditation to see them. I sleep on my elbows propped painfully on the railing and feel a great promise in knowing nothing. With mental detachment I look at the arrested street full of hurrying people, and I make out the details: the crates piled up on a cart, the sacks at the door of the other warehouse, and, in the farthest window of the grocery on the corner, the glint of those bottles of Port wine that I imagine no one can afford to buy. My spirit abandons the material dimension. I investigate with my imagination. The people passing by on the street are always the same ones who passed by a while ago, always a group of floating figures, patches of motion, uncertain voices, things that pass by and never quite happen.

To take note, not with my senses, but with the awareness of my senses… The possibility of other things… And suddenly, from behind me, I hear the metaphysically abrupt arrival of the office boy. I feel like I could kill him for barging in on what I wasn’t thinking. I turn around and look at him with a silence full of hatred, tense with latent homicide, my mind already hearing the voice he’ll use to tell me something or other. He smiles from the other side of the room and says ‘Good afternoon’ in a loud voice. I hate him like the universe. My eyes are sore from imagining.

144

After many days of rain, the sky brings back its hidden blue to the vast expanses on high. Between the streets, whose puddles sleep like country ponds, and the clear and chilly gladness overhead, there’s a contrast that makes the dirty streets congenial and the dreary winter sky spring-like. It’s Sunday and I have nothing to do. It’s such a nice day that I don’t even feel like dreaming. I enjoy it with all the sincerity of my senses, to which my intelligence bows. I walk like a liberated shop assistant. I feel old, just so I can have the pleasure of feeling myself being rejuvenated.

In the large Sunday square there’s a solemn flurry of a different sort of day. People are coming out of Mass at the church of São Domingos, and another one is about to begin. I see those who are leaving and those who still haven’t entered, because they’re waiting for people who aren’t there watching who’s coming out.

None of these things are important. They are, like everything in the ordinary world, a slumber of mysteries and battlements, and like a herald who has just arrived, I gaze at the open plain of my meditation.

When I was a child, I used to go to this Mass, or perhaps another one, but I think it was this one. I wore my only good suit, out of respect, and enjoyed every minute, even when there was nothing special to enjoy. I lived externally, and the suit was clean and new. What more can one want, when he’s going to die and doesn’t know it, led by a mother’s hand?

I used to enjoy all of this, but only now do I realize how much I enjoyed it. I would enter Mass as into a great mystery, and come out at the end as into a clearing. And that’s how it really was, and how it still really is. It’s only the self who no longer believes and is now an adult, with a soul that remembers and weeps – only this self is fiction and confusion, anguish and the grave.

Yes, what I am would be unbearable if I couldn’t remember what I’ve been. And this crowd of strangers who are still leaving Mass, and the beginning of the potential crowd arriving for the next Mass, are like boats passing by on a slow river, beneath the open windows of my house on the bank.

Memories, Sundays, Masses, the pleasure of having been, the miracle of time having remained because it already went by, and since it was mine it will never be forgotten… Absurd diagonal of my normal sensations, sudden sound of an old carriage around the square, creaking its wheels in the depths of the cars’ noisy silences and somehow or other, by a maternal paradox of time, subsisting today, right here, between what I am and what I’ve lost, in my backward gaze that is me…

145

The higher a man rises, the more things he must do without. There’s no room on the pinnacle except for the man himself. The more perfect he is, the more complete; and the more complete, the less other.