The Book of Disquiet (22 page)

These thoughts occurred to me after reading a newspaper article about the great and multifaceted life of a celebrity – an American millionaire who had been everything. He had achieved all that he’d aspired to – money, love, friendship, recognition, travels, collections. Money can’t buy everything, but the personal magnetism that enables a man to make lots of money can, indeed, obtain most things.

As I laid the paper down on the restaurant table, I was already thinking how a similar article, narrowing the focus, could have been written about the firm’s sales representative, more or less my acquaintance, who’s eating lunch at the table in the back corner, as he does every day. All that the millionaire had, this man has – in smaller
measure, to be sure, but abundantly for his stature. Both men have had equal success, and there isn’t even a difference in their fame, for here too we must see each man in his particular context. There’s no one in the world who doesn’t know the name of the American millionaire, but there’s no one in Lisbon’s commercial district who doesn’t know the name of the man eating lunch in the corner.

These men obtained all that their hand could grasp within arm’s reach. What varied in them was the length of their arm; they were identical in other respects. I’ve never been able to envy this sort of person. I’ve always felt that virtue lay in obtaining what was out of one’s reach, in living where one isn’t, in being more alive after death than during life, in achieving something impossible, something absurd, in overcoming – like an obstacle – the world’s very reality.

Should someone point out that the pleasure of enduring is nil after one ceases to exist, I would first of all respond that I’m not sure if it is, because I don’t know the truth about human survival. Secondly, the pleasure of future fame is a present pleasure – the fame is what’s future. And it’s the pleasure of feeling proud, equal to no pleasure that material wealth can bring. It may be illusory, but it is in any case far greater than the pleasure of enjoying only what’s here. The American millionaire can’t believe that posterity will appreciate his poems, given that he didn’t write any. The sales representative can’t imagine that the future will admire his pictures, since he never painted any.

I, however, who in this transitory life am nothing, can enjoy the thought of the future reading this very page, since I do actually write it; I can take pride – like a father in his son – in the fame I will have, since at least I have something that could bring me fame. And as I think this, rising from the table, my invisible and inwardly majestic stature rises above Detroit, Michigan, and over all the commercial district of Lisbon.

It was not, however, with these reflections that I began to reflect. What I initially thought about was how little a man must be in this life in order to live beyond it. One reflection is as good as another, for they are the same. Glory isn’t a medal but a coin: on one side the head, on the other a stated value. For the larger values there are no coins, just paper, whose value is never much.

With metaphysical psychologies such as these, humble people like me console themselves.

146

Some have a great dream in life that they never accomplish. Others have no dream, and likewise never accomplish it.

147

Every struggle, no matter what its goal, is forced by life to make adjustments; it becomes a different struggle, serves different ends, and sometimes accomplishes the very opposite of what it set out to do. Only slight goals are worth pursuing, because only a slight goal can be entirely fulfilled. If I struggle to make a fortune, I can make it in a certain way; the goal is slight, like all quantitative goals, personal or otherwise, and it’s attainable, verifiable. But how shall I fulfil the intention of serving my country, or of enriching human culture, or of improving humanity? I can’t be certain of the right course of action, nor verify whether the goals have been achieved .....

148

The perfect man, for the pagans, was the perfection of the man that exists; for Christians, the perfection of the man that does not exist; and for Buddhists, the perfection of no man existing.

Nature is the difference between the soul and God.

Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what’s in the note we can extract the gist
of what must have been in the text, but there’s always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.

149

Many people have defined man, and in general they’ve defined him in contrast with animals. That’s why definitions of man often take the form, ‘Man is a such-and-such animal’, or ‘Man is an animal that…’, and then we’re told what. ‘Man is a sick animal,’ said Rousseau, and that’s partly true. ‘Man is a rational animal,’ says the Church, and that’s partly true. ‘Man is a tool-using animal,’ says Carlyle, and that’s partly true. But these definitions, and others like them, are always somewhat off the mark. And the reason is quite simple: it’s not easy to distinguish man from animals, for there’s no reliable criterion for making the distinction. Human lives run their course with the same inherent unconsciousness as animal lives. The same fundamental laws that rule animal instincts likewise rule human intelligence, which appears to be no more than an instinct in the formative stage, as unconscious as any instinct, and less perfect since still not fully formed.

‘All that exists comes from unreason,’ says The Greek Anthology. And everything, indeed, comes from unreason. Since it deals only with dead numbers and empty formulas, mathematics can be perfectly logical, but the rest of science is no more than child’s play at dusk, an attempt to catch birds’ shadows and to stop the shadows of windblown grass.

The funny thing is that, while it’s difficult to formulate a definition that truly distinguishes man from animals, it’s easy to differentiate between the superior man and the common man.

I’ve never forgotten that phrase from Haeckel,* the biologist, whom I read in the childhood of my intelligence, that period when we’re attracted to popular science and writings that attack religion. The phrase is more or less the following: The distance between the superior man (a Kant or a Goethe, I believe he says) and the common man is much greater than the distance between the common man and the ape. I’ve never forgotten the phrase, because it’s true. Between me, whose
rank is low among thinking men, and a farmer from Loures,* there is undoubtedly a greater distance than between the farmer and, I won’t say a monkey, but a cat or dog. None of us, from the cat on up to me, is really in charge of the life imposed on us or of the destiny we’ve been given; we are all equally derived from no one knows what; we’re shadows of gestures performed by someone else, embodied effects, consequences that feel. But between me and the farmer there’s a difference of quality, due to the presence in me of abstract thought and disinterested emotion; whereas between him and the cat, intellectually and psychologically, there is only a difference of degree.

The superior man differs from the inferior man and his animal brothers by the simple trait of irony. Irony is the first sign that our consciousness has become conscious, and it passes through two stages: the one represented by Socrates, when he says, ‘All I know is that I know nothing,’ and the other represented by Sanches,* when he says, ‘I don’t even know if I know nothing.’ In the first stage we dogmatically doubt ourselves, and every superior man arrives there. In the second stage we come to doubt not only ourselves but also our own doubt, and few men have reached that point in the already so long yet short span of time that the human race has beheld the sun and night over the earth’s variegated surface.

To know oneself is to err, and the oracle that said ‘Know thyself’ proposed a task more difficult than the labours of Hercules and a riddle murkier than the Sphinx’s. To consciously not know ourselves – that’s the way! And to conscientiously not know ourselves is the active task of irony. I know nothing greater, nor more worthy of the truly great man, than the patient and expressive analysis of the ways in which we don’t know ourselves, the conscious recording of the unconsciousness of our conscious states, the metaphysics of autonomous shadows, the poetry of the twilight of disillusion.

But something always eludes us, some analysis or other always gets muddled, and the truth – even if false – is always beyond the next corner. And this is what tires us even more than life (when life tires us) and more than the knowledge and contemplation of life (which always tire us).

I stand up from the chair where, propped distractedly against the table, I’ve entertained myself with the narration of these strange
impressions. I stand up, propping my body on itself, and walk to the window, higher than the surrounding rooftops, and I watch the city going to sleep in a slow beginning of silence. The large and whitely white moon sadly clarifies the terraced differences in the buildings opposite. The moonlight seems to illuminate icily all the world’s mystery. It seems to reveal everything, and everything is shadows with admixtures of faint light, false and unevenly absurd gaps, inconsistencies of the visible. There’s no breeze, and the mystery seems to loom larger. I feel queasy in my abstract thought. I’ll never write a page that sheds light on me or that sheds light on anything. A wispy cloud hovers hazily over the moon, like a coverture. I’m ignorant, like these rooftops. I’ve failed, like all of nature.

150

The persistence of instinctive life in the guise of human intelligence is one of my most constant and profound contemplations. The artificial disguise of consciousness only highlights for me the unconsciousness it doesn’t succeed in disguising.

From birth to death, man is the slave of the same external dimension that rules animals. Throughout his life he doesn’t live, he vegetatively thrives, with greater intensity and complexity than an animal. He’s guided by norms without knowing that they guide him or even that they exist, and all his ideas, feelings and acts are unconscious – not because there’s no consciousness in them but because there aren’t two consciousnesses.

Flashes of awareness that we live an illusion – that, and no more, is what distinguishes the greatest of men.

With a wandering mind I consider the common history of common men. I see how in everything they are slaves of a subconscious temperament, of extraneous circumstances, and of the social and anti-social impulses in which, with which and over which they clash like petty objects.

How often I’ve heard people say the same old phrase that symbolizes all the absurdity, all the nothingness, all the verbalized ignorance of
their lives. It’s the phrase they use in reference to any material pleasure: ‘This is what we take away from life…’ Take where? take how? take why? It would be sad to wake them out of their darkness with questions like that… Only a materialist can utter such a phrase, because everyone who utters such a phrase is, whether he knows it or not, a materialist. What does he plan to take from life, and how? Where will he take his pork chops and red wine and lady friend? To what heaven that he doesn’t believe in? To what earth, where he’ll take only the rottenness that was the latent essence of his whole life? I can think of no phrase that’s more tragic, or that reveals more about human humanity. That’s what plants would say if they could know that they enjoy the sun. That’s what animals would say about their somnambulant pleasures, were their power of self-expression not inferior to man’s. And perhaps even I, while writing these words with a vague impression that they might endure, imagine that my memory of having written them is what I ‘take away from life’. And just as a common corpse is lowered into the common ground, so the equally useless corpse of the prose I wrote while waiting will be lowered into common oblivion. A man’s pork chops, his wine, his lady friend – who am I to make fun of them?

Brothers in our common ignorance, different expressions of the same blood, diverse forms of the same heredity – which of us can deny the other? A wife can be denied, but not mother, not father, not brother.

151

Outside, in the slow moonlit night, the wind slowly shakes things that cast fluttering shadows. Perhaps it’s just hanging laundry from the floor above, but the shadows don’t know they’re from shirts, and they impalpably flutter in hushed harmony with everything else.

I left the shutters open so as to wake up early, but so far I haven’t succeeded in falling asleep or even in staying wide awake, and the night’s already so old that not a sound can be heard. There’s moonlight beyond the shadows of my room, but it doesn’t come through the
window. It exists like a day of hollow silver, and the roof of the building opposite, which I can see from my bed, is liquid with a blackish whiteness. In the moon’s hard light there’s a sad peace, like lofty congratulations to someone who can’t hear them.

And without seeing, without thinking, my eyes now closed on my non-existent slumber, I meditate on what words can truly describe moonlight. The ancients would say that it is silvery or white. But this supposed whiteness actually consists of many colours. Were I to get out of bed and look past the cold panes, I know I would see that in the high lonely air the moonlight is greyish white, blued by a subdued yellow; that over the various, unequally dark rooftops it bathes the submissive buildings with a black white and floods the red brown of the highest clay tiles with a colourless colour. At the end of the street – a placid abyss where the naked cobblestones are unevenly rounded – it has no colour other than a blue which perhaps comes from the grey of the stones. In the depths of the horizon it must be almost dark blue, different from the black blue in the depths of the sky. On the windows where it strikes, the moonlight is a black yellow.

From here in my bed, if I open my eyes, heavy with the sleep I cannot find, it looks like snow turned into colour, with floating threads of warm nacre. And if I think with what I feel, it’s a tedium turned into white shadow, darkening as if eyes were closing on this hazy whiteness.