The Book of Disquiet (30 page)

We externalize impressions not so much because we have them but to convince ourselves that we do.

212

To have opinions is to sell out to yourself. To have no opinion is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.

213

Everything slips away from me. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and all it contains, my personality: it all slips away. I constantly feel that I was someone different, that a different I felt, that a different I thought. I’m watching a play with a different, unfamiliar setting, and what I’m watching is me.

In the commonplace clutter of my literary drawers I sometimes find things I wrote ten or fifteen years ago, or longer, and many of them seem to be written by a stranger; I can’t recognize the voice as my own. But who wrote them, if not me? I felt those things, but in what seems to be another life, one from which I’ve now awoken, as if from someone else’s sleep.

I often come across pages I wrote in my youth, when I was seventeen or twenty, and some of them reveal an expressive power I can’t remember having back then. There are certain phrases and sentences written in the wake of my adolescence that seem like the product of the person I am now, with all that I’ve learned in the intervening years. I see I’m the same as what I was. And since in general I feel that I’ve greatly progressed from what I was, I wonder where the progress is, if back then I was the same as now.

There’s a mystery here that discredits and disturbs me.

Just the other day I was bowled over by a short piece I wrote ages ago. I’m quite certain that the special care I take with language goes back only a few years, but in one of my drawers I found this much older piece of writing in which that same care was clearly evident. I must not have known myself at all back then. How did I develop into what I already was? How have I come to know the I that I never knew back then? And everything becomes a confusing labyrinth where I stray, in myself, away from myself.

I let my mind wander, and I’m sure that what I’m writing I’ve already written. I remember. And I ask the one in me who presumes to exist if in the Platonism of sensations there might not be another, less vertical anamnesis – another pre-existing life that we vaguely remember but that belongs only to this life…

My God, my God, who am I watching? How many am I? Who is I? What is this gap between me and myself?

214

Again I found pages of mine, this time in French, written some fifteen years ago. I’ve never been in France and was never in close contact with French people, so it’s not as if I had a familiarity with the language that waned over the years. Today I read as much French as I ever did. I’m older and more practised in thought; I should have progressed. Yet these pages from my distant past denote a confidence in the use of French that I no longer possess; they have a fluid style that today I couldn’t possibly achieve in that language; there are entire passages,
complete sentences, grammatical forms and idioms that demonstrate a fluency I’ve lost without remembering that I ever had it. How can this be explained? Who did I replace inside myself?

It’s easy enough to form a theory of the fluidity of things and souls, to understand ourselves as an inner flow of life, to imagine that we’re a large quantity, that we traverse ourselves, that we have been many… But in this case there’s something besides the flow of personality between its own banks: there’s an absolute other, an extraneous self that was me. That with age I should lose my imagination, my emotion, a certain kind of intelligence, a way of feeling – all of this, while causing regret, wouldn’t cause me any great wonder. But what am I confronting when I read myself as if reading a stranger? On what shore am I standing if I see myself in the depths?

At other times I find pages that I not only don’t remember having written, which in itself doesn’t astonish me, but that I don’t even remember having been capable of writing, which terrifies me. Certain phrases belong to another mentality. It’s as if I’d found an old picture that I know is of me, with a different height and with features I don’t recognize, but undoubtedly me, terrifyingly I.

215

I have the most conflicting opinions, the most divergent beliefs. For it’s never I who thinks, speaks or acts. It’s always one of my dreams, which I momentarily embody, that thinks, speaks and acts for me. I open my mouth, but it’s I-another who speaks. The only thing I feel to be really
mine
is a huge incapacity, a vast emptiness, an incompetence for everything that is life. I don’t know the gestures for any real act.....

I never learned how to exist.

I obtain everything I want, as long as it’s inside me.

I’d like the reading of this book to leave you with the impression that you’ve traversed a sensual nightmare.

What used to be moral is aesthetic for us. What was social is now individual.

Why should I look at twilights if I have within me thousands of diverse twilights – including some that aren’t twilights – and if, besides seeing them inside me, I myself
am them
, on the inside and the outside?

216

The sunset spreads over the scattered clouds that dot the entire sky. Soft hues of every colour fill the lofty, spatial diversities, absently floating amid the sorrows on high. On the crests of the half-coloured, half-shaded rooftops, the last slow rays of the departing sun take on colours that are not their own nor of the things they light up. An immense calm hangs over the noisy city, which is also growing calmer. Everything breathes beyond colour and sound, in a deep and hushed sigh.

On the painted buildings that the sun doesn’t see, the colours are beginning to grey. There’s a coldness in these colours’ diversity. A mild anxiety dozes in the pseudo-valleys formed by the streets. It dozes and grows calm. And little by little, in the lowest of the high clouds, the hues begin to be shadowy. Only in that tiny cloud – a white eagle hovering above everything – does the far-off sun still cast its smiling gold.

Everything I sought in life I abandoned for the sake of the search. I’m like one who absent-mindedly looks for he doesn’t know what, having forgotten it in his dreaming as the search got under way. The thing being searched for becomes less real than the real motions of the hands that search – rummaging, picking up, putting down – and that visibly exist, long and white, with exactly five fingers on each.

All that I’ve had is like this high and diversely identical sky, tatters of nothing tinged by a distant light, fragments of pseudo-life gilded by death from afar with its sad smile of whole truth. All I’ve had has amounted to my not knowing how to search, like a feudal lord of swamps at twilight, solitary prince of a city of empty tombs.

All that I am or was, or that I think I am or was, suddenly loses – in these thoughts and in that high cloud’s suddenly spent light – the secret, the truth, perhaps fortune, that was in some obscure thing that
has life for a bed. All of this, like a sun that’s missing, is all I have left. Over the diversely high rooftops the light lets its hands slip away until, in the unity of those same rooftops, the inner shadow of everything emerges.

Like a hazy flickering drop, in the distance the first small star glows.

217

All stirrings of our sensibility, even the most pleasant ones, are bound to disturb the inscrutable inner life of that same sensibility. Tiny concerns as well as large worries distract us from ourselves, hindering the peace of mind we all aspire to, whether we know it or not.

We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it’s towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses.

218

I’m older than Time and Space, because I’m conscious. Things derive from me; the whole of Nature is the offspring of my sensations.

I seek and don’t find. I want and can’t have.

Without me the sun rises and expires; without me the rain falls and the wind howls. It’s not because of me that there are seasons, the twelve months, time’s passage.

Lord of the world in me which, like earthly lands, I can’t take with me.....

219

That locus of sensations known as my soul sometimes walks with me, consciously, through the city’s nocturnal streets, in the wearisome hours when I feel like a dream among dreams of a different sort, by the
gaslight, in the midst of the transitory sound of traffic.

As my body penetrates the lanes and side streets, my soul loses itself in intricate labyrinths of sensation. All that can disturbingly convey the notion of unreality and feigned existence, all that can demonstrate – not to abstract reason but
and concretely – how the place occupied by the universe is hollower than hollow: all this objectively unfolds before my detached spirit. I don’t know why, but I’m troubled by this objective network of wide and narrow streets, this succession of street lamps, trees, lighted and dark windows, opened and closed gates – heterogeneously nocturnal shapes which my near-sightedness makes even hazier, until they become subjectively monstrous, unintelligible and unreal.

Verbal snatches of envy, lust and triviality collide with my sense of hearing. Whispered murmurs
ripple towards my consciousness.

Little by little I lose my clear awareness of the fact that I concurrently exist with all this, that I really move – seeing little but hearing – among shadows that represent beings and places where there actually are beings. It becomes gradually, darkly, indistinctly unintelligible to me how all of this can exist in the face of eternal time and infinite space.

Through a passive association of ideas, I start thinking about the men whose consciousness of that space and time was so analytically and intuitively acute that it lost touch with the world. It seems ludicrous that on nights no doubt like this one, in cities surely not very different from the one in which I contemplate, there were men such as Plato, Scotus Erigena,* Kant and Hegel who virtually forgot about all this, who became different from these
people. And they were from the same human race.....