The Book of Disquiet (35 page)

Sensations aged me. Too much thinking wore me out. My life became a metaphysical fever, always searching for the occult meanings of things, playing with the fire of mysterious analogies, denigrating [?] itself by putting off full lucidity and normal synthesis.

I fell into a complex state of mental indiscipline and general indifference. Where did I take refuge? My impression is that I didn’t take refuge anywhere. I abandoned myself to I don’t know what.

I limited and focused my desires to hone and refine them. To reach the infinite – and I believe it can be reached – we need to have a sure port, just one, from which to set out for the Indefinite.

Today I’m an ascetic in my religion of myself. A cup of coffee, a cigarette and my dreams can substitute quite well for the universe and its stars, for work, love, and even beauty and glory. I need virtually no stimulants. I have opium enough in my soul.

What dreams do I have? I don’t know. I forced myself to reach a point where I’m no longer sure what I think, dream, or envision. I
seem to dream ever more remotely, about vague and imprecise things that can’t be visualized.

I have no theories about life. I don’t know or wonder whether it’s good or bad. In my eyes it’s harsh and sad, with delightful dreams interspersed here and there. Why should I care what it is for others?

Other people’s lives are of use to me only in my dreams, where I live the life that seems to suit each one.

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Thinking is still a form of acting. Only in sheer reverie, where nothing active intervenes and even our self-awareness gets stuck in the mud – only there, in this warm and damp state of non-being, can total renunciation of action be achieved.

To stop trying to understand, to stop analysing… To see ourselves as we see nature, to view our impressions as we view a field – that is true wisdom.

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…the sacred instinct of having no theories…

254

More than once, while roaming the streets in the late afternoon, I’ve been suddenly and violently struck by the bizarre presence of organization in things. It’s not so much natural things that arouse this powerful awareness in my soul; it’s the layout of the streets, the signs, the people dressed up and talking, their jobs, the newspapers, the logic of it all. Or rather, it’s the fact that ordered streets, signs, jobs, people
and society exist, all of them fitting together and going forward and opening up paths.

When I take a good look at man, I see that he’s as unconscious as a dog or cat, that he speaks and organizes himself into society through a different kind of unconsciousness, patently inferior to the unconsciousness that guides ants and bees in their social life. And as if a light had turned on, the intelligence that creates and informs the world becomes as clear to me as the existence of organisms, as clear as the existence of logical and invariable physical laws.

On these occasions, I always recall the words of I can’t remember which scholastic:
Deus est anima brutorum
, God is the soul of the beasts. This marvellous phrase was the author’s way of explaining the certainty with which instinct guides inferior animals, which display no intelligence, or only a primitive outline of one. But we are all inferior animals, and speaking and thinking are merely new instincts, less dependable than others precisely because they’re new. So that the beautifully accurate phrase of the scholastic has a wider application, and I say, ‘God is the soul of everything.’

I’ve never understood how anyone who has stopped to consider the tremendous fact of this universal watch mechanism can deny the watchmaker, in whom not even Voltaire disbelieved. I understand why, in light of certain events that have apparently deviated from a plan (and only by knowing the plan could one know if they have deviated from it), someone might attribute an element of imperfection to this supreme intelligence. I understand this, although I don’t accept it. And I understand why, in view of the evil that’s in the world, one might not acknowledge that the creating intelligence is infinitely good. I understand this, although again I don’t accept it. But to deny the existence of this intelligence, namely God, strikes me as one of those idiocies that sometimes afflict, in one area of their intelligence, men who in all other areas may be superior – those, for example, who systematically make mistakes in adding and subtracting, or who (considering now the intelligence that rules aesthetic sensibility) cannot feel music, or painting, or poetry.

I’ve said that I don’t accept the notion of the watchmaker who is imperfect or who isn’t benevolent. I reject the notion of the imperfect watchmaker, because those aspects of the world’s government and
organization that seem flawed or nonsensical might prove otherwise, if we only knew the plan. While clearly seeing a plan in everything, we also see certain things that apparently make no sense, but if there’s a reason behind everything, then won’t these things be guided by that same reason? Seeing the reason but not the actual plan, how can we say that certain things are outside the plan, when we don’t know what it is? Just as a poet of subtle rhythms can insert an arrhythmic verse for rhythmic purposes, i.e. for the very purpose he seems to be going against (and a critic who’s more linear than rhythmic will say that the verse is mistaken), so the Creator can insert things that our narrow logic considers arrhythmic into the majestic flow of his metaphysical rhythm.

I admit that the notion of an unbenevolent watchmaker is harder to refute, but only on the surface. One could say that since we don’t really know what evil is, we cannot rightfully affirm that something is bad or good, but it’s true that a pain, even if it’s for our ultimate good, is obviously bad in itself, and this is enough to prove that evil exists in the world. A toothache is enough to make one disbelieve in the goodness of the Creator. The basic error in this argument seems to lie in our complete ignorance of God’s plan, and our equal ignorance of what kind of an intelligent person the Intellectual Infinite might be. The existence of evil is one thing; the reason for its existence is another. The distinction may be subtle to the point of seeming sophistic, but it is nevertheless valid. The existence of evil cannot be denied, but one can deny that the existence of evil is evil. I admit that the problem persists, but only because our imperfection persists.

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If there’s one thing life grants us for which we should thank the Gods, besides thanking them for life itself, it’s the gift of not knowing: of not knowing ourselves and of not knowing each other. The human soul is a murky and slimy abyss, a well on the earth’s surface that’s never used. No one would love himself if he really knew himself, and without the vanity which is born of this ignorance and is the blood of the
spiritual life, our souls would die of anemia. No one knows anyone else, and it’s just as well, for if he did, he would discover – in his very own mother, wife or son – his inveterate, metaphysical enemy.

We get along because we’re strangers at heart. What would become of so many happy couples if they could see into one another’s soul, if they could truly understand one another, as romantics say, without knowing the danger (albeit ultimately inconsequential) of what they’re saying? All marriages are flawed, because each partner holds inside, in a secret corner where the soul belongs to the Devil, the wispy image of the desired man who is nothing like the husband, the hazy figure of the sublime woman whom the wife doesn’t live up to. The happiest people are unaware of their frustrated inclinations; the less happy are aware but choose to ignore them, and only an occasional jerky movement or brusque remark evokes, on the casual surface of gestures and words, the hidden Demon, the ancient Eve, the Knight and the Sylph.

The life we live is a flexible, fluid misunderstanding, a happy mean between the greatness that doesn’t exist and the happiness that can’t exist. We are content thanks to our capacity, even as we think and feel, for not believing in the soul’s existence. In the masked ball which is our life, we’re satisfied by the agreeable sensation of the costumes, which are all that really count for a ball. We’re servants of the lights and colours, moving in the dance as if in the truth, and we’re not even aware – unless, remaining alone, we don’t dance – of the so cold and lofty night outside, of the mortal body under the tatters that will outlive it, of all that we privately imagine is essentially us but that is actually just an inner parody of that supposedly true self.

All that we do, say, think or feel wears the same mask and the same costume. No matter how much we take off what we wear, we’ll never reach nakedness, which is a phenomenon of the soul and not of removing clothes. And so, dressed in a body and soul, with our multiple costumes stuck to us like feathers on a bird, we live happily or unhappily – or without knowing how we live – this brief time given us by the gods that we might amuse them, like children who play at serious games.

One or another man, liberated or cursed, suddenly sees – but even this man sees rarely – that all we are is what we aren’t, that we fool
ourselves about what’s true and are wrong about what we conclude is right. And this man, who in a flash sees the universe naked, creates a philosophy or dreams up a religion; and the philosophy spreads and the religion propagates, and those who believe in the philosophy begin to wear it as a suit they don’t see, and those who believe in the religion put it on as a mask they soon forget.

Knowing neither ourselves nor each other, and therefore cheerfully getting along, we keep twirling round in the dance and chatting during the intervals – human, futile, and in earnest – to the sound of the great orchestra of the stars, under the aloof and disdainful gaze of the show’s organizers.

Only they know we’re the prey of the illusion they created for us. But what’s the reason for this illusion, and why is there this or any illusion, and why did they, likewise deluded, give us the illusion they gave us? This, undoubtedly, not even they know.

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I’ve always felt an almost physical loathing for secret things – intrigues, diplomacy, secret societies, occult sciences. What especially irks me are these last two things – the pretension certain men have that, through their understandings with Gods or Masters or Demiurges, they and they alone know the great secrets on which the world is founded.

I can’t believe their claims, though I can believe someone else might. But is there any reason why all these people might not be crazy or deluded? The fact there are a lot of them proves nothing, for there are collective hallucinations.

What really shocks me is how these wizards and masters of the invisible, when they write to communicate or intimate their mysteries, all write abominably. It offends my intelligence that a man can master the Devil without being able to master the Portuguese language. Why should dealing with demons be easier than dealing with grammar? If through long exercises of concentration and willpower one can have so-called astral visions, why can’t the same person – applying considerably
less concentration and willpower – have a vision of syntax? What is there in the teachings and rituals of the Magic Arts that prevents their adherents from writing – I won’t say with clarity, since obscurity may be part of the occult law – but at least with elegance and fluency, which can exist in the sphere of the abstruse? Why should all the soul’s energy be spent studying the language of the Gods, without a pittance left over to study the colour and rhythm of the language of men?

I don’t trust masters who can’t be down-to-earth. For me they’re like those eccentric poets who can’t write like everybody else. I accept that they’re eccentric, but I’d like them to show me that it’s because they’re superior to the norm rather than incapable of it.

There are supposedly great mathematicians who make errors in simple addition, but what I’m talking about here is ignorance, not error. I accept that a great mathematician can add two and two and get five: it can happen to anyone in a moment of distraction. What I don’t accept is that he not know what addition is or how it’s done. And this is the case of the overwhelming majority of occult masters.

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Thought can be lofty without being elegant, but to the extent it lacks elegance it will have less effect on others. Force without finesse is mere mass.

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To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.

If a man writes well only when he’s drunk, then I’ll tell him: Get drunk. And if he says that it’s bad for his liver, I’ll answer: What’s your liver? A dead thing that lives while you live, whereas the poems you write live without while.

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I enjoy speaking. Or rather, I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities. Perhaps because real sensuality doesn’t interest me in the least, not even intellectually or in my dreams, desire in me metamorphosed into my aptitude for creating verbal rhythms and for noting them in the speech of others. I tremble when someone speaks well. Certain pages from Fialho* and from Chateaubriand make my whole being tingle in all of its pores, make me rave in a still shiver with impossible pleasure. Even certain pages of Vieira,* in the cold perfection of their syntactical engineering, make me quiver like a branch in the wind, with the passive delirium of something shaken.

Like all who are impassioned, I take blissful delight in losing myself, in fully experiencing the thrill of surrender. And so I often write with no desire to think, in an externalized reverie, letting the words cuddle me like a baby in their arms. They form sentences with no meaning, flowing softly like water I can feel, a forgetful stream whose ripples mingle and undefine, becoming other, still other ripples, and still again other. Thus ideas and images, throbbing with expressiveness, pass through me in resounding processions of pale silks on which imagination shimmers like moonlight, dappled and indefinite.