The Book of Disquiet (39 page)

287

We worship perfection because we can’t have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.

We harbour a secret hatred of paradise. Our yearnings are like those of the poor wretch who hopes for the countryside in heaven. It’s not abstract ecstasies or marvels of the absolute that can enchant a feeling soul; it’s homesteads and hillsides, green islands in blue seas, wooded paths and restful hours spent on ancestral farms, even if we’ve never
had these things. If there’s no land in heaven, then better there were no heaven. Better that everything be nothing and that the plotless novel come to an end.

To achieve perfection would require a coldness foreign to man, and he would lose the human heart that makes him love perfection.

In awe we worship the impulse to perfection of great artists. We love their approximation to perfection, but we love it because it is only an approximation.

288

How tragic not to believe in human perfectibility!

And how tragic to believe in it!

289

If I had written
King Lear
, I would be plagued by remorse for the rest of my life. For the sheer greatness of this work grossly magnifies its defects, its monstrous defects, the tiniest things that stand between certain scenes and their possible perfection. It’s not the sun marred by spots; it’s a broken Greek statue. All that has ever been done is ridden with errors, faulty perspectives, ignorance, signs of bad taste, shortcomings and oversights. To write a masterpiece large enough to be great and perfect enough to be sublime is a task no one has had the fortune or divine capacity to accomplish. Whatever can’t be done in a single burst suffers from the unevenness of our spirit.

This thought causes my imagination to be overwhelmed by regret, by a painful certainty that I’ll never be able to do anything good and useful for Beauty. The only method for achieving Perfection is to be God. Our greatest effort takes time; the time it takes passes through various stages of our soul, and each stage of the soul, being unlike any other, taints the character of the work with its own personality. All we can be certain of when we write is that we write badly; the only
great and perfect works are the ones we never dream of realizing.

Listen still, with a sympathetic ear. Hear me out and then tell me if dreaming isn’t better than life…

Hard work never pays off. Effort never leads anywhere. Only abstention is noble and lofty, for it alone recognizes that realization is always inferior, that the work we produce is always the grotesque shadow of the work we dreamed.

How I would love to be able to record, in words on paper that could be read out loud and listened to, the dialogues of the characters in my imagined dramas! The action in these dramas flows perfectly and the dialogues are flawless, but the action isn’t spatially delineated in me such that I could materially project it, nor does the substance of these inner dialogues consist of actual words which I could listen to closely and transcribe on paper.

I love certain lyric poets precisely because they weren’t epic or dramatic poets, because they had the intuitive wisdom never to want to express more than an intensely felt or dreamed moment. What can be written unconsciously is the exact measure of the perfection that is possible. No Shakespearian drama satisfies like a lyric poem of Heine. The poetry of Heine is perfect, whereas all drama – of Shakespeare or anyone else – is inevitably imperfect. Ah, to be able to construct a complete Whole, to compose something that would be like a human body, with perfect harmony among all its parts, and with a life, a life of unity and congruency, uniting the scattered traits of its various parts!*

You who listen but hardly hear me have no idea what a tragedy this is! To lose father and mother, to attain neither glory nor happiness, to have neither friend nor lover – all of that can be endured; what cannot be endured is to dream something beautiful that’s impossible to achieve in word or deed.

The awareness that a work is perfect, the satisfaction of a work achieved… – soothing is the sleep under this shady tree in the calm of summer.

290

When I lean back and belong only remotely to life, then how fluently I dictate to my inertia the phrases I’ll never write and how clearly I describe in my meditation the landscapes I could never describe! I fashion complete sentences with not a word out of place; detailed dramatic plots unroll in my mind; I sense the verbal and metrical cadence of great poems in each and every word, and a great enthusiasm follows me like an invisible slave in the shadows. But if I get up from the chair, where these nearly actualized sensations loll, and step over to the table to write them down, then the words flee, the dramas die, and the vital nexus underlying the rhythmic murmur vanishes, leaving only a distant nostalgia, a vestige of sunlight on faraway mountains, a wind that stirs leaves on the edge of a wilderness, a kinship that’s never revealed, the orgy other people enjoy, the woman whom we expect to turn around and look but who never quite exists.

I’ve undertaken every project imaginable. The
Iliad
composed by me had a structural logic in its organic linking of epodes such as Homer could never have achieved. The meticulous perfection of my unwritten verses makes Virgil’s precision look sloppy and Milton’s power slack. My allegorical satires surpassed all of Swift’s in the symbolic exactitude of their rigorously interconnected particulars. How many Horaces* I’ve been!

And whenever I’ve stood up from the chair where in fact these things were not totally dreamed, I’ve experienced the double tragedy of realizing that they’re worthless and that they weren’t pure dream, that something of them remains on the abstract threshold of my thinking and their being.

I was a genius in more than dreams and in less than life. That is my tragedy. I was the runner who led the race until he fell down, right before the finishing line.

291

If in art there were the office of improver, then I would have a function in life, at least in my life as an artist.

To begin with somebody else’s creation, working only on improving it… Perhaps that is how the
Iliad
was written.

Anything but to have to struggle with original creation!

How I envy those who produce novels, those who begin them and write them and finish them! I can imagine novels chapter by chapter, sometimes with the actual phrases of dialogue and the narrative commentary in between, but I’m incapable of committing these dreams of writing to paper .....

292

Every form of action, from war to logical reasoning, is false; and every abdication is also false. If only I could not act and not abdicate from acting! That would be the Dream-Crown of my glory, the Sceptre-of-Silence of my greatness.

I don’t even suffer. My disdain for everything is so complete that I even disdain myself. The contempt I have for the sufferings of others I also have for my own. And so all my suffering is crushed under the foot of my disdain.

Ah, but this makes me suffer more… Because to value one’s own suffering is to gild it with the sun of pride. Intense suffering can give the sufferer the illusion of being the Chosen One of Pain. Thus .....

293

D
OLOROUS
I
NTERLUDE

Like someone whose eyes, when lifted up after staring at a book for a long time, wince at the mere sight of a naturally bright sun, so too, when I lift my eyes from looking at myself, it hurts and stings me to see the vivid clarity and independence-from-me of the world outside, of the existence of others, of the position and correlation of movements in space. I stumble on the real feelings of others. The antagonism of their psyches towards mine shoves me and trips up my steps. I slide and tumble above and between the sounds of their strange words in my ears, the hard and definite falling of their feet on the actual floor, their motions that really exist, their various and complex ways of being persons who are not mere variants of my own.

And once I’ve hurled myself into these souls, I suddenly feel helpless and empty, as if I’d died and yet I live, a sore and pale shade, which the first breeze will knock to the ground and the first physical contact dissolve into dust.

And then I wonder: Was it worth all the effort I put into isolating and raising myself up? Was it worth making my life into a long-drawn-out calvary for the sake of my Crucified Glory? And even if I know that it was worth it, in these moments I’m overwhelmed by the feeling that it wasn’t and will never be worth it.

294

Money, children, lunatics .....

Wealth should never be envied except platonically. Wealth is freedom.

295

Money is beautiful, because it frees us.

To want to die in Peking and not be able to is one of the things that weigh on me like a feeling of impending doom.

The buyers of useless things are wiser than is commonly supposed – they buy little dreams. They become children in the act of acquisition. When people with money succumb to the charms of those useless little objects, they possess them with the joy of a child gathering sea shells on the beach – the image that best expresses the child’s happiness. He gathers shells on the beach! No two are ever alike for a child. He falls asleep with the two prettiest ones in his hand, and when they’re lost or taken from him (A crime! They’ve made off with outward bits of his soul! They’ve stolen pieces of his dream!), he weeps like a God robbed of a just-created universe.

296

The love of absurdity and paradox is the animal happiness* of the sad. Just as the normal man talks nonsense and slaps others on the back out of zest and vitality, so those incapable of joy and enthusiasm do somersaults in their minds and perform, in their own cold way, the warm gestures of life.

297

Reductio ad absurdum
is one of my favourite drinks.

298

Everything is absurd. One man spends his life earning and saving up money, although he has no children to leave it to nor any hope that some heaven might reserve him a transcendent portion. Another man strives to gain posthumous fame without believing in an afterlife that would give him knowledge of that fame. Yet another wears himself out in pursuit of things he doesn’t really care for. Then there’s one who .....

One man reads so as to learn, uselessly. Another man enjoys himself so as to live, uselessly.

I’m riding on a tram and, as usual, am closely observing all the details of the people around me. For me these details are like things, voices, phrases. Taking the dress of the girl in front of me, I break it down into the fabric from which it’s made and the work that went into making it (such that I see a dress and not just fabric), and the delicate embroidery that trims the collar decomposes under my scrutiny into the silk thread with which it was embroidered and the work it took to embroider it. And immediately, as in a textbook of basic economics, factories and jobs unfold before me: the factory where the cloth was made; the factory where the darker-coloured silk was spun to trim with curlicues its place around the neck; the factories’ various divisions, the machines, the workers, the seamstresses. My inwardly turned eyes penetrate into the offices, where I see the managers trying to stay calm, and I watch everything being recorded in the account books. But that’s not all: I see beyond all this to the private lives of those who live their social existence in these factories and offices. The whole world opens up before my eyes merely because in front of me – on the nape of a dark-skinned neck whose other side has I don’t know what face – I see a regularly irregular dark-green embroidery on a light-green dress.

All humanity’s social existence lies before my eyes.

And beyond this I sense the loves, the secrets and the souls of all who laboured so that the woman in front of me in the tram could wear, around her mortal neck, the sinuous banality of a dark-green silk trim on a less-dark-green cloth.

I get dizzy. The seats in the tram, made of tough, close-woven straw, take me to distant places and proliferate in the form of industries, workers, their houses, lives, realities, everything.

I get off the tram dazed and exhausted. I’ve just lived all of life.

299

Every time I go somewhere, it’s a vast journey. A train trip to Cascais* tires me out as if in this short time I’d travelled through the urban and rural landscapes of four or five countries.

I imagine myself living in each house I pass, each chalet, each isolated cottage whitewashed with lime and silence – happy at first, then bored, then fed up. It all happens in a moment, and as soon as I’ve abandoned one of these homes, I’m filled with nostalgia for the time I lived there. And so every trip I make is a painful and happy harvest of great joys, great boredoms, and countless false nostalgias.

And as I pass by those houses, villas and chalets, I also live the daily lives of all their inhabitants, living them all at the same time. I’m the father, mother, sons, cousins, the maid and the maid’s cousin, all together and all at once, thanks to my special talent for simultaneously feeling various and sundry sensations, for simultaneously living the lives of various people – both on the outside, seeing them, and on the inside, feeling them.

I’ve created various personalities within. I constantly create personalities. Each of my dreams, as soon as I start dreaming it, is immediately incarnated in another person, who is then the one dreaming it, and not I.

To create, I’ve destroyed myself. I’ve so externalized myself on the inside that I don’t exist there except externally. I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.