The Book of Disquiet (48 page)

371

I
N
P
RAISE OF
A
BSURDITY

I speak in earnest and with sadness. This is not a matter for joy, because the joys of dreaming are contradictory and gloomy, and must be enjoyed in a special, mysterious way.

Sometimes I inwardly, objectively observe delightful and absurd things which I can’t even imagine seeing, for they’re illogical to our eyesight – bridges that connect nothing to nothing, roads without beginning or end, upside-down landscapes..... – the absurd, the illogical, the contradictory, everything that detaches and removes us from reality and its vast entourage of practical thoughts, human feelings, and all notions of useful and profitable action. Absurdity prevents the state of spirit in which dreaming is a sweet fury from ever becoming too tedious.

And I have a peculiar, mysterious way of envisioning these absurdities. In some way I can’t explain, I’m able to see these things that are inconceivable for any kind of human vision.

372

I
N
P
RAISE OF
A
BSURDITY

Let’s absurdify life, from east to west.

373

Life is an experimental journey that we make involuntarily. It is a journey of the mind through matter, and since it is the mind that journeys, that is where we live. And so there are contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely and more turbulently than those who live externally. The end result is what counts. What was felt is what was lived. A dream can tire us out as much as physical labour. We never live as hard as when we’ve thought a great deal.

The man in the corner of the dance-hall dances with all the dancers. He sees everything, and because he sees everything, he lives everything. Since everything is ultimately our own sensation, to have actual contact with a body counts for no more than seeing it or just remembering it. I dance, therefore, when I see someone dance. I second the English poet* who, lying in the grass and watching three mowers in the distance, said: ‘A fourth man is mowing, and that fourth am I.’

All of this, told the way I feel it, has to do with the great weariness that came over me today, suddenly and for no apparent reason. I’m not only weary, but embittered; and the bitterness is also a mystery. I feel so anguished I’m on the verge of tears – not the kind that are wept but the kind that stay inside: tears caused by a sickness of the soul, not by a sensible pain.

How much I’ve lived without having lived! How much I’ve thought without having thought! I’m exhausted from worlds of static violence, from adventures I’ve experienced without moving a muscle. I’m surfeited with what I’ve never had and never will, jaded by gods that so far don’t exist. I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided. My muscles are sore from all the effort I have never even thought of making.

Dull, silent, futile… The lofty sky is of a flawed, dead summer. I look at it as if it weren’t there. I sleep what I think, I’m lying down as I walk. I suffer without feeling anything. My enormous nostalgia is for nothing, is nothing, like the lofty sky that I don’t see, and that I’m staring at impersonally.

374

In the day’s limpid perfection, the sun-filled air nevertheless stagnates. It’s not the present pressure of the future storm, not a malaise in our involuntary bodies, not a vague haziness in the truly blue sky. It’s the torpor that the thought of not working makes us feel, a feather tickling our dozing face. It’s sultry but it’s summer. The countryside appeals even to those who don’t like it.

If I were someone else, this would no doubt be a happy day for me, because I’d feel it without thinking about it. I would look forward to finishing my normal day’s work – which to me is monotonously abnormal day after day – and then take the tram to Benfica* with some friends. We would eat dinner right as the sun was setting, in one of the garden restaurants. Our happiness in that moment would be part of the landscape, and recognized as such by all who saw us.

But since I am me, I merely take a little pleasure in the little that it is to imagine myself as that someone else. Yes, soon he-I, under a tree or bower, will eat twice what I can eat, drink twice what I dare drink, and laugh twice what I can conceive of laughing. Soon he, now I. Yes, for a moment I was someone else: in someone else I saw and lived this human and humble joy of existing as an animal in shirtsleeves. Great day that made me dream all this! The sky is sublimely blue, like my fleeting dream of being a hale and hearty sales representative on a sort of holiday when the day’s work is over.

375

The countryside is always where we aren’t. There, and there alone, do real trees and real shade exist.

Life is the hesitation between an exclamation and a question. Doubt is resolved by a period.

Miracles are God’s laziness – or rather, the laziness we ascribe to God when we invent miracles.

The Gods are the incarnation of what we can never be.

The weariness of all hypotheses…

376

The slight inebriation of a mild fever, with its soft and penetrating discomfort that’s cold in our aching bones and warm in our eyes, under our throbbing temples – I adore that discomfort like a slave his beloved oppressor. It puts me in that state of feeble, quivering passivity in which I glimpse visions, turn corners of ideas and get lost among sudden and unexpected feelings.

Thinking, feeling and wanting become a single confused thing. Beliefs, sensations, imagined things and real things get all mixed up, like the contents of various drawers overturned on to the floor.

377

There’s a kind of sad happiness in the feeling of convalescence, especially if the sickness that preceded it affected the nerves.* There’s an autumn in our emotions and thoughts, or rather, a beginning of spring that except for the absence of falling leaves seems, in the air and in the sky, like autumn.

Our fatigue is pleasant, and the pleasantness hurts just a little. We feel a bit removed from life, though still in it, as if on the balcony of life’s house. We become pensive without actually thinking; we feel without any definable emotion. Our will grows calm, for we have no need of it.

That’s when certain memories, certain hopes and certain vague desires slowly climb the slope of consciousness, like indistinct wayfarers seen from the top of a mountain. Memories of futile things: hopes whose non-fulfilment didn’t particularly matter; desires that weren’t violent in nature or in their manifestation, that weren’t ever able to want really to be.

When the day is in keeping with these sensations – today, for example, which is rather cloudy even though it’s summer, with a slight wind that feels almost chilly for not being warm –, then the particular mood in which we think, feel and live these impressions is accentuated. Not that the memories, hopes and desires we’ve had become any clearer. But we feel them more, and their indefinite sum total weighs a little, absurdly, on the heart.

In this moment I feel strangely far away. I’m on the balcony of life, yes, but not exactly of this life. I’m above life, looking down on it. It lies before me, descending in a varied landscape of dips and terraces towards the smoke from the white houses of the villages in the valley. If I close my eyes, I keep seeing, because I’m not really seeing. If I open them I see no more, because I wasn’t really seeing in the first place. I’m nothing but a vague nostalgia, not for the past nor for the future but for the present – anonymous, unending and unintelligible.

378

The classifiers of things, by which I mean those scientists whose science is merely to classify, generally don’t realize that what’s classifiable is infinite and thus cannot be classified. But what really astounds me is that they don’t realize there are things hidden in the cracks of knowledge – things of the soul and of consciousness – that can also be classified.

Perhaps because I think too much or dream too much, or perhaps for some other reason, I don’t distinguish between the reality that exists and the world of dreams, which is the reality that doesn’t exist. And so in my ruminations about the sky and the earth, I insert things that aren’t lit up by the sun or trod on by feet – fluid wonders of my imagination.

I gild myself with sunsets I invent, but what I invent is alive in my invention. I rejoice in imaginary breezes, but the imaginary lives while it’s being imagined. I have a soul, according to various hypotheses, and each of these hypotheses has its own soul, which it gives to me.

The only problem is that of reality, as insoluble as it is alive. What do I know about the difference between a tree and a dream? I can touch the tree; I know that I have the dream. What is all this really?

What is all this? It’s that I, alone in the deserted office, can imaginatively live without abstaining from my intelligence. My thinking isn’t interrupted by the vacant desks and the shipping division that’s empty except for brown paper and balls of string. I’m not at my stool but leaning back in Moreira’s comfortable armchair, enjoying a premature promotion. Perhaps it’s the influence of my surroundings that has anointed me with distraction. These dog days make me tired; I sleep without sleeping, for lack of energy. And that’s why I think this way.

379

D
OLOROUS
I
NTERLUDE

I’m tired of the street, but no, I’m not tired of it – the street is all of life. There’s the tavern opposite, which I can see if I look over my right shoulder, and there are the piled-up crates, which I can see by looking over my left shoulder; and in the middle, which I can only see if I turn around completely, there’s the steady sound of the shoemaker’s hammer, at the entrance to the offices of the Africa Company. I don’t know what’s on the upper floors. On the third floor there’s a rooming house which is said to be immoral, but so it is with everything, life.

Tired of the street? Only thinking makes me tired. When I look at
the street, or feel it, then I don’t think: I do my work with great inner repose, ensconced in my corner, bookkeepingly nobody. I have no soul, nobody here does – it’s all just work in this large office. Where millionaires live the good life, always in some foreign country or other, there is likewise work, and likewise no soul. And all that will remain is one or another poet. If only a phrase of mine could remain, just one thing I’ve written that would make people say ‘Well done!’, like the numbers I register, copying them in the book of my entire life.

I think that I shall always be an assistant bookkeeper in a fabric warehouse. I hope, with absolute sincerity, never to be promoted to head bookkeeper.

380

For a long time – I’m not sure if for days or for months – I haven’t recorded any impressions; I don’t think, therefore I don’t exist. I’ve forgotten who I am. I’m unable to write because I’m unable to be. Through an oblique slumber, I’ve been someone else. To realize I don’t remember myself means that I’ve woken up.

I fainted for a spell, cut off from my life. I return to myself without remembering what I’ve been, and the memory of what I used to be suffers from having been interrupted. I have a confused impression of a mysterious interlude; part of my memory is vainly struggling to find the other part. I can’t pull myself together. If I’ve lived during this time, I forgot to be aware of it.

It’s not that this first day that really feels like autumn – the first uncomfortably cool one to dress the dead summer with less light – gives me, through a kind of distracted clarity, a sensation of dead purpose and false desire. It’s not that in this interlude of lost things there’s a pale trace of useless memory. It’s more painful than that. It’s a tedium of trying to remember what can’t be recalled, an anguish over what my consciousness has lost among reeds and seaweed, on the seashore of who knows what.

I know that the clear, still day has a veritable sky whose blue is less vivid than a deep blue. I know that the sun, slightly less golden than it
was, bathes the walls and windows with its humid glimmers. I know that, although there is no wind, nor a breeze to recall and negate it, a wakeful coolness dozes in the hazy city. I know all this, without thinking or wanting to, and I’m sleepy only because I remember to be sleepy, nostalgic only because I’m disquieted.

I remotely and futilely convalesce from the sickness I never had. Wide awake, I prepare myself for what I don’t dare. What sleepiness kept me from sleeping? What endearment refused to speak to me? How good to be someone else taking in a deep, cold breath of vigorous spring! How good – much better than life – to be able at least to imagine it, while in the distance, in the image I remember, the blue-green reeds bow along the riverside where there’s not a hint of wind!

How often, remembering who I wasn’t, I think of myself young and forget all the rest! The landscapes that existed but that I never saw were different then, and the landscapes that didn’t exist but that I did see were new to me. Why do I care? I ended up in interstices, led on by chance, and now, as the sun itself seems to radiate coolness, the dark reeds by the river sleep coldly in the sunset that I see but do not have.

381

No one has yet defined tedium in a language comprehensible to those who have never experienced it. What some people call tedium is merely boredom; others use the term to mean a nagging discomfort; still others consider tedium to be weariness. But while tedium includes weariness, discomfort and boredom, it doesn’t resemble them any more than water resembles the hydrogen and oxygen of which it is composed.