The Book of Disquiet (19 page)

Most people are afflicted by an inability to say what they see or think. They say there’s nothing more difficult than to define a spiral in words; they claim it’s necessary to use the unliterary hand, twirling it in a steadily upward direction, so that human eyes will perceive the abstract figure immanent in a wire spring and a certain type of staircase. But if we remember that to say is to renew, we will have no trouble defining a spiral: it’s a circle that rises without ever closing. I realize that most people would never dare define it this way, for they suppose that defining is to say what others want us to say rather than what’s required for the definition. I’ll say it more accurately: a spiral is a potential circle that winds round as it rises, without ever completing itself. But no, the definition is still abstract. I’ll resort to the concrete, and all will become clear: a spiral is a snake without a snake, vertically wound around nothing.

All literature is an attempt to make life real. As all of us know, even when we don’t act on what we know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are all absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary.
Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel and not what someone has taught them to feel. Once I heard a child, who wished to say that he was on the verge of tears, say not ‘I feel like crying,’ which is what an adult, i.e. an idiot, would say, but rather, ‘I feel like tears.’ And this phrase – so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it – decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. ‘I feel like tears’! That small child aptly defined his spiral.

To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming – like worms when a rock is lifted – under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

118

Why should I care that no one reads what I write? I write to forget about life, and I publish because that’s one of the rules of the game. If tomorrow all my writings were lost, I’d be sorry, but I doubt I’d be violently and frantically sorry, as one might expect, given that with my writings would go my entire life. I would probably be like the mother who loses her son but is back to normal in a few months’ time. The great earth that cares for the hills would also, in a less motherly fashion, take care of the pages I’ve written. Nothing matters, and I’m sure there have been people who, looking at life, didn’t have much patience for this child that was still awake, when all they wanted was the peace that would come once the child went to bed.

119

It has always disappointed me to read the allusions in Amiel’s diary* to the fact that he published books. That’s where he falls down. How great he would be otherwise!

Amiel’s diary has always grieved me on my own account. When I came to the passage where he says that Scherer* described the fruit of the mind as ‘the consciousness of consciousness’, I felt it as a direct reference to my soul.

120

That obscure and almost imponderable malice that gladdens every human heart when confronted by the pain and discomfort of others has been redirected, in me, to my own pains, so that I can actually take pleasure in feeling ridiculous or contemptible, as if it were someone else in my place. By a strange and fantastic transformation of sentiments, I don’t feel that malicious and all-too-human gladness when faced with other people’s pain and embarrassment. When others are in difficulty, what I feel isn’t sorrow but an aesthetic discomfort and a sinuous irritation. This isn’t due to compassion but to the fact that whoever looks ridiculous looks that way to others and not just to me, and it irritates me when someone looks ridiculous to others; it grieves me that any animal of the human species should laugh at the expense of another when he has no right to. I don’t care if others laugh at my expense, for I have the advantage of an armoured contempt towards whatever’s outside me.

I’ve surrounded the garden of my being with high iron gratings – more imposing than any stone wall – in such a way that I can perfectly see others while perfectly excluding them, keeping them in their place as others.

To discover ways of not acting has been my main concern in life.

I refuse to submit to the state or to men; I passively resist. The state can only want me for some sort of action. As long as I don’t act,
there’s nothing it can get from me. Since capital punishment has been abolished, the most it can do is harass me; were this to occur, I would have to armour my soul even more, and live even deeper inside my dreams. But this hasn’t happened yet. The state has never bothered me. Fate, it seems, has looked out for me.

121

Like all men endowed with great mental mobility, I have an irrevocable, organic love of settledness. I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places.

122

The idea of travelling nauseates me.

I’ve already seen what I’ve never seen.

I’ve already seen what I have yet to see.

The tedium of the forever new, the tedium of discovering – behind the specious differences of things and ideas – the unrelenting sameness of everything, the absolute similarity of a mosque and a temple and a church, the exact equivalence of a cabin and a castle, the same physical body for a king in robes and for a naked savage, the eternal concordance of life with itself, the stagnation of everything I live, all of it equally condemned to change*…

Landscapes are repetitions. On a simple train ride I uselessly and restlessly waver between my inattention to the landscape and my inattention to the book that would amuse me if I were someone else. Life makes me feel a vague nausea, and any kind of movement aggravates it.

Only landscapes that don’t exist and books I’ll never read aren’t tedious. Life, for me, is a drowsiness that never reaches the brain. This I keep free, so that I can be sad there.

Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! For someone who isn’t anything, like a river, forward motion is no doubt life. But for those who are alert, who think and feel, the horrendous hysteria of trains, cars and ships makes it impossible to sleep or to wake up.

From any trip, even a short one, I return as from a slumber full of dreams – in a dazed confusion, with one sensation stuck to another, feeling drunk from what I saw.

I can’t rest for lack of good health in my soul. I can’t move because of something lacking between my body and soul; it’s not movement that I’m missing, but the very desire to move.

Often enough I’ve wanted to cross the river – those ten minutes from the Terreiro do Paço to Cacilhas.* And I’ve always felt intimidated by so many people, by myself, and by my intention. Once or twice I’ve made the trip, nervous the whole way, setting my foot on dry land only after I’d returned.

When one feels too intensely, the Tagus is an endless Atlantic, and Cacilhas another continent, or even another universe.

123

Renunciation is liberation. Not wanting is power.

What can China give me that my soul hasn’t already given me? And if my soul can’t give it to me, how will China give it to me? For it’s with my soul that I’ll see China, if I ever see it. I could go and seek riches in the Orient, but not the riches of the soul, because I am my soul’s riches, and I am where I am, with or without the Orient.

Travel is for those who cannot feel. That’s why travel books are always so unsatisfying as books of experience. They’re worth only as much as the imagination of the one who writes them, and if the writer has imagination, he can as easily enchant us with the detailed, photographic description – down to each tiny coloured pennant – of scenes he imagined as he can with the necessarily less detailed description of the scenes he thought he saw. All of us are near-sighted, except on the inside. Only the eyes we use for dreaming truly see.

There are basically only two things in our earthly experience: the universal and the particular. To describe the universal is to describe what is common to all human souls and to all human experience – the broad sky, with day and night occurring in it and by it; the flowing of rivers, all with the same fresh and nunnish water; the vast waving mountains known as oceans, which hold the majesty of height in the secret of their depths; the fields, the seasons, houses, faces, gestures; clothes and smiles; love and wars; gods both finite and infinite; the formless Night, mother of the world’s origin; Fate, the intellectual monster that is everything… Describing these or any other universals, my soul speaks the primitive and divine language, the Adamic tongue that everyone understands. But what splintered, Babelish language would I use to describe the Santa Justa Lift,* the Reims Cathedral, the breeches worn by the Zouaves, or the way Portuguese is pronounced in the province of Trás-os-Montes? These are surface differences, the ground’s unevenness, which we can feel by walking but not by our abstract feeling. What’s universal in the Santa Justa Lift is the mechanical technology that makes life easier. What’s true in the Reims Cathedral is neither Reims nor the Cathedral but the religious splendour of buildings dedicated to understanding the human soul’s depths. What’s eternal in the Zouaves’ breeches is the colourful fiction of clothes, a human language whose social simplicity is, in a certain way, a new nakedness. What’s universal in local accents is the homely tone of voice in those who live spontaneously, the diversity within groups, the multicoloured parade of customs, the differences between peoples, and the immense variety of nations.

Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.

124

(
Chapter on Indifference or something like that
)

Every soul worthy of itself desires to live life in the Extreme. To be satisfied with what one is given is for slaves. To ask for more is for children. To conquer more is for madmen, because every conquest is .....

To live life in the Extreme means to live it to the limit, but there are three ways of doing this, and it’s up to the superior soul to choose one of the ways. The first way to live life in the extreme is by possessing it to an extreme degree, via a Ulyssean journey through all experiential sensations, through all forms of externalized energy. Few people, however, in all the ages of the world, have been able to shut their eyes with a fatigue that’s the sum of all fatigues, having possessed everything in every way.

Indeed few can get life to yield to them completely, body and soul, making them so sure of its love that jealous thoughts become impossible. But this must surely be the desire of every superior, strong-willed soul. When this soul, however, realizes that it can never accomplish such a feat, that it lacks the strength to conquer all parts of the Whole, then there are two other roads it can follow. One is total renunciation, formal and complete abstention, whereby it transfers to the sensible sphere whatever cannot be wholly possessed in the sphere of activity and energy; better to supremely not act than to act spottily, inadequately and in vain, like the superfluous, inane, vast majority of men. The other road is that of perfect equilibrium, the search for the Limit in Absolute Proportion, whereby the longing for the Extreme passes from the will and emotion to the Intelligence, one’s entire ambition being not to live all life or to feel all life but to organize all life, to consummate it in intelligent Harmony and Coordination.

The longing to understand, which in noble souls often replaces the longing to act, belongs to the sphere of sensibility. To replace energy with the Intelligence, to break the link between will and emotion, stripping the material life’s gestures of any and all interest – this, if
achieved, is worth more than life, which is so hard to possess in its entirety and so sad when possessed only in part.

The argonauts said* that it wasn’t necessary to live, only to sail. We, argonauts of our pathological sensibility, say that it’s not necessary to live, only to feel.

125

Your ships, Lord, didn’t make a greater voyage than the one made by my thought, in the disaster of this book. They rounded no cape and sighted no far-flung beach – beyond what daring men had dared and what minds had dreamed – to equal the capes I rounded with my imagination and the beaches where I landed with my .....

Thanks to your initiative, Lord, the Real World was discovered. The Intellectual World will be discovered thanks to mine.

Your argonauts* grappled with monsters and fears. In the voyage of my thought, I also had monsters and fears to contend with. On the path to the abstract chasm that lies in the depths of things there are horrors that the world’s men don’t imagine and fears to endure that human experience doesn’t know. The cape of the common sea beyond which all is mystery is perhaps more human than the abstract path to the world’s void.

Separated from their native soil, banished from the path leading back to their homes, forever widowed from the tranquillity of life being the same, your emissaries finally arrived, when you were already dead, at the oceanic end of the Earth. They saw, materially, a new sky and new earth.

I, far away from the paths to myself, blind to the vision of the life I love,..... I too have finally arrived at the vacant end of things, at the imponderable edge of creation’s limit, at the port-in-no-place of the World’s abstract chasm.

I have entered, Lord, that Port. I have wandered, Lord, over that sea. I have gazed, Lord, at that invisible chasm.