The Book of Disquiet (25 page)

The day will come when I see no more of this, when I’ll be survived by the bananas lining the pavement, by the voices of the shrewd saleswomen, and by the daily papers that the boy has set out on the opposite corner of the street. I’m well aware that the bananas will be others, that the saleswomen will be others, and that the newspapers will show – to those who bend down to look at them – a different date from today’s. But they, because they don’t live, endure, although as others. I, because I live, pass on, although the same.

I could easily memorialize this moment by buying bananas, for the whole of today’s sun seems to be focused on them like a searchlight without a source. But I’m embarrassed by rituals, by symbols, by buying in the street. They might not wrap the bananas the right way. They might not sell them to me as they should be sold, since I don’t
know how to buy them as they should be bought. They might find my voice strange when I ask the price. Better to write than to dare live, even if living means merely to buy bananas in the sunlight, as long as the sun lasts and there are bananas for sale.

Later, perhaps… Yes, later… Another, perhaps… Or perhaps not…

171

Only one thing astonishes me more than the stupidity with which most people live their lives, and that’s the intelligence of this stupidity.

On the face of it, the monotony of ordinary lives is horrifying. In this simple restaurant where I’m eating lunch, I look at the figure of the cook behind the counter and at the old waiter, near my table, who serves me and who I believe has been a waiter here for thirty years. What kind of lives do these men lead? For forty years that figure of a man has spent most of every day in a kitchen; he doesn’t get much time off; he sleeps relatively little; he occasionally goes to his home town, returning without hesitation or regret; he slowly saves his slowly earned money, which he has no plans to spend; he would get ill if he had to retire for good from his kitchen to the piece of land he bought in Galicia; he has been in Lisbon for forty years and has never yet gone to the Rotunda* or to a theatre, and just once to the circus at the Coliseum, whose clowns still inhabit his life’s inner vestiges. He married – I don’t know how or why – and has four sons and a daughter, and his smile, as he leans over the counter in my direction, expresses a tremendous, solemn, satisfied happiness. And he’s not pretending, nor would he have reason to pretend. If he feels happy, it’s because he really is.

And what of the old waiter who serves me and who has just set before me what must be the millionth coffee he’s set on a customer’s table? He has the same life as the cook, the only difference being the fifteen or twenty feet between the dining area and the kitchen, where they carry out their respective functions. As for the rest, the waiter has only two sons, goes more often to Galicia, has seen more of Lisbon
than the cook, knows Oporto, where he spent four years, and is equally happy.

It shocks me to consider the panorama of these lives, but before I can feel horror, pity and indignation on their account, it occurs to me that those who feel no horror or pity or indignation are the very ones who would have every right to – namely, the people who live these lives. It’s the central error of the literary imagination: to suppose that others are like us and must feel as we do. Fortunately for humanity, each man is just who he is, it being given only to the genius to be a few others as well.

What’s given, in fact, always depends on the person or thing it’s given to. A minor incident in the street brings the cook to the door and entertains him more than I would be entertained by contemplating the most original idea, by reading the greatest book, or by having the most gratifying of useless dreams. If life is basically monotony, he has escaped it more than I. And he escapes it more easily than I. The truth isn’t with him or with me, because it isn’t with anyone, but happiness does belong to him.

Wise is the man who monotonizes his existence, for then each minor incident seems a marvel. A hunter of lions feels no adventure after the third lion. For my monotonous cook, a fist-fight on the street always has something of a modest apocalypse. One who has never been outside Lisbon travels to the infinite in the tram to Benfica,* and should he ever go to Sintra,* he’ll feel as though he’s been to Mars. The man who has journeyed all over the world can’t find any novelty in five thousand miles, for he finds only new things – yet another novelty, the old routine of the forever new – while his abstract concept of novelty got lost at sea after the second new thing he saw.

A man of true wisdom, with nothing but his senses and a soul that’s never sad, can enjoy the entire spectacle of the world from a chair, without knowing how to read and without talking to anyone.

Monotonizing existence, so that it won’t be monotonous. Making daily life anodyne, so that the littlest thing will amuse. My days at the office, where I always do the very same dull and useless work, are punctuated by visions of me escaping, by dreamed remnants of faraway islands, by feasts in the promenades of parks from other eras, by other landscapes, other feelings, another I. But I realize, between two
ledger entries, that if I had all this, none of it would be mine. Better, after all, to have Vasques my boss than the kings of my dreams; better, after all, the office on Rua dos Douradores than the grand promenades of impossible parks. Having Vasques as my boss, I can enjoy dreaming of kings; having the office on Rua dos Douradores, I can enjoy the inner vision of non-existent landscapes. But if I had the kings of my dreams, what would I have left to dream? If I had impossible landscapes, what other impossibilities would remain for me to imagine?

Give me monotony – the dull repetition of the same old days, today an exact copy of yesterday – while my observant soul enjoys the fly that flits past my eyes and distracts me, the laughter that drifts up from I’m not sure which street, the liberation I feel when it’s time to close the office, and the infinite repose of a day off.

I can imagine that I’m everything, because I’m nothing. If I were something, I wouldn’t be able to imagine. An assistant bookkeeper can dream he is the Roman emperor, but the King of England cannot, for in his dreams the King of England is precluded from being any king other than the one he is. His reality won’t let him feel.*

172

The slope leads to the mill, but effort leads to nothing.

It was an early autumn afternoon, when the sky has a cold, dead warmth, and clouds smother the light with blankets of moisture.

Destiny gave me only two things: accounting ledgers and a talent for dreaming.

173

Dreaming is the worst of drugs, because it’s the most natural of all. It works its way into our habits like no other drug can. We take it unawares, like a poison slipped in a drink. It doesn’t hurt, doesn’t
make you pale, and won’t knock you out, but the soul that takes it can’t be cured, for it can never let go of its poison, which is its very own self.

Like a pageant in the mist.....

In dreams I learned to crown the
foreheads of the ordinary with images; to say the banal with mystery and the simple with meanders; to gild, with the sun of artifice, the dark corners and forgotten furniture; and, whenever I write, to give music (as if lulling myself) to the fluid phrases of my fixation.

174

After a bad night’s sleep, nobody likes us. The sleep which deserted us took with it something that made us human. We feel a latent irritation that even seems to imbue the inorganic air around us. It’s we, after all, who deserted ourselves; it’s between us and us that the silent battle of diplomacy is fought.

Today I’ve dragged my feet and heavy fatigue through the streets. My soul has been reduced to a tied-up ball of thread, and what I am and have been, which is me, forgot its name. I don’t know if I’ll have a tomorrow. All I know is that I didn’t sleep, and the confusion I feel at certain moments imposes long silences on my internal speech.

Ah, the huge parks enjoyed by others, the gardens familiar to so many, the tree-lined paths where people who will never know me walk! I stagnate between sleepless nights, as one who never dared to be superficial, and my meditation is startled awake like a dream when it ends.

I’m a widowed house, cloistered in itself, haunted by shy and furtive ghosts. I’m always in the next room, or they are, and trees loudly rustle all around me. I wander and find; I find because I wander. Ah, it’s you, my childhood days, dressed up in pinafores!

And during all of this I walk down the street, a wandering sleepyhead, a stray leaf. Some slow wind has swept me off the ground and I drift, like the end of twilight, among the details of the landscape. My eyelids weigh heavy on my dragging feet. Because I’m walking I feel
like sleeping. My mouth is shut as if to seal my lips. I walk the way a ship sinks.

No, I didn’t sleep, but I’m more myself when I haven’t slept and still can’t sleep. I’m truly I in the incidental and symbolic eternity of this half-souled state in which I delude myself. One or two people look at me as if they knew me and found me strange. I’m vaguely aware of looking back at them, with eyes I can feel under the eyelids that rub against their surface, but I’d rather not know about the world’s existence.

I’m sleepy, very sleepy, totally sleepy!

175

The generation I belong to was born into a world where those with a brain as well as a heart couldn’t find any support. The destructive work of previous generations left us a world that offered no security in the religious sphere, no guidance in the moral sphere, and no tranquillity in the political sphere. We were born into the midst of metaphysical anguish, moral anxiety and political disquiet. Inebriated with objective formulas, with the mere methods of reason and science, the generations that preceded us did away with the foundations of the Christian faith, for their biblical criticism – progressing from textual to mythological criticism – reduced the gospels and the earlier scriptures of the Jews to a doubtful heap of myths, legends and mere literature, while their scientific criticism gradually revealed the mistakes and ingenuous notions of the gospels’ primitive ‘science’. At the same time, the spirit of free inquiry brought all metaphysical problems out into the open, and with them all the religious problems that had to do with metaphysics. Drunk with a hazy notion they called ‘positivism’, these generations criticized all morality and scrutinized all rules of life, and all that remained from the clash of doctrines was the certainty of none of them and the grief over there being no certainty. A society so undisciplined in its cultural foundations could obviously not help but be a victim, politically, of its own chaos, and so we woke up to a world eager for social innovations, a world that gleefully
pursued a freedom it didn’t grasp and a progress it had never defined.

But while the sloppy criticism of our fathers bequeathed us the impossibility of being Christians, it didn’t bequeath us an acceptance of the impossibility; while it bequeathed us a disbelief in established moral codes, it didn’t bequeath us an indifference to morality and the rules for peaceful human coexistence; while it left the thorny problem of politics in doubt, it didn’t leave our minds unconcerned about how to solve it. Our fathers blithely wreaked destruction, for they lived in a time that was still informed by the solidity of the past. The very thing they destroyed was what gave strength to society and enabled them to destroy without noticing that the building was cracking. We inherited the destruction and its aftermath.

Today the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. Today the right to live and triumph is awarded on virtually the same basis as admission into an insane asylum: an inability to think, amorality, and nervous excitability.

176

T
HE
I
NN OF
R
EASON

On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it’s still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there’s something understandable.

177

Metaphysical theories that can give us the momentary illusion that we’ve explained the unexplainable; moral theories that can fool us for an hour into thinking we finally know which of all the closed doors leads to virtue; political theories that convince us for a day that we’ve solved some problem, when there are no solvable problems except in
mathematics… May our attitude towards life be summed up in this consciously futile activity, in this preoccupation that gives no pleasure but at least keeps us from feeling the presence of pain.

There’s no better sign that a civilization has reached its height than the awareness, in its members, of the futility of all effort, given that we’re ruled by implacable laws, which nothing can repeal or obstruct. We may be slaves shackled to the whim of gods who are stronger than us, but they’re not any better, being subject – like us – to the iron hand of an abstract Fate, which is superior to justice and kindness, indifferent to good and evil.