The Book of Disquiet (27 page)

He is Caesar of an entire square block, and it’s only right that all the women like him.

And so I drag myself to do what I don’t want and to dream what I can’t have, my life....., as meaningless as a broken public clock.

My hazy but constant sensibility and my long but conscious dream
which together form my privilege of a life in the shadows.

188

The ordinary man, however hard his life may be, at least has the pleasure of not thinking about it. To take life as it comes, living it externally like a cat or a dog – that is how people in general live, and that is how life should be lived, if we would have the contentment of the cat or dog.

To think is to destroy. Thought itself is destroyed in the process of thinking, because to think is to decompose. If men knew how to meditate on the mystery of life, if they knew how to feel the thousand complexities which spy on the soul in every single detail of action, then they would never act – they wouldn’t even live. They would kill themselves from fright, like those who commit suicide to avoid being guillotined the next day.

189

R
AINY
D
AY

The air is a veiled yellow, like a pale yellow seen through a dirty white. There’s scarcely any yellow in the grey air, but the paleness of the grey has a yellow in its sadness.

190

Any change in one’s usual routine is always received by the spirit as a chilly novelty, a slightly uncomfortable pleasure. Anyone who leaves the office at five o’clock when he’s in the habit of leaving at six is bound to experience a mental holiday, and a feeling like regret for not knowing what to do with himself.

Yesterday I left the office at four, as I had to take care of some business far away, and by five o’clock I was through with it. I’m not
used to being out on the streets at that hour, and I found that I was in a different city. The soft light on the usual façades was uselessly tranquil, and the usual pedestrians passed by in the city next to me, like sailors who’d disembarked from last night’s ship.

I returned to the office, which was still open, and my colleagues were naturally astonished, as I’d already bid farewell for the day. What? You’re back? Yes, I’m back. There, all alone with those familiar faces who don’t exist for me spiritually, I was free from having to feel. It was in a certain sense home – the place, that is, where one doesn’t feel.

191

It sometimes occurs to me, with sad delight, that if one day (in a future to which I won’t belong) the sentences I write are read and admired, then at last I’ll have my own kin, people who ‘understand’ me, my true family in which to be born and loved. But far from being born into it, I’ll have already died long ago. I’ll be understood only in effigy, when affection can no longer compensate for the indifference that was the dead man’s lot in life.

Perhaps one day they’ll understand that I fulfilled, like no one else, my instinctive duty to interpret a portion of our century; and when they’ve understood that, they’ll write that in my time I was misunderstood, that the people around me were unfortunately indifferent and insensitive to my work, and that it was a pity this happened to me. And whoever writes this will fail to understand my literary counterpart in that future time, just as my contemporaries don’t understand me. Because men learn only what would be of use to their great-grandparents. The right way to live is something we can teach only the dead.

On the afternoon in which I write, the rain has finally let up. A gladness in the air feels almost too cool against the skin. The day is ending not in grey but in pale blue. A hazy blue is even reflecting off the stones of the street. It hurts to live, but the pain is remote. Feeling doesn’t matter. One or another shop window lights up. In a window
higher up, there are people looking down at the workers who are finishing up for the day. The beggar who brushes my shoulder would be shocked if he knew me.

The indefinite hour grows yet a little later in the now less pale and less blue blueness mirrored in the buildings.

Fall gently final hour of this day in which those who believe and are mistaken engage in their usual labours with the joy of unconsciousness, even in their pain. Fall gently, final wave of light, melancholy of this useless afternoon, fogless haze that seeps into my heart. Fall gently and lightly, shimmering blue paleness of this aquatic afternoon – gently, lightly, sadly over the cold and simple earth. Fall gently, invisible grey, embittered monotony, sleepless tedium.

192

During three straight days of heat without let-up, a storm lurked in the anxious stillness until finally drifting elsewhere, and then a gentle, almost cool warmth arrived to soothe the bright surface of things. So too, it sometimes happens in life that a soul weighed down by living suddenly feels relief, for no apparent reason.

I see us as climates over which storms threaten, before breaking elsewhere.

The empty immensity of things, the tremendous oblivion in the sky and on earth…

193

I’ve witnessed, incognito, the gradual collapse of my life, the slow foundering of all that I wanted to be. I can say, with a truth that needs no flowers to show it’s dead, that there’s nothing I’ve wanted – and nothing in which I’ve placed, even for a moment, the dream of only that moment – that hasn’t disintegrated below my windows like a clod of dirt that resembled stone until it fell from a flowerpot on a high
balcony. It would even seem that Fate has always tried to make me love or want things just so that it could show me, on the very next day, that I didn’t have and could never have them.

But as an ironic spectator of myself, I’ve never lost interest in seeing what life brings. And since I now know beforehand that every vague hope will end in disillusion, I have the special delight of already enjoying the disillusion with the hope, like the bitter with the sweet that makes the sweet sweeter by way of contrast. I’m a sullen strategist who, having never won a battle, has learned to derive pleasure from mapping out the details of his inevitable retreat on the eve of each new engagement.

My destiny, which has pursued me like a malevolent creature, is to be able to desire only what I know I’ll never get. If I see the nubile figure of a girl in the street and imagine for the slightest moment, however nonchalantly, what it would be like if she were mine, it’s a dead certainty that ten steps past my dream she’ll meet the man who’s obviously her husband or lover. A romantic would make a tragedy out of this; a stranger to the situation would see it as a comedy; I, however, mix the two things, since I’m romantic in myself and a stranger to myself, and I turn the page to yet another irony.

Some say that without hope life is impossible, others that with hope it’s empty. For me, since I’ve stopped hoping or not hoping, life is simply an external picture that includes me and that I look at, like a show without a plot, made only to please the eyes – an incoherent dance, a rustling of leaves in the wind, clouds in which the sunlight changes colour, ancient streets that wind every which way around the city.

I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write. I unroll myself in sentences and paragraphs, I punctuate myself. In my arranging and rearranging of images I’m like a child using newspaper to dress up as a king, and in the way I create rhythm with a series of words I’m like a lunatic adorning my hair with dried flowers that are still alive in my dreams. And above all I’m calm, like a rag doll that has become conscious of itself and occasionally shakes its head to make the tiny bell on top of its pointed cap (a component part of the same head) produce a sound, the jingling life of a dead man, a feeble notice to Fate.

But how often, in the middle of this peaceful dissatisfaction, my conscious emotion is slowly filled with a feeling of emptiness and tedium for thinking this way! How often I feel, as if hearing a voice behind intermittent sounds, that I myself am the underlying bitterness of this life so alien to human life – a life in which nothing happens except in its self-awareness! How often, waking up for a moment from this exile that’s me, I get a glimpse of how much better it would be to be a complete nobody, the happy man who at least has real bitterness, the contented man who feels fatigue instead of tedium, who suffers instead of imagining he suffers, who kills himself, yes, instead of watching himself die!

I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads. Whatever I feel is felt (against my will) so that I can write that I felt it. Whatever I think is promptly put into words, mixed with images that undo it, cast into rhythms that are something else altogether. From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I. I plumbed myself and dropped the plumb; I spend my life wondering if I’m deep or not, with no remaining plumb except my gaze that shows me – blackly vivid in the mirror at the bottom of the well – my own face that observes me observing it.

I’m like a playing card belonging to an old and unrecognizable suit – the sole survivor of a lost deck. I have no meaning, I don’t know my worth, there’s nothing I can compare myself with to discover what I am, and to make such a discovery would be of no use to anyone. And so, describing myself in image after image – not without truth, but with lies mixed in – I end up more in the images than in me, stating myself until I no longer exist, writing with my soul for ink, useful for nothing except writing. But the reaction ceases, and again I resign myself. I go back to whom I am, even if it’s nothing. And a hint of tears that weren’t cried makes my stiff eyes burn; a hint of anguish that wasn’t felt gets caught in my dry throat. But I don’t even know what I would have cried over, if I’d cried, nor why it is that I didn’t cry over it. The fiction follows me, like my shadow. And what I want is to sleep.

194

A terrible weariness fills the soul of my heart. I feel sad because of whom I never was, and I don’t know with what kind of nostalgia I miss him. I fell, with every sunset, against my hopes and certainties.

195

There are people who truly suffer because they weren’t able, in real life, to live with Mr Pickwick or to shake Mr Wardle’s hand. I’m one of those people. I’ve wept genuine tears over that novel, for not having lived in that time and with those people, real people.

The disasters of novels are always beautiful, because the blood in them isn’t real blood and those who die in them don’t rot, nor is rottenness rotten in novels.

When Mr Pickwick is ridiculous he’s not ridiculous, for it all happens in a novel. Perhaps the novel is a more perfect life and reality, which God creates through us. Perhaps we live only to create it. It seems that civilizations exist only to produce art and literature; words are what speak for them and remain. How do we know that these extra-human figures aren’t truly real? It tortures my mind to think this might be the case…

196

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are. The sensation we come to have of ourselves is of a deserted field at
dusk, sad with reeds next to a river without boats, its glistening waters blackening between wide banks.

I don’t know if these feelings are a slow madness born of disconsolation or if they’re reminiscences of some other world in which we’ve lived – jumbled, criss-crossing remembrances, like things seen in dreams, absurd in the form they come to us but not in their origin, if we knew what it was. I don’t know if we weren’t in fact other beings, whose greater completeness we can sense today, incompletely, forming at best a sketchy notion of their lost solidity in the two dimensions of our present lives, mere shadows of what they were.

I know these thoughts of the emotion ache bitterly in the soul. Our inability to conceive of anything they could correspond to, the impossibility of finding a substitute for what they embrace in our imagination – all of this weighs like a harsh sentence handed down no one knows where, or by whom, or why.

But what remains from feeling all this is an inevitable disaffection with life and all its gestures, a foretasted weariness of all desires in all their manifestations, a generic distaste for all feelings. In these times of acute grief, it is impossible – even in dreams – to be a lover, to be a hero, to be happy. All of this is empty, even in our idea of what it is. It’s all spoken in another language that we can’t grasp – mere nonsense syllables to our understanding. Life is hollow, the soul hollow, the world hollow. All gods die a death greater than death. All is emptier than the void. All is a chaos of things that are nothing.