The Book of Disquiet (36 page)

I weep over nothing that life brings or takes away, but there are pages of prose that have made me cry. I remember, as clearly as what’s before my eyes, the night when as a child I read for the first time, in an anthology, Vieira’s famous passage on King Solomon: ‘Solomon built a palace…’ And I read all the way to the end, trembling and confused. Then I broke into joyful tears – tears such as no real joy could make me cry, nor any of life’s sorrows ever make me shed. That hieratic movement of our clear majestic language, that expression of ideas in inevitable words, like water that flows because there’s a slope, that vocalic marvel in which the sounds are ideal colours – all of this instinctively seized me like an overwhelming political emotion. And I cried. Remembering it today, I still cry. Not out of nostalgia for my childhood, which I don’t miss, but because of nostalgia for the emotion of that moment, because of a heartfelt regret
that I can no longer read for the first time that great symphonic certitude.

I have no social or political sentiments, and yet there is a way in which I’m highly nationalistic. My nation is the Portuguese language. It wouldn’t trouble me at all if Portugal were invaded or occupied, as long as I was left in peace. But I hate with genuine hatred, with the only hatred I feel, not those who write bad Portuguese, not those whose syntax is faulty, not those who used phonetic rather than etymological spelling,* but the badly written page itself, as if it were a person, incorrect syntax, as someone who ought to be flogged, the substitution of
i
for
y
, as the spit that directly disgusts me, independent of who spat it.

Yes, because spelling is also a person. The word is complete when seen and heard. And the pageantry of Graeco-Roman transliteration dresses it for me in its authentic royal robe, making it a lady and queen.

260

Art consists in making others feel what we feel, in freeing them from themselves by offering them our own personality. The true substance of whatever I feel is absolutely incommunicable, and the more profoundly I feel it, the more incommunicable it is. In order to convey to someone else what I feel, I must translate my feelings into his language – saying things, that is, as if they were what I feel, so that he, reading them, will feel exactly what I felt. And since this someone is presumed by art to be not this or that person but everyone (i.e., that person common to all persons), what I must finally do is convert my feelings into a typical human feeling, even if it means perverting the true nature of what I felt.

Abstract things are hard to understand, because they don’t easily command the reader’s attention, so I’ll use a simple example to make my abstractions concrete. Let’s suppose that, for some reason or other (which might be that I’m tired of keeping the books or bored because I have nothing to do), I’m overwhelmed by a vague sadness about life,
an inner anxiety that makes me nervous and uneasy. If I try to translate this emotion with close-fitting words, then the closer the fit, the more they’ll represent my own personal feeling, and so the less they’ll communicate it to others. And if there is no communicating it to others, it would be wiser and simpler to feel it without writing it.

But let’s suppose that I want to communicate it to others – to make it into art, that is, since art is the communication to others of the identity we feel with them, without which there would be no communication and no need for it. I search for the ordinary human emotion that will have the colouring, spirit and shape of the emotion I’m feeling right now for the inhuman, personal reason of being a weary bookkeeper or a bored Lisboan. And I conclude that the ordinary emotion which in ordinary souls has the same characteristics as my emotion is nostalgia for one’s lost childhood.

Now I have the key to the door of my theme. I write and weep about my lost childhood, going into poignant detail about the people and furniture of our old house in the country. I recall the joy of having no rights or responsibilities, of being free because I still didn’t know how to think or feel – and this recollection, if it’s well written and visually effective, will arouse in my reader exactly the same emotion I was feeling, which had nothing to do with childhood.

I’ve lied? No, I’ve understood. That lying, except for the childish and spontaneous kind that comes from wanting to be dreaming, is merely the recognition of other people’s real existence and of the need to conform that existence to our own, which cannot be conformed to theirs. Lying is simply the soul’s ideal language. Just as we make use of words, which are sounds articulated in an absurd way, to translate into real language the most private and subtle shifts of our thoughts and emotions (which words on their own would never be able to translate), so we make use of lies and fiction to promote understanding among ourselves, something that the truth – personal and incommunicable – could never accomplish.

Art lies because it is social. And there are two great forms of art: one that speaks to our deepest soul, the other to our attentive soul. The first is poetry, the second is the novel. The first begins to lie in its very structure; the second in its very intention. One purports to give us the truth through lines that keep strict metres, thus lying against the
nature of speech; the other purports to give us the truth by means of a reality that we all know never existed.

To feign is to love. Whenever I see a pretty smile or a meaningful gaze, no matter whom the smile or gaze belongs to, I always plumb to the soul of the smiling or gazing face to discover what politician wants to buy our vote or what prostitute wants us to buy her. But the politician that buys us loved at least the act of buying us, even as the prostitute loved being bought by us. Like it or not, we cannot escape universal brotherhood. We all love each other, and the lie is the kiss we exchange.

261

In me all affections take place on the surface, but sincerely. I’ve always been an actor, and in earnest. Whenever I’ve loved, I’ve pretended to love, pretending it even to myself.

262

Today I was struck by an absurd but valid sensation. I realized, in an inner flash, that I’m no one. Absolutely no one. In that flash, what I’d supposed was a city proved to be a barren plain, and the sinister light that showed me myself revealed no sky above. Before the world existed, I was deprived of the power to be. If I was reincarnated, it was without myself, without my I.

I’m the suburbs of a non-existent town, the long-winded commentary on a book never written. I’m no one, no one at all. I don’t know how to feel, how to think, how to want. I’m the character of an unwritten novel, wafting in the air, dispersed without ever having been, among the dreams of someone who didn’t know how to complete me.

I always think, I always feel, but there’s no logic in my thought, no emotions in my emotion. I’m falling from the trapdoor on high through
all of infinite space in an aimless, infinitudinous,* empty descent. My soul is a black whirlpool, a vast vertigo circling a void, the racing of an infinite ocean around a hole in nothing. And in these waters which are more a churning than actual waters float the images of all I’ve seen and heard in the world – houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and syllables of voices all moving in a sinister and bottomless swirl.

And amid all this confusion I, what’s truly I, am the centre that exists only in the geometry of the abyss: I’m the nothing around which everything spins, existing only so that it can spin, being a centre only because every circle has one. I, what’s truly I, am a well without walls but with the walls’ viscosity, the centre of everything with nothing around it.

It’s not demons (who at least have a human face) but hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it’s the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything.

If only I knew how to think! If only I knew how to feel!

My mother died too soon for me to ever know her…

263

As prone as I am to tedium, it’s odd that until now I’ve never seriously thought about just what it is. Today my soul is in that state of limbo where neither life nor anything else really appeals, and I’ve decided, since I’ve never done it before, to analyse tedium through my impressionistic thoughts, even though whatever analysis I dream up will naturally be somewhat factitious.

I don’t know if tedium is merely the waking equivalent of a vagrant’s drowsy stupor, or if it is something more noble. In my own experience, tedium occurs frequently but unpredictably, without following a set pattern. I can go an entire listless Sunday without tedium, or I can
suddenly experience it, like a cloud overhead, in the middle of concentrated labour. As far as I can tell, it isn’t related to my state of health (or lack thereof), nor does it result from causes residing in my visible, tangible self.

To say that it’s a metaphysical anxiety in disguise, that it’s an acute disillusion incognito, that it’s a voiceless poetry of the bored soul sitting at the window which looks out on to life – to say this or something similar can colour tedium, like a child who colours over the outlines of a figure and effaces them, but it’s no more to me than a din of words echoing in the cellar of the mind.

Tedium… To think without thinking, but with the weariness of thinking; to feel without feeling, but with the anxiety of feeling; to shun without shunning, but with the disgust that makes one shun – all of this is in tedium but is not tedium itself, being at best a paraphrase or translation of it. In terms of our immediate sensation, it’s as if the drawbridge had been raised over the moat of the soul’s castle, such that we can only gaze at the lands around the castle, without ever being able to set foot on them. There’s something in us that isolates us from ourselves, and the separating element is as stagnant as we are, a ditch of filthy water around our self-alienation.

Tedium… To suffer without suffering, to want without desire, to think without reason… It’s like being possessed by a negative demon, like being bewitched by nothing at all. Wizards and witches, by making images of us and subjecting them to torments, can supposedly cause those torments to be reflected in us through an astral transference. Transposing this image, I would say that my tedium is like the fiendish reflection of an elfin demon’s sorceries, applied not to my image but to its shadow. It’s on my internal shadow, on the outside of my inner soul, that papers are pasted or needles are poked. I’m like the man that sold his shadow,* or, rather, like the shadow that was sold.

Tedium… I work hard. I fulfil what the moralists of action would say is my social duty. I fulfil that duty, or fate, without too much effort and without gross incompetence. But sometimes right in the middle of my work, or in the middle of the rest which, according to the same moralists, I deserve and ought to enjoy, my soul overflows with a bitter inertia, and I’m tired, not of working or of resting, but of me.

Why of me, if I wasn’t thinking about myself? Of what other thing, if I wasn’t thinking about anything? The mystery of the universe that descends on my bookkeeping or on my repose? The universal sorrow of living which is suddenly particularized in my soul-turned-medium? Why so ennoble someone whose identity isn’t even certain? It’s a sensation of emptiness, a hunger without appetite, as noble as the sensations that come to our physical brain and stomach when we smoke too much or suffer from indigestion.

Tedium… Perhaps, deep down, it is the soul’s dissatisfaction because we didn’t give it a belief, the disappointment of the sad child (who we are on the inside) because we didn’t buy it the divine toy. Perhaps it is the insecurity of one who needs a guiding hand and who doesn’t feel, on the black path of profound sensation, anything more than the soundless night of not being able to think, the empty road of not being able to feel…

Tedium… Those who have Gods don’t have tedium. Tedium is the lack of a mythology. For people without beliefs, even doubt is impossible, even their scepticism will lack the strength to question. Yes, tedium is the loss of the soul’s capacity for self-delusion; it is the mind’s lack of the non-existent ladder by which it might firmly ascend to truth.

264

I know, by analogy, what it means to overeat. I know it through my sensations, not my stomach. There are days when they’ve eaten too much, and my body gets heavy, my gestures are clumsy, and I don’t feel like moving a muscle.

On these occasions, like a thorn in the side, a vestige of my vanished imagination nearly always emerges from out of my undisturbed torpor. And I make plans founded on ignorance, I raise edifices based on hypotheses, and I’m dazzled by what’s bound to never happen.

At these strange times, my moral as well as material life are mere appendages to who I am. I forget not only about the notion of duty but also about the idea of being, and I feel physically tired of the whole
universe. I sleep what I know and what I dream with an equal intensity that makes my eyes sore. Yes, at these times I know more about myself than I’ve ever known, and I’m every snooze of every beggar lying under the trees on the estate of Nobody.

265

The idea of travelling seduces me vicariously, as if it were the perfect idea for seducing someone I’m not. All the world’s vast panorama traverses my alert imagination like a colourful tedium; I trace a desire as one who’s tired of making gestures, and the anticipated weariness of potential landscapes scourges the flower of my drooping heart like a harsh wind.

And as with journeys, so with books, and as with books, so with everything… I dream of an erudite life in the quiet company of the ancients and the moderns, a life in which I would renew my emotions via the emotions of others, and fill myself with contradictory thoughts based on the contradiction between the meditators and those who almost thought (and who are the majority of writers). But the very idea of reading vanishes as soon as I pick up a book from the table, the physical act of reading abolishing all desire to read. In the same way, the idea of travelling withers if I happen to go near a platform or port of departure. And I return to the two worthless things that I (likewise worthless) am certain of: my daily life as an inconspicuous passer-by, and the waking insomnia of my dreams.