The Book of Disquiet (41 page)

309

The pleasure of praising ourselves…

R
AINY
L
ANDSCAPE

It smells to me of coldness, of regret, of the hopelessness of every road and of every ideal ever dreamed up.

Women today take so much care with how they look and move that they give the excruciating impression of being ephemeral and irreplaceable.

Their
and embellishments so paint and colour them that they become more decorative than carnally alive. Friezes, pictures, paintings – that’s all they amount to, visually speaking.

The mere gesture of wrapping a shawl around their shoulders is done with a greater awareness of its visual effect than ever before. The shawl used to be part of a woman’s basic attire; now it’s an optional feature, depending solely on notions of aesthetic taste.

In these colourful times when almost nothing escapes being turned into art, everything plucks petals from the conscious sphere and merges
into flights of fancy.

These female figures are all like fugitives from pictures that were never painted. Some of them are too full of details… Certain profiles
stand out too sharply, as if they were trying to look unreal, so detached are their pure lines from the background.

310

My soul is a secret orchestra, but I don’t know what instruments – strings, harps, cymbals, drums – strum and bang inside me. I only know myself as the symphony.

Every effort is a crime, because every gesture is a dead dream.

Your hands are captive doves. Your lips are silent doves (that come to coo before my eyes).

All of your gestures are birds. You’re a swallow when you stoop, a condor when you look at me, and an eagle in your disdainful lady’s ecstasies. I look at you and see a pond full of flapping wings .....

You are nothing but wings .....

Rain, rain, rain…

Groaning, unrelenting rain .....

My body makes even my soul shiver, not with a coldness that’s in the air, but with a coldness that comes from watching the rain.

Every pleasure is a vice, because to seek pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the only black vice is to do what everyone else does.

311

Sometimes, without expecting it and with no reason to expect it, the oppressiveness of common life makes me gag, and I feel physically nauseated by the voice and gestures of my so-called fellow man. It’s an instant physical nausea, automatically felt in my stomach and head, an impressive but stupid consequence of my alert sensibility. Everyone who talks to me, each face whose eyes gaze at me, hits me like an insult or a piece of filth. I brim with disgust at the whole lot. I get dizzy from feeling myself feel them.

And in these moments of abdominal distress, there’s nearly always a man, a woman or even a child that stands before me as a live representative of the banality that torments me. Not a representative according to my subjective, pondered emotion but by an objective truth, outwardly corresponding to what I inwardly feel and appearing to me by analogical magic as the perfect example for the rule I conceive.

312

There are days when everyone I meet, and especially the people I’m forced to have daily contact with, appear as symbols, and individually or together they form a prophetic or occult writing that obscurely describes my life. The office becomes a page with people for its words; the street is a book; the words I exchange with familiar or unfamiliar faces are phrases for which I have no dictionary, though I have an idea of what they mean. They speak, they tell, but it’s not of themselves that they speak or tell; they’re words, as I’ve said, that don’t disclose their meaning, but they allow glimpses. In my twilight vision I only vaguely distinguish what these sudden glass panes on the surfaces of things let show from the interior that they veil and reveal. I understand without knowledge, like a blind man when someone tells him about colours.

Walking along the street, I often hear snatches of private conversations,
and they’re almost all about another woman, another man, a friend’s boyfriend or someone else’s girlfriend .....

Just to hear these shadows of human speech (which is all that occupies most conscious lives) fills me with a sickening tedium, an anguished feeling of being exiled among spiders, and a sudden awareness of my humiliation among real people, condemned to being looked upon by the landlord and the whole neighbourhood as a tenant just like everyone else on the block. And it’s with loathing that I peer through the bars of the storeroom’s back windows, seeing everybody’s rubbish heaped up in the rain in the grimy courtyard which is my life.

313

I loathe the happiness of all these people who don’t know they’re unhappy. Their human life is full of what, in a true sensibility, would produce a surfeit of anxieties. But since their true life is vegetative, their sufferings come and go without touching their soul, and they live a life that can be compared only to that of a man with a toothache who won a fortune – the genuine good fortune of living unawares, the greatest gift granted by the gods, for it is the gift of being like them, superior just as they are (albeit in a different fashion) to happiness and pain.

That’s why, in spite of everything, I love them all. My dear vegetables!

314

I’d like to develop a code of inertia for superior souls in modern societies.

Society would govern itself spontaneously if it didn’t contain sensitive and intelligent people. You can be sure that they’re the only thing that hinders it. Primitive societies were happy because they didn’t have such people.

Unfortunately, superior souls would die if expelled from society,
because they don’t know how to work. And without any stupid blanks between them, perhaps they would die of boredom. But my concern here is with overall human happiness.

Each superior soul who appeared in society would be exiled to the Island of the superiors.* The superiors would be fed, like animals in cages, by normal society.