The Book of Disquiet (66 page)

§To be adept at constantly standing between ourselves and external things is the highest degree of wisdom and prudence.

§Our personality should be inscrutable, even to ourselves. That’s why we should always dream, making sure that we’re included in our dreams so that we won’t be able to have opinions about ourselves.

And we should especially protect our personality against being invaded by others. All outside interest in us is a flagrant disrespect. What saves the banal greeting ‘How are you?’ from being an inexcusable vulgarity is the fact that it’s usually completely empty and insincere.

§To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It’s exceedingly important that we not love.)

§To give good advice is to disdain the faculty of erring that God gave to others. Not only that, we should be glad that other people don’t act like us. It makes sense only to
ask
for advice from others, so that we can be sure – by doing just the opposite – that we are totally ourselves, in complete disagreement with all Otherness.

§The only advantage of studying is to take delight in all the things that other people haven’t said.

§Art is an isolation. Every artist should seek to isolate others, to fill their souls with a desire to be alone. The supreme triumph for the artist who writes is when his readers, on reading his works, prefer just to have them and not read them. This doesn’t necessarily happen to celebrated writers, but it is the greatest tribute.....

§To be lucid is to be out of sorts with oneself. The right state of mind for looking inside ourselves is that
of someone looking at nerves and indecisions.

§The only intellectual attitude worthy of a superior creature is that of a calm and cold compassion for everything that isn’t himself. Not that
this attitude has a grain of legitimacy or truth, but it’s so enviable that he must adopt it.

M
ILKY
W
AY

…with twisting phrases that have a poisonous spirituality…

…rituals clothed in tattered purples, mysterious ceremonial rites from the time of no one*…

…sequestered sensations felt in a body that is not our physical body and yet is physical in its own way, with subtleties that fall between the complex and the simple…

…lakes where a pellucid hint of muted gold hovers, hazily divested of ever having been materialized, and no doubt through tortuous refinements, a lily in sheer white hands…

…pacts between torpor and anguish – dull green-black and looking terribly weary between their sentries of tedium…

…nacre of useless consequences, alabaster of many macerations – the welcome distraction of violet gold sunsets with fringes, but no boats leading to better shores, nor bridges to better twilights…

…nor even to the edge of the idea of pools, lots of pools, in the distance amid poplar trees or perhaps cypresses, depending on the syllables employed by the wistful moment to utter their name…

…hence windows opening on to wharfs, a continual pounding of waves against docks, a mad and enraptured retinue like a confusion of opals in which amaranths and terebinths write with lucid insomnias on the dark stone walls of being able to hear…

…strands of fine silver, ties made from the thread of unravelled robes, futile feelings beneath linden trees, ancient couples on quiet paths lined by hedges, sudden fans, vague gestures, and no doubt better gardens awaiting the placid weariness of nothing but paths and promenades…

…bowers, trees in quincunxes, artificial grottoes, sculpted flower beds, fountains, all the art that survives from the dead masters whose dissatisfaction duelled with the visible, and they authored whole processions of things made for dreams along the narrow streets of the ancient villages of sensations…

…melodies that resound against the marble of distant palaces, reminiscences that place their hands on ours, sunsets in fateful skies like fortuitous glances of uncertainty, giving way to starlit nights over silently decaying empires…

_____

To reduce sensation to a science, to make psychological analysis into a microscopically precise method – that’s the goal that occupies, like a steady thirst, the hub of my life’s will.

It’s between my sensations and my consciousness of them that all of my life’s great tragedies occur. It’s there in that murky, indefinite region of nothing but woods and every kind of water sound, where not even the commotion of our wars is felt, that my true being – which I try in vain to see clearly – takes place.

I lay down my life. (My sensations are a long-drawn-out epitaph* on top of my dead life.) I subsist in death and dusk. The most I can sculpt is my tomb of inner beauty.

The gates of my seclusion open on to parks of infinity, but no one passes through them, not even in my dreams – and yet they are open eternally on to the useless, they are eternally of iron opening on to the unreal…

I pluck the petals of private glories in the gardens of my inner splendours, and between dreamed hedges my feet loudly tread the paths that lead to the Confused.

I’ve pitched my Empires in the Confused, at the edge of silences, in the tawny war that will do away with the Exact.

_____

The man of science realizes that the only reality for him is his own self, and that the only real world is the world as his sensations give it to him. That’s why, instead of following the fallacious path of adapting his sensations to other people’s, he uses objective science to try to achieve a perfect knowledge of his world and his personality. There’s nothing more objective than his dreams, and nothing more infallibly his than his self-awareness. Around these two realities he refines his science. It’s very different from the one practised by the old scientists,
who, rather than studying the laws of their own personality and the organization of their dreams, sought the laws of the ‘outside’ and the organization of what they called ‘Nature’.