Let grammar rule the man who doesn’t know how to think what he feels. Let it serve those who are in command when they express themselves. It is told of Sigismund, King of Rome,* that when someone pointed out a grammatical mistake he had made in a speech, he answered, ‘I am King of Rome, and above all grammar.’ And he went down in history as Sigismund super-grammaticam. A marvellous symbol! Every man who knows how to say what he has to say is, in his way, King of Rome. The title is royal, and the reason for it is imperial.*
85
When I consider all the people I know or have heard of who write prolifically or who at least produce lengthy and finished works, I feel an ambivalent envy, a disdainful admiration, an incoherent mixture of mixed feelings.
The creation of something complete and whole, be it good or bad – and if it’s never entirely good, it’s very often not all bad – yes, the creation of something complete seems to stir in me above all a feeling of envy. A completed thing is like a child; although imperfect like everything human, it belongs to us like our own children.
And I, whose self-critical spirit allows me only to see my lapses and defects, I, who dare write only passages, fragments, excerpts of the non-existent, I myself – in the little that I write – am also imperfect.
Better either the complete work, which is in any case a work, even if it’s bad, or the absence of words, the unbroken silence of the soul that knows it is incapable of acting.
86
Perhaps everything in life is the degeneration of something else. Perhaps existence is always an approximation – an advent, or surroundings.
Just as Christianity was but the prophetic degeneration of a debased Neo-Platonism, the Romanization of Hellenism through Judaism,* so our age – senile and carcinogenic* – is the multiple deviation of all great goals, concordant or conflicting, whose defeat gave rise to all the negations we use to affirm ourselves.*
We live an intermission with band music.
But what do I, in this fourth-floor room, have to do with sociologies such as these?* They are all a dream to me, like Babylonian princesses, and to occupy ourselves with humanity is a futile enterprise – an archaeology of the present.
I’ll disappear in the fog as a foreigner to all life, as a human island detached from the dream of the sea, as a uselessly existing ship that floats on the surface of everything.
87
Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity. If we knew the truth, we’d see it; everything else is systems and approximations. The inscrutability of the universe is quite enough for us to think about; to want to actually understand it is to be less than human, since to be human is to realize it can’t be understood.
I’m handed faith like a sealed package on a strange-looking platter and am expected to accept it without opening it. I’m handed science, like a knife on a plate, to cut the folios of a book whose pages are blank. I’m handed doubt, like dust inside a box – but why give me a box if all it contains is dust?
I write because I don’t know, and I use whatever abstract and lofty term for Truth a given emotion requires. If the emotion is clear and decisive, then I naturally speak of the gods, thereby framing it in a consciousness of the world’s multiplicity. If the emotion is profound, then I naturally speak of God, thereby placing it in a unified consciousness. If the emotion is a thought, I naturally speak of Fate, thereby shoving it up against the wall.*
Sometimes the mere rhythm of a sentence will require God instead of the Gods; at other times the two syllables of ‘the Gods’ will be necessary, and I’ll verbally change universe; on still other occasions what will matter is an internal rhyme, a metrical displacement, or a burst of emotion, and polytheism or monotheism will prevail accordingly. The Gods are contingent on style.
88
Where is God, even if he doesn’t exist? I want to pray and to weep, to repent of crimes I didn’t commit, to enjoy the feeling of forgiveness like a caress that’s more than maternal.
A lap in which to weep, but a huge and shapeless lap, spacious like a summer evening, and yet cosy, warm, feminine, next to a fireplace… To be able to weep in that lap over inconceivable things, failures I can’t remember, poignant things that don’t exist, and huge shuddering doubts concerning I don’t know what future…
A second childhood, an old nursemaid like I used to have, and a tiny bed where I’d be lulled to sleep by tales of adventure that my flagging attention would hardly even follow – stories that once ran through infant hair as blond as wheat… And all of this enormous and eternal, guaranteed for ever and having God’s lofty stature, there in the sad, drowsy depths of the ultimate reality of Things…
A lap or a cradle or a warm arm around my neck… A softly singing voice that seems to want to make me cry… A fire crackling in the fireplace… Heat in the winter… My consciousness listlessly wandering… And then a peaceful, soundless dream in a huge space, like a moon whirling among the stars…
When I put away my artifices and lovingly arrange in a corner all my toys, words, images and phrases, so dear to me I feel like kissing them, then I become so small and innocuous, so alone in a room so large and sad, so profoundly sad!
Who am I, finally, when I’m not playing? A poor orphan left out in the cold among sensations, shivering on the street corners of Reality, forced to sleep on the steps of Sadness and to eat the bread offered by Fantasy. I was told that my father, whom I never knew, is called God, but the name means nothing to me. Sometimes at night, when I’m feeling lonely, I call out to him with tears and form an idea of him I can love. But then it occurs to me that I don’t know him, that perhaps he’s not how I imagine, that perhaps this figure has never been the father of my soul…
When will all this end – these streets where I drag my misery, these steps where I coldly crouch and feel the night running its hands through my tatters? If only God would one day come and take me to his house and give me warmth and affection… Sometimes I think about this and weep with joy just because I can think about it. But the wind blows down the street, and the leaves fall on the pavement. I lift my eyes and look at the stars, which make no sense at all. And all that remains of this is I, a poor abandoned child that no Love wanted as its adopted son and no Friendship accepted as its playmate.
I’m so cold, so weary in my abandonment. Go and find my Mother, O Wind. Take me in the Night to the house I never knew. Give me back my nursemaid, O vast Silence, and my crib and the lullaby that used to put me to sleep.
89
The only attitude worthy of a superior man is to persist in an activity he recognizes is useless, to observe a discipline he knows is sterile, and to apply certain norms of philosophical and metaphysical thought that he considers utterly inconsequential.
90
To recognize reality as a form of illusion and illusion as a form of reality is equally necessary and equally useless. The contemplative life, to exist at all, must see real-life accidents as the scattered premises of an unattainable conclusion, but it must also consider the contingencies of dreams as in some sense worthy of the attention we give them, since this attention is what makes us contemplatives.
Anything and everything, depending on how one sees it, is a marvel or a hindrance, an all or a nothing, a path or a problem. To see something in constantly new ways is to renew and multiply it. That is why the contemplative person, without ever leaving his village, will nevertheless have the whole universe at his disposal. There’s infinity in a cell or a desert. One can sleep cosmically against a rock.
But there are times in our meditation – and they come to all who meditate – when everything is suddenly worn-out, old, seen and reseen, even though we have yet to see it. Because no matter how much we meditate on something, and through meditation transform it, whatever we transform it into can only be the substance of meditation. At a certain point we are overwhelmed by a yearning for life, by a desire to know without the intellect, to meditate with only our senses, to think in a tactile
or sensory mode, from inside the object of our thought, as if it were a sponge and we were water. And so we also have our night, and the profound weariness produced by emotions becomes even more profound, since in this case the emotions come from thought. But it’s a night without slumber or moon or stars, a night as if all had been turned inside out – infinity internalized and ready to burst, and the day converted into the black lining of an unfamiliar suit.
Yes, it’s always better to be the human slug that loves what it doesn’t know, the leech that’s unaware of how repugnant it is. To ignore so as to live! To feel in order to forget! Ah, and all the events lost in the green-white wake of age-old ships, like a cold spit off the tall rudder that served as a nose under the eyes of the ancient cabins!
91
A glimpse of open country above a stone wall on the outskirts of town is more liberating for me than an entire journey would be for someone else. Every point of view is the apex of an inverted pyramid, whose base is indeterminate.
There was a time when I was irritated by certain things that today make me smile. And one of those things, which I’m reminded of nearly every day, is the way men who are active in day-to-day life smile at poets and artists. They don’t always do it, as the intellectuals who write in newspapers suppose, with an air of superiority. Often they do it with affection. But it’s as if they were showing affection to a child, someone with no notion of life’s certainty and exactness.
This used to irritate me, because I naïvely assumed that this outward smile directed at dreaming and self-expression sprang from an inner conviction of superiority. In fact it’s only a reaction to something that’s different. While I once took this smile as an insult, because it seemed to imply a superior attitude, today I see it as the sign of an unconscious doubt. Just as adults often recognize in children a quick-wittedness they don’t have, so the smilers recognize in us, who are devoted to dreaming and expressing, something different that makes them suspicious, just because it’s unfamiliar. I like to think that the smartest among them sometimes detect our superiority, and then smile in a superior way to hide the fact.
But our superiority is not the kind that many dreamers have imagined we have. The dreamer isn’t superior to the active man because dreaming is superior to reality. The dreamer’s superiority is due to the fact that dreaming is much more practical than living, and the dreamer gets far greater and more varied pleasure out of life than the man of action. In other and plainer words, the dreamer is the true man of action.
Life being fundamentally a mental state, and all that we do or think valid to the extent we consider it valid, the valuation depends on us. The dreamer is an issuer of banknotes, and the notes he issues circulate in the city of his mind just like real notes in the world outside. Why should I care if the currency of my soul will never be convertible to gold, when there is no gold in life’s factitious alchemy? After us all comes the deluge, but only after us all. Better and happier those who, recognizing that everything is fictitious, write the novel before someone writes it for them and, like Machiavelli, don courtly garments to write in secret.
92
I’ve never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.* My worst sorrows have evaporated when I’ve opened the window on to the street of my dreams* and forgotten myself in what I saw there.
I’ve never aspired to be more than a dreamer. I paid no attention to those who spoke to me of living. I’ve always belonged to what isn’t where I am and to what I could never be. Whatever isn’t mine, no matter how base, has always had poetry for me. The only thing I’ve loved is nothing at all. The only thing I’ve desired is what I couldn’t even imagine. All I asked of life is that it go on by without my feeling it. All I demanded of love is that it never stop being a distant dream. In my own inner landscapes, all of them unreal, I’ve always been attracted to what’s in the distance, and the hazy aqueducts – almost out of sight in my dreamed landscapes – had a dreamy sweetness in relation to the rest of the landscape, a sweetness that enabled me to love them.
I am still obsessed with creating a false world, and will be until I die. Today I don’t line up spools of thread and chess pawns (with an occasional bishop or knight sticking out) in the drawers of my chest, but I regret that I don’t, and in my imagination I line up the characters – so alive and dependable! – who occupy my inner life, and this makes me feel cosy, like sitting by a warm fire in winter. I have a world of friends inside me, with their own real, individual, imperfect lives.
Some of them are full of problems, while others live the humble and picturesque life of bohemians. Others are travelling salesmen. (To be able to imagine myself as a travelling salesman has always been one of my great ambitions – unattainable, alas!) Others live in the rural towns and villages of a Portugal inside me; they come to the city, where I sometimes run into them, and I open wide my arms with emotion. And when I dream this, pacing in my room, talking out loud, gesticulating – when I dream this and picture myself running into them, then I rejoice, I’m fulfilled, I jump up and down, my eyes water, I throw open my arms and feel a genuine, enormous happiness.
Ah, no nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed! The longing I feel when I think of the past I’ve lived in real time, when I weep over the corpse of my childhood life – this can’t compare to the fervour of my trembling grief as I weep over the non-reality of my dreams’ humble characters, even the minor ones I recall having seen just once in my pseudo-life, while turning a corner in my envisioned world, or while passing through a doorway on a street that I walked up and down in the same dream.
My bitterness over nostalgia’s impotence to revive and resurrect becomes a tearful rage against God, who created impossibilities, when I think about how the friends of my dreams – with whom I’ve shared so much in a make-believe life and with whom I’ve had so many stimulating conversations in imaginary cafés – have never had a space of their own where they could truly exist, independent of my consciousness of them!
Oh, the dead past that survives in me and that has never been anywhere but in me! The flowers from the garden of the little country house that never existed except in me! The pine grove, orchards and vegetable plots of the farm that was only a dream of mine! My imaginary excursions, my outings in a countryside that never existed! The trees along the roadside, the pathways, the stones, the rural folk passing by – all of this, which was never more than a dream, is recorded in my memory, where it hurts, and I, who spent so many hours dreaming these things, now spend hours remembering having dreamed them, and it’s a genuine nostalgia that I feel, an actual past that I mourn, a real-life corpse that I stare at, lying there solemnly in its coffin.
Then there are the landscapes and lives that weren’t exclusively internal. Certain paintings without great artistic merit and certain prints on walls I saw every day became realities in me. My sensation in these cases was different – sadder and more poignant. It grieved me that I couldn’t be there too, whether or not the scenes were real. That I couldn’t at least be an inconspicuous figure drawn in at the foot of those moonlit woods I saw on a small print in a room where I once slept – and this was after my childhood was quite finished! That I couldn’t imagine being hidden there, in the woods next to the river, bathed by the eternal (though poorly rendered) moonlight, watching the man going by in a boat beneath the branches of a willow tree. In these cases I was grieved by my inability to dream completely. My nostalgia exhibited other features. The gestures of my despair were different. The impossibility that tortured me resulted in a different kind of anxiety. Ah, if all of this at least had a meaning in God, a fulfilment in accord with the tenor of my desires, fulfilled I don’t know where, in a vertical time, consubstantial with the direction of my nostalgias and reveries! If there could at least be a paradise made of all this, even if only for me! If I could at least meet the friends I’ve dreamed of, walk along the streets I’ve cre
ated, wake up amid the racket of roosters and hens and the early morning rustling in the country house where I pictured myself – and all of this more perfectly arranged by God, placed in the right order for it to exist, in the form needed for me to possess it, which is something not even my dreams can achieve, for there’s always at least one dimension missing in the inward space that harbours these hapless realities.
I raise my head from the sheet of paper where I’m writing… It’s early still. It’s just past noon on a Sunday. Life’s basic malady, that of being conscious, begins with my body and discomfits me. To have no islands where those of us who are uncomfortable could go, no ancient garden paths reserved for those who’ve retreated into dreaming! To have to live and to act, however little; to have to physically touch because there are other, equally real people in life! To have to be here writing this, because my soul needs it, and not to be able to just dream it all, to express it without words, without so much as consciousness, through a construction of myself in music and diffuseness, such that tears would well in my eyes as soon as I felt like expressing myself, and I would flow like an enchanted river across gentle slopes of my own self, ever further into unconsciousness and the Far-away, to no end but God.
93
The intensity of my sensations has always been less than the intensity of my awareness of them. I’ve always suffered more from my consciousness that I was suffering than from the suffering of which I was conscious.
The Book of Disquiet Page 12