A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe
Page 17
Whatever it is, it’s to salute you.
Whatever it’s worth, it’s to love you.
Whatever it comes to, it’s to agree with you.
Whatever it is, it’s this. And you understand, you like it.
You, old boy, crying on my shoulder, agree with me . . .
(When does the last train leave?
A long holiday spent in God . . .
Let’s go without fear, let’s go . . . )
All this must have another meaning
Beyond just living and having all we have . . .
There must be a point of consciousness
In which the landscape is transformed
And begins to interest us, assist us, arouse us,
In which a cool breeze stirs in our soul
And sunny fields open up in our recently awakened
senses . . .
We’ll meet at the Station, wherever it is . . .
Wait for me at the entrance, Walt; I’ll be there . . .
I’ll be there without the universe, without life, without
myself, without anything . . .
And we’ll remember, all by ourselves, in silence and with our
sorrow,
The world’s tremendous absurdity, the bitter inadequacy of
things,
And I’ll feel the great mystery, I’ll feel it far away, so far
away,
So abstractly and absolutely far away,
Definitively far away.
I stop, I listen, I recognize myself!
The sound of my voice in the air has fallen, lifeless.
I’m the same as I was, you are dead, and everything is
still . . .
Saluting you was a way of trying to inject life into myself,
And so I saluted you in spite of feeling that I lack
The vital energy to salute anyone!
O heart that won’t heal! Who will save me from you?
[1915]
All along the wharf there’s the bustle of an imminent arrival.
People begin to gather around and wait.
The steamer from Africa is coming into plain view.
I came here to wait for no one,
To watch everyone else wait,
To be everyone else waiting,
To be the anxious waiting of everyone else.
I’m exhausted from being so many things.
The latecomers are finally arriving,
And I suddenly get sick of waiting, of existing, of being.
I abruptly leave and am noticed by the gatekeeper, who
gives me a hard, quick stare.
I return to the city as if to freedom.
It’s good to feel, if for no other reason, so as to stop feeling.
LISBON REVISITED (1923)
No, I don’t want anything.
I already said I don’t want anything.
Don’t come to me with conclusions!
Death is the only conclusion.
Don’t offer me aesthetics!
Don’t talk to me of morals!
Take metaphysics away from here!
Don’t try to sell me complete systems, don’t bore me
with the breakthroughs
Of science (of science, my God, of science!)—
Of science, of the arts, of modern civilization!
What harm did I ever do to the gods?
If you’ve got the truth, you can keep it!
I’m a technician, but my technique is limited to the technical
sphere,
Apart from which I’m crazy, and with every right to be so.
With every right to be so, do you hear?
Leave me alone, for God’s sake!
You want me to be married, futile, predictable and taxable?
You want me to be the opposite of this, the opposite of
anything?
If I were someone else, I’d go along with you all.
But since I’m what I am, lay off!
Go to hell without me,
Or let me go there by myself!
Why do we have to go together?
Don’t grab me by the arm!
I don’t like my arm being grabbed. I want to be alone,
I already told you that I can only be alone!
I’m sick of you wanting me to be sociable!
O blue sky—the same one I knew as a child—
Perfect and empty eternal truth!
O gentle, silent, ancestral Tagus,
Tiny truth in which the sky is mirrored!
O sorrow revisited, Lisbon of bygone days today!
You give me nothing, you take nothing from me, you’re
nothing I feel is me.
Leave me in peace! I won’t stay long, for I never stay
long . . .
And as long as Silence and the Abyss hold off, I want to be
alone!
[1923]
LISBON REVISITED (1926)
Nothing holds me.
I want fifty things at the same time.
I long with meat-craving anxiety
For I don’t know what—
Definitely something indefinite . . .
I sleep fitfully and live in the fitful dream-state
Of a fitful sleeper, half dreaming.
All abstract and necessary doors were closed in my face.
Curtains were drawn across every hypothesis I could have
seen from the street.
I found the alley but not the number of the address I was
given.
I woke up to the same life I’d fallen asleep to.
Even the armies I dreamed of were defeated.
Even my dreams felt false while I dreamed them.
Even the life I merely long for jades me—even that life . . .
At intermittent intervals I understand;
I write in respites from my weariness;
And a boredom bored even of itself casts me ashore.
I don’t know what destiny or future belongs to my anxiety
adrift on the waves;
I don’t know what impossible South Sea islands await me, a
castaway,
Or what palm groves of literature will grant me at least a
verse.
No, I don’t know this, or that, or anything else . . .
And in the depths of my spirit, where I dream all I’ve
dreamed,
In my soul’s far-flung fields, where I remember for no reason
(And the past is a natural fog of false tears),
On the roads and pathways of distant forests
Where I supposed my being dwelled—
There my dreamed armies, defeated without having been,
And my nonexistent legions, annihilated in God,
All flee in disarray, the last remnants
Of the final illusion.
Once more I see you,
City of my horrifyingly lost childhood . . .
Happy and sad city, once more I dream here . . .
I? Is it one and the same I who lived here, and came back,
And came back again, and again,
And yet again have come back?
Or are we—all the I’s that I was here or that were here—
A series of bead-beings joined together by a string of
memory,
A series of dreams about me dreamed by someone outside
me?
Once more I see you,
With a heart that’s more distant, a soul that’s less mine.
Once more I see you—Lisbon, the Tagus and the rest—
A useless onlooker of you and of myself,
A foreigner here like everywhere else,
Incidental in life as in my soul,
A ghost wandering through halls of remembrances
To the sound of rats and creaking floorboards
In the accursed castle of having to live . . .
Once more I see you,
A shadow movi
ng among shadows, gleaming
For an instant in some bleak unknown light
Before passing into the night like a ship’s wake swallowed
In water whose sound fades into silence . . .
Once more I see you,
But, oh, I cannot see myself!
The magic mirror where I always looked the same has
shattered,
And in each fateful fragment I see only a piece of me—
A piece of you and of me!
26 APRIL 1926
If you want to kill yourself, why don’t you want to kill
yourself?
Now’s your chance! I, who greatly love both death and life,
Would kill myself too, if I dared kill myself . . .
If you dare, then be daring!
What good to you is the changing picture of outer images
We call the world?
What good is this cinema of hours played out
By actors with stock roles and gestures,
This colorful circus of our never-ending drive to keep going?
What good is your inner world which you don’t know?
Kill yourself, and maybe you’ll finally know it . . .
End it all, and maybe you’ll begin . . .
If you’re weary of existing, at least
Be noble in your weariness,
And don’t, like me, sing of life because you’re drunk,
Don’t, like me, salute death through literature!
You’re needed? O futile shadow called man!
No one is needed; you’re not needed by anyone . . .
Without you everything will keep going without you.
Perhaps it’s worse for others that you live than if you kill
yourself . . .
Perhaps your presence is more burdensome than your
absence . . .
Other people’s grief? You’re worried
About them crying over you?
Don’t worry: they won’t cry for long . . .
The impulse to live gradually stanches tears
When they’re not for our own sake,
When they’re because of what happened to someone else,
especially death,
Since after this happens to someone, nothing else will . . .
First there’s anxiety, the surprise of mystery’s arrival
And of your spoken life’s sudden absence . . .
Then there’s the horror of your visible and material coffin,
And the men in black whose profession is to be there.
Then the attending family, heartbroken and telling jokes,
Mourning between the latest news from the evening papers,
Mingling grief over your death with the latest crime . . .
And you merely the incidental cause of that lamentation,
You who will be truly dead, much deader than you
imagine . . .
Much deader down here than you imagine,
Even if in the beyond you may be much more alive . . .
Next comes the black procession to the vault or grave,
And finally the beginning of the death of your memory.
At first everyone feels relieved
That the slightly irksome tragedy of your death is over . . .
Then, with each passing day, the conversation lightens up
And life falls back into its old routine . . .
Then you are slowly forgotten.
You’re remembered only twice a year:
On you birthday and your death day.
That’s it. That’s all. That’s absolutely all.
Two times a year they think about you.
Two times a year those who loved you heave a sigh,
And they may sigh on the rare occasions someone mentions
your name.
Look at yourself in the face and honestly face what we
are . . .
If you want to kill yourself, then kill yourself . . .
Forget your moral scruples or intellectual fears!
What scruples or fears influence the workings of life?
What chemical scruples rule the driving impulse
Of sap, the blood’s circulation, and love?
What memory of others exists in the joyous rhythm of life?
Ah, vanity of flesh and blood called man,
Can’t you see that you’re utterly unimportant?
You’re important to yourself, because you’re what you feel.
You’re everything to yourself, because for you you’re the
universe,
The real universe and other people
Being mere satellites of your objective subjectivity.
You matter to yourself, because you’re all that matters to
you.
And if this is true for you, O myth, then won’t it be true for
others?
Do you, like Hamlet, dread the unknown?
But what is known? What do you really know
Such that you can call anything “unknown”?
Do you, like Falstaff, love life with all its fat?
If you love it so materially, then love it even more materially
By becoming a bodily part of the earth and of things!
Scatter yourself, O physicochemical system
Of nocturnally conscious cells,
Over the nocturnal consciousness of the unconsciousness of
bodies,
Over the huge blanket of appearances that blankets nothing,
Over the grass and weeds of proliferating beings,
Over the atomic fog of things,
Over the whirling walls
Of the dynamic void that’s the world . . .
26 APRIL 1926
Distant lighthouses
With their light suddenly so bright,
With night and absence so swiftly restored,
On this night, on this deck—the anguish they stir up!
The last of our grieving for those we left behind,
Fiction of thinking . . .
Distant lighthouses . . .
Life’s uncertainty . . .
The fast-swelling light has returned, flashing
In the aimlessness of my lost gaze.
Distant lighthouses . . .
Life serves no purpose.
Thinking about life serves no purpose.
Thinking about thinking about life serves no purpose.
We’re going far away and the bright light begins to flash less
brightly.
Distant lighthouses . . .
30 APRIL 1926
At the wheel of the Chevrolet on the road to Sintra,
In the moonlight and in a dream, on the deserted road,
I drive alone, I drive almost slowly, and it almost
Seems, or I make myself think it seems,
That I’m going down another road, another dream, another
world,
That I’m going without Lisbon lying behind me and Sintra
up ahead,
That I’m going, and what’s in it besides not stopping, just
going?
I’ll spend the night in Sintra since I can’t spend it in Lisbon,
But when I get to Sintra I’ll be sorry I didn’t stay in Lisbon.
Always this irrational, irrelevant, useless fretfulness,
Always, always, always
This exaggerated mental anxiety over nothing,
On the road to Sintra, on the road of dreaming, on the road
of life . . .
Responsive to my subconscious movements at the wheel,
The borrowed car bounds forward beneath me, with me.
As I think about the symbol and turn right, I smile.
How many borrowed things I’ve used to go forward in the
world!
How many borrowed things I’ve driven as if they
were mine!
Alas, how much I myself am what I’ve borro
wed!
On the left side of the road there’s a cabin—yes, a cabin.
On the right the open country, with the moon in the
distance.
The car, which so recently seemed to be giving me freedom,
Is now something that closes me in,
Something I can only drive if I’m closed inside it,
Something I control only if I’m part of it, if it’s part of me.
Behind me on the left the humble—more than humble—
cabin . . .
Life there must be happy, just because it isn’t mine.
If anyone saw me from the cabin window, they’re no doubt
thinking: That guy is happy.
Perhaps to the child peering out the top-floor window
I looked (with my borrowed car) like a dream, a magical
being come to life.
Perhaps to the girl, who as soon as she heard the motor
looked out the kitchen window
On the ground floor,
I’m something like the prince of every girl’s heart,
And she’ll keep glancing through the window until I vanish
around the curve.
Will I leave dreams behind me, or is it the car that leaves
them?
I the driver of the borrowed car, or the borrowed car I’m
driving?
On the road to Sintra in the moonlight, in sadness, with
fields and the night before me,
Driving the borrowed Chevrolet and feeling forlorn,
I lose myself on the road to come, I vanish in the distance I’m