by Josep Pla
I could and I couldn’t, I should add. I say this because there was this driving force within me – my egotism – a hidden, invisible chain that bound me to reality. If I could speak to you at all clearly about my egotism, you’d soon see what an unpleasant person I am. My over-righteous attitude towards the outside world constantly edged me in the direction of pessimism, and made me quite unable to collaborate or interact socially. One might say that everything was wonderful, but keeping well away was what turned me on. My singular ability to do nothing, to spend hour after hour smoking cigars and sitting around like a man on the verge of suicide – this turn of phrase was a success in its day and even today is apposite – was in response to my instincts. Men work because they find pleasures there that inactivity and sloth cannot bring. I’ve never felt those pleasures and it has made an unlucky man of me. You see: I never joined in, or allowed others into my life. The very thought that someone was approaching me with that in mind made my blood pressure shoot up. The countless advantages that social contact brings are nothing, to my mind, compared to the discomforts and conflicts that social intercourse brings. My basic education and superficial hold on culture probably enabled me to channel all my mental potential in a single direction. The doctor whose hearing is twice as sensitive as other doctors tends to reduce all pain to diseases of the heart. I have enjoyed a real talent when it comes to highlighting the tiniest stupid detail and picking up on strange habits, absurd situations, natural conflicts, and offensive attitudes to the point that I can say that this all mighty, almost unconscious receptivity of mine has manufactured the grotesque, unpleasant situations I have often encountered.
Not to mention, of course, my awkwardness in social life. I have the thickest skin for certain things but then can’t stand the slightest friction. I’ve almost always existed amid the most awful moral and intellectual chaos, but contrived to be annoyed by a late-running train. I was so naïve! And I only just managed to survive clashes of my own making. What I couldn’t tolerate were rifts caused by others – particularly when sparked by sheer thoughtlessness. After all this, I think I probably don’t need to tell you that I’ve never experienced what people call ambition, pride, the pleasure of giving out orders, or what poor, overweight, preposterous poets call the desire to fly. I would be lying if I said that I’ve ever wanted anything enough to want to possess and control it. Nothing has ever appealed sufficiently to dazzle me or make me overlook its less attractive sides.
Please forgive the extremely confessional tone this letter is assuming. However, as we have taken this route, you might as well know that I’ve carried these ideas of mine to an extreme, particularly in matters of love. One might say that I’ve always made myself available for the ladies, but I’ve never demanded anything they couldn’t give. Perhaps you will say I’ve been generous. I couldn’t say. However, it is undeniable that I’ve been most hurt by my right not to suffer friction of any kind. I’ve been generous in the hope that I would be left in peace. I can say, then, that if my combative individualism has been de facto nonexistent, my spirit of self-preservation has been elemental, rough-edged, and brutish. I’ve asked for nothing and dominated nobody, but I have defended myself with every noble and ignoble weapon there is when people have tried to dominate me or force me to take a step in their direction. I grant you this is all very paltry: I only ever wanted to get on with my life. The laws of state increasingly encroach on us and the day may come when we have to fill in a form in order to grow a mustache. I’ve always preferred to have maximum freedom within the constraints of the law, and if I could stretch them, with or without sleight of hand, I’ve never given it a second thought. I’ve always thought unwritten laws were vague, and if I’ve never worked to discredit them, I can’t say they’ve ever excited me. If you want to grasp the ferocious nature of my instinct for self-preservation, you only need remember the expressions on the faces of our millionaires when you ask for five pesetas. They turn green as lizards and secrete the best salamander veneer you’ve ever seen. Transfer this to a broader, more philosophical field – to a stance respecting life – and you have some idea of where I stand. It would probably be interesting to find out the source of my savage intensity on behalf of the right to be passive. I’ve attempted to and have found so many blemishes in individuals and nations that their abundance has prevented me from ever reaching a conclusion.
The day after finishing my degree I entered the world of journalism, and this notorious profession is what finally sank me. In fact, I forgot to tell you that I have always been naturally intuitive and found it relatively easy to understand what people want, before, as they say, the words reach their lips. The advantages brought by intuition are only apparent, for the ease with which they come is the downfall of men and the root of all immorality. Intuitions respect nothing, neither the interests nor potential of the person so endowed, but they are intoxicating and send your head into a spin. Nothing can beat them if you want to weave your way through life on a wing and a prayer. Journalism, with its vapid, albeit necessary, prattle, industrializes your intuitions, schematically catalogues your world and provides the words at any given moment to create the impression that you are in the swim of things. In the long term, this facility is so energy-sapping you find it hard to walk on your own two feet and not deny that everything is insane. This profession that is vital in giving everyone a feeling of freedom is a ruthless machine for flattening people, an obvious example of the implacable cruelty of the laws of nature. I took to it like a fish to water and got soaked. My standoffish temperament made me particularly appreciate the way journalists have of washing their hands: their naturalness. Moreover, the reports they filed sum up life and reality, and then every evening, general disappointment descends over one’s desk. Initially, I found that repellent. Then, I began to be thick-skinned. By the end of the year I saw that everything that happens in this world has the importance a clearly written, simple, lively column can lend it. The cycle had gone full circle; as far as I was concerned, reality had ceased to be a reason to be affable and accommodating. Nothing made any difference, and the profession, in effect, had merely refined my instinctive, antisocial sarcasm.
“I had made positive gains. Several years had gone by. I had learned to pretend, to swim underwater, to not commit myself, to play foul and fair and elegantly. Without ever being forced to make unpleasant concessions, my temperament shed its tedious solitude, and my savoir faire enabled me to enjoy relationships without suffering tyranny or friction. I grasped that one cannot be a perfect egotist without being infinitely tactful and clever. I am ashamed to admit this but I managed to perform imperceptibly and, to my mind, with sophistication, on that farcical terrain. I became so immersed in this play-acting I thought it was a more profound, more natural state than reality itself. I was partly right. The most serious questions incorporate innumerable excessive, improper features. The mistake, however, is to believe that everything is improper. In the end, all I can repeat is that sentence from the first chapter of Tristram Shandy – ‘Pray My Dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?’ that I find more enlightening than any sublime canto from the Divine Comedy. In literature, I have only ever been interested in writing that delineates contrasts, and I’ve always found characters with less than two faces to be absurd. I reckoned that idealistic literature could at best interest captains of cavalry, artists, and bank managers. That’s absurd too, I know. Absurd and disgusting. But I had formed such a wretchedly low opinion of myself I refused to believe that the angelical nature of men isn’t combined with arrant ruthlessness. Did I deceive myself? Who can say? In any case I find no reason to think I am any different from anyone else.
I observed the process and was startled to see how my world became distorted and how the grandest things fell apart before my eyes. I believe everyone must experience a similar sequence of sensations and ideas that at some point has helped form a clear self-image. The fact remains, however, that this process is continuous
for the very few. When they look themselves in the face, men are frightened, don’t want to know, put their hands up, then turn their backs and try to forget. Nothing is more childish and destructive than the truth. Some unfortunate folk, on the other hand, seem to have been born to be ingenuous. When you are exposed to a surfeit of commonplaces, your mouth tastes sour and your hands shake feverishly at the way life can become so distorted. You are intoxicated by the simultaneous, contradictory paths life offers. You feel the indescribable emotion aroused by continuous dissatisfaction. If you bolt down this path, it seems all sweetness and light at first, you make interesting discoveries at each step and that suggests you are making progress. But the path only leads to the mineral indifference that such immensity provokes. And finally, if you don’t meet a redeeming soul, you shrink back into your shell and feel loathing for the bête humaine and everything moving around you. And if you then use your powers of reason, you can choose a minimalist path through life, one that has the added advantage of providing the epitaph for your future tombstone: ‘He didn’t desire, so as not to suffer; he didn’t love, so as to die.’
When I left for Paris, I was unspeakably worried by such things. My ideas were much clearer than now, because they were less rounded out. Why did I leave? Leafing through a diary I was writing at the time, I came across a very childish comment I committed to paper a few months after arriving in France; it illuminates very little, to be sure, but it does have the merit of supplying a vaguely philosophical justification for my gloomy style of life.
What is it, I wondered then, that allows a man to say that he is happy at a specific moment in time? Every era must be alike, and, despite cars, engines, electricity, wireless telegrams, and other astonishing inventions, man today is, more or less, the man he was a thousand years ago. The world is always home to similar amounts of pleasure and pain, of stupidity, cruelty, and tenderness. If you are lucky enough to fall on your feet, in just the right place, then you enjoy a life of plenty, even though people are gouging their eyes out a few feet away. Other folk, on the contrary, are destined to struggle to survive – even if they eke out an existence amid quills, charming sighs, and ethereal melodies – because they can’t find their rightful place. I find myself in this second category, I suppose.
Some of my friends imagine my psychological state is trying and unpleasant. That’s true, and it’s because I am a man who has been displaced. I could have enjoyed robust health, could have lived like a countryman with all that word implies. The name I bear has been rooted for centuries in a piece of red, sunny soil in the Vallès. The rural legacy of my forbears informs everything I do, my life, my thinking. I seem to have a countryman’s liking for what is direct and slightly vague, for reserve, sarcasm, and common sense as well as the occasional need to strike out. I see the turbid ways of men and women in a grotesque light; I focus on their frantic pettiness because I carry in my blood an ancestral admiration of natural phenomena, of the sun and the moon, harvests and stars, eating and drinking. I can’t stand instinctive beings, children, women, artists, or magical people: priests, princes, or great men. I hate orators, especially those who exalt to the point of apparent adoration the stage for mild, conformist human behavior, onto which they then latch themselves like the greediest of parasites.
Circumstances in life have forced me to move around and take a dip in the whirlpools of society. I did so reluctantly, I have adapted poorly and nobody has taught me anything – despite the huge scope of human vanity – the dead couldn’t have taught me infinitely better. That’s why I appear to be someone who has grown prickly, who feels on edge and at a loss everywhere. In the world where I live, I try to act like everyone else, but I must do so poorly, because people see through me and say I am a cheat.
Once I’d realized that I was experiencing this sense of dislocation, I organized my life so it was relatively bearable. I created a series of defense mechanisms to avoid being tyrannized by that idola tribus mentioned by Lord Bacon. I saw that social life in my country was incredibly hard and that people spent their lives torturing others. I decided to leave for a while and have now lived among distant, unpredictable people for many a year. Within that profound solitude I’ve experienced some tolerable periods, to the extent that I can say that though I don’t much like our times they do offer the occasional delight.
My comments end here, and the more I reflect on them the more I can see how those last words precisely echo my state of mind at the time. No doubt about it: I was happy. I loved the city – Paris – because it was large enough to give me an ineffable feeling of solitude. The monotony of that life lulled me. I watched the masquerade parade by and longed for nothing: I was too close to things to want any of it. I waited on nobody and nobody waited on me. No man knew me, no woman either, and nobody felt charitable enough – hey, hey, can’t you shush – to enjoy my charms. I experienced freedom with lithe feline energy. Spring had just begun, the light wasn’t too bright and it drizzled endlessly. I so liked the weather I sometimes didn’t get up. The monotonous rain slowly numbed me, my body lost its boyish tendency to go on the attack; my imagination didn’t tempt me or demand things. The spring equinox was still cold, though I could feel the warm sap rising, and it seemed to draw me close to the essence of life and time went by in my hotel room on that lonely street with lime trees about to blossom and a faint, liquid light in my windows, within a warm, gentle haze.
This was the situation when I met Olga Johansen. I was thirty and my character was fully formed. My egotism was a fully crystallized, driving force. Olga was a gorgeous woman and younger than me; she was twenty-five, tall, blond, and buxom, with a subtle, silken firmness. It was the feeling of moral and material cleanliness that she radiated, rather than her golden flesh, that made her a pure delight. She was such a joy that she lived surrounded by a collection of wretched, adoring individuals. There’s nothing like exercising one’s vanity before people we appreciate. Olga had an entourage of sullen angels who looked at her with the eyes of beheaded calves.
Once we’d been introduced I was strangely surprised by the air of orderly pleasure and refined luxury emanating from her. Even so, when we first conversed, I made fun of the most hallowed and holy things. Initially, as I always saw her with that motley crowd, I thought she must be frivolous and incapable of lingering over any real pleasure or pain. I later realized that, even though she liked to soak up other people’s woes and catalogue strong feelings, she was able to focus calmly on a single thing, and that her fondness for listening to the woes of others was the sign of a soothing temperament. Perhaps she was the right woman for Martial’s epigram: ‘I don’t want her too easy or too difficult. I prefer them midpoint between the two extremes. I don’t want one who tortures or one who satiates.’ That summed up Olga: a soothing balm.
I don’t want to take up your time while I strain to recreate my states of mind then, because you were a benign witness to them. I thought that what people called love was simply a botched idealization of one of the most implacable, obscure drives of the human species. I believed there was only one thing that justified and explained marriage: the purely physical comfort and well-being the state of matrimony sometimes brings. From the spiritual point of view, that is, I decided it could resolve nothing in terms of helping one to escape from oneself. At best, the path of marriage is tantamount to a continuous liberating confessional, can numb and chloroform the pain brought on by consciousness, and for some can heal the scars of a life of failure. I saw Olga as the source of comfort in this world. That’s why I was so easily and imperceptibly suffused by her ineffable gentleness and concluded that marrying her would be a good deal. We launched into a copious correspondence, full of childish nonsense. For her part, Olga strung together things one might call decorous romanticism. I threw in the commonplaces of a cynical wit. Her letters were so sloppy they made me blush. Mine were incredibly uninspired. Olga’s billets doux were generally tedious. Mine were a mess, and if a chink of light ever broke through,
it only exposed something idiotic …
She’d say: ‘You are a much better person than you think.’
I’d reply: ‘You are much worse than you say.’
We debated such questions enthusiastically for six months perhaps. Finally we both hinted simultaneously that we were probably wasting our time. Meanwhile, however, the likelihood of marriage had gained ground. Olga never asked for anything and this gave me a clear sense of how small scale I was. Don’t think for one minute that I found this unpleasant. Conversely, it would be wrong to say my character had changed. All in all, there is no real difference between freedom and being dominated by someone we feel we need. By her side I felt frail, anarchic, and insignificant and walked as if I were being led by the hand. Olga, for her part, gave everything and never haggled. She protested when I said she did things out of charity and when I threw her healing powers in her face. She replied that she was a woman like any other and did it out of love … I laughed and sometimes frightened myself. I couldn’t say if I have ever been completely sincere. However, if ever I was, it must have been when I tried to list the troublesome consequences marriage might bring if she became disillusioned for any reason. I remember how she burst into tears when we talked of such things, and became very nervous. I persisted. To shut me up she’d say that if what I was predicting actually happened, we could simply separate without making a fuss. Sometimes, man’s fate is so naturally absurd that anguish comes very politely. The fact is we decided to marry and did marry – probably with great enthusiasm.