My destiny, which has pursued me like a malevolent creature, is to be able to desire only what I know I’ll never get. If I see the nubile figure of a girl in the street and imagine for the slightest moment, however nonchalantly, what it would be like if she were mine, it’s a dead certainty that ten steps past my dream she’ll meet the man who’s obviously her husband or lover. A romantic would make a tragedy out of this; a stranger to the situation would see it as a comedy; I, however, mix the two things, since I’m romantic in myself and a stranger to myself, and I turn the page to yet another irony.
Some say that without hope life is impossible, others that with hope it’s empty. For me, since I’ve stopped hoping or not hoping, life is simply an external picture that includes me and that I look at, like a show without a plot, made only to please the eyes—an incoherent dance, a rustling of leaves in the wind, clouds in which the sunlight changes color, ancient streets that wind every which way around the city.
I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write. I unroll myself in sentences and paragraphs, I punctuate myself. In my arranging and rearranging of images I’m like a child using newspaper to dress up as a king, and in the way I create rhythm with a series of words I’m like a lunatic adorning my hair with dried flowers that are still alive in my dreams. And above all I’m calm, like a rag doll that has become conscious of itself and occasionally shakes its head to make the tiny bell on top of its pointed cap (a component part of the same head) produce a sound, the jingling life of a dead man, a feeble notice to Fate.
But how often, in the middle of this peaceful dissatisfaction, my conscious emotion is slowly filled with a feeling of emptiness and tedium for thinking this way! How often I feel, as if hearing a voice behind intermittent sounds, that I myself am the underlying bitterness of this life so alien to human life—a life in which nothing happens except in its self-awareness! How often, waking up for a moment from this exile that’s me, I get a glimpse of how much better it would be to be a complete nobody, the happy man who at least has real bitterness, the contented man who feels fatigue instead of tedium, who suffers instead of imagining he suffers, who kills himself, yes, instead of watching himself die!
I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads. Whatever I feel is felt (against my will) so that I can write that I felt it. Whatever I think is promptly put into words, mixed with images that undo it, cast into rhythms that are something else altogether. From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I. I plumbed myself and dropped the plumb; I spend my life wondering if I’m deep or not, with no remaining plumb except my gaze that shows me—blackly vivid in the mirror at the bottom of the well—my own face that observes me observing it.
I’m like a playing card belonging to an old and unrecognizable suit—the sole survivor of a lost deck. I have no meaning, I don’t know my worth, there’s nothing I can compare myself with to discover what I am, and to make such a discovery would be of no use to anyone. And so, describing myself in image after image—not without truth, but with lies mixed in—I end up more in the images than in me, stating myself until I no longer exist, writing with my soul for ink, useful for nothing except writing. But the reaction ceases, and again I resign myself. I go back to who I am, even if it’s nothing. And a hint of tears that weren’t cried makes my stiff eyes burn; a hint of anguish that wasn’t felt gets caught in my dry throat. But I don’t even know what I would have cried over, if I’d cried, nor why it is that I didn’t cry over it. The fiction follows me, like my shadow. And what I want is to sleep.
208.
Just as, whether we know it or not, we all have a metaphysics, so too, whether we like it or not, we all have a morality. I have a very simple morality: not to do good or evil to anyone. Not to do evil, because it seems only fair that others enjoy the same right I demand for myself—not to be disturbed—and also because I think that the world doesn’t need more than the natural evils it already has. All of us in this world are living on board a ship that is sailing from one unknown port to another, and we should treat each other with a traveler’s cordiality. Not to do good, because I don’t know what good is, nor even if I do it when I think I do. How do I know what evils I generate if I give a beggar money? How do I know what evils I produce if I teach or instruct? Not knowing, I refrain. And besides, I think that to help or clarify is, in a certain way, to commit the evil of interfering in the lives of others. Kindness depends on a whim of our mood, and we have no right to make others the victims of our whims, however humane or kind-hearted they may be. Good deeds are impositions; that’s why I categorically abhor them.
If, for moral reasons, I don’t do good to others, neither do I expect others to do good to me. When I get sick, what I hate most is if someone should feel obliged to take care of me, something I’d loathe doing for another. I’ve never visited a sick friend. And whenever I’ve been sick and had visitors, I’ve always felt their presence as a bother, an insult, an unwarranted violation of my willful privacy. I don’t like people to give me things, because it seems like they’re obligating me to give something in return—to them or to others, it’s all the same.
I’m highly sociable in a highly negative way. I’m inoffensiveness incarnate. But I’m no more than this, I don’t want to be more than this, I can’t be more than this. For everything that exists I feel a visual affection, an intellectual fondness—nothing in the heart. I have faith in nothing, hope in nothing, charity for nothing. I’m nauseated and outraged by the sincere souls of all sincerities and by the mystics of all mysticisms, or rather, by the sincerities of all sincere souls and the mysticisms of all mystics. This nausea is almost physical when the mysticisms are active—when they try to convince other people, meddle with their wills, discover the truth, or reform the world.
I consider myself fortunate for no longer having family, as it relieves me of the obligation to love someone, which I would surely find burdensome. Any nostalgia I feel is literary. I remember my childhood with tears, but they’re rhythmic tears, in which prose is already being formed. I remember it as something external, and it comes back to me through external things; I remember only external things. It’s not the stillness of evenings in the country that endears me to the childhood I spent there, it’s the way the table was set for tea, it’s the way the furniture was arranged in the room, it’s the faces and physical gestures of the people. I feel nostalgia for scenes. Thus someone else’s childhood can move me as much as my own; both are purely visual phenomena from a past I’m unable to fathom, and my perception of them is literary. They move me, yes, but because I see them, not because I remember them.
I’ve never loved anyone. The most that I’ve loved are my sensations—states of conscious seeing, impressions gathered by intently hearing, and aromas through which the modesty of the outer world speaks to me of things from the past (so easily remembered by their smells), giving me a reality and an emotion that go beyond the simple fact of bread being baked inside the bakery, as on that remote afternoon when I was coming back from the funeral of my uncle who so loved me, and I felt a kind of sweet relief about I’m not sure what.
This is my morality, or metaphysics, or me: passer-by of everything, even of my own soul, I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing—just an abstract center of impersonal sensations, a fallen sentient mirror reflecting the world’s diversity. I don’t know if I’m happy this way. Nor do I care.
230.
Art is a substitute for acting or living. If life is the willful expression of emotion, art is the intellectual expression of that same emotion. Whatever we don’t have, don’t attempt, or don’t achieve can be possessed through dreams, and these are what we use to make art. At other times our emotion is so strong that, although reduced to action, this action doesn’t completely satisfy it; the leftover emotion, unexpressed in life, is used to produce the work of art. There are thus two types of artist: the one who expresses what he does
n’t have, and the one who expresses the surplus of what he did have.
247.
The active life has always struck me as the least comfortable of suicides. To act, in my view, is a cruel and harsh sentence passed on the unjustly condemned dream. To exert influence on the outside world, to change things, to overcome obstacles, to influence people—all of this seems more nebulous to me than the substance of my daydreams. Ever since I was a child, the intrinsic futility of all forms of action has been a cherished touchstone for my detachment from everything, including me.
To act is to react against oneself. To exert influence is to leave home.
I’ve always pondered how absurd it is that, even when the substance of reality is just a series of sensations, there can be things so complexly simple as businesses, industries, and social and family relationships, so devastatingly unintelligible in light of the sou’s inner attitude toward the idea of truth.
261.
In me all affections take place on the surface, but sincerely. I’ve always been an actor, and in earnest. Whenever I’ve loved, I’ve pretended to love, pretending it even to myself.
279.
He left today for his hometown, apparently for good. I mean the so-called office boy, the same man I’d come to regard as part of this human corporation, and therefore as part of me and my world. He left today. In the corridor, casually running into each other for the expected surprise of our farewell, he timidly returned my embrace, and I had enough self-control not to cry, as in my heart—independent of me—my ardent eyes wanted.
Whatever has been ours, because it was ours, even if only as a casual presence in our daily routine or in what we see, becomes part of us. The man who left today for a Galician town I’ve never heard of was not, for me, the office boy; he was a vital part, because visible and human, of the substance of my life. Today I was diminished. I’m not quite the same. The office boy left today.
Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything that ceases in what we see ceases in us. Everything that has been, if we saw it when it was, was taken from us when it went away. The office boy left today.
Wearier, older, and less willing, I sit down at the high desk and continue working from where I left off yesterday. But today’s vague tragedy, stirring thoughts I have to dominate by force, interrupts the automatic process of good bookkeeping. The only way I’m able to work is through an active inertia, as my own slave. The office boy left today.
Yes, tomorrow or another day, or whenever the bell will soundlessly toll my death or departure, I’ll also be one who’s no longer here, an old copier stowed away in the cabinet under the stairs. Yes, tomorrow or when Fate decides, the one in me who pretended to be I will come to an end. Will I go to my hometown? I don’t know where I’ll go. Today the tragedy is visible because of an absence, considerable because it doesn’t deserve consideration. My God, my God, the office boy left today.
298.
Everything is absurd. One man spends his life earning and saving up money, although he has no children to leave it to nor any hope that some heaven might reserve him a transcendent portion. Another man strives to gain posthumous fame without believing in an afterlife that would give him knowledge of that fame. Yet another wears himself out in pursuit of things he doesn’t really care for. Then there’s one who ….
One man reads so as to learn, uselessly. Another man enjoys himself so as to live, uselessly.
I’m riding on a streetcar and, as usual, am closely observing all the details of the people around me. For me these details are like things, voices, phrases. Taking the dress of the girl in front of me, I break it down into the fabric from which it’s made and the work that went into making it (such that I see a dress and not just fabric), and the delicate embroidery that trims the collar decomposes under my scrutiny into the silk thread with which it was embroidered and the work it took to embroider it. And immediately, as in a textbook of basic economics, factories and jobs unfold before me: the factory where the cloth was made; the factory where the darker-colored silk was spun to trim with curlicues its place around the neck; the factories’ various divisions, the machines, the workers, the seamstresses. My inwardly turned eyes penetrate into the offices, where I see the managers trying to stay calm, and I watch everything being recorded in the account books. But that’s not all: I see beyond all this to the private lives of those who live their social existence in these factories and offices. The whole world opens up before my eyes merely because in front of me—on the nape of a dark-skinned neck whose other side has I don’t know what face—I see a regularly irregular dark-green embroidery on a light-green dress.
All humanity’s social existence lies before my eyes.
And beyond this I sense the loves, the secrets, and the souls of all who labored so that the woman in front of me in the streetcar could wear, around her mortal neck, the sinuous banality of a dark-green silk trim on a less dark green cloth.
I get dizzy. The seats in the streetcar, made of tough, close-woven straw, take me to distant places and proliferate in the form of industries, workers, their houses, lives, realities, everything.
I get off the streetcar dazed and exhausted. I’ve just lived all of life.
299.
Every time I go somewhere, it’s a vast journey. A train trip to Cascais* tires me out as if in this short time I’d traveled through the urban and rural landscapes of four or five countries.
I imagine myself living in each house I pass, each chalet, each isolated cottage whitewashed with lime and silence—happy at first, then bored, then fed up. It all happens in a moment, and as soon as I’ve abandoned one of these homes, I’m filled with nostalgia for the time I lived there. And so every trip I make is a painful and happy harvest of great joys, great boredoms, and countless false nostalgias.
And as I pass by those houses, villas, and chalets, I also live the daily lives of all their inhabitants, living them all at the same time. I’m the father, mother, sons, cousins, the maid, and the maid’s cousin, all together and all at once, thanks to my special talent for simultaneously feeling various and sundry sensations, for simultaneously living the lives of various people—both on the outside, seeing them, and on the inside, feeling them.
I’ve created various personalities within. I constantly create personalities. Each of my dreams, as soon as I starting dreaming it, is immediately incarnated in another person, who is then the one dreaming it, and not I.
To create, I’ve destroyed myself. I’ve so externalized myself on the inside that I don’t exist there except externally. I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.
317.
One of my constant preoccupations is to understand how other people can exist, how there can be souls that aren’t mine, consciousnesses that have nothing to do with my own, which—because it’s a consciousness—seems to me like the only one. I accept that the man standing before me, who speaks with words like mine and gesticulates as I do or could do, is in some sense my fellow creature. But so are the figures from illustrations that fill my imagination, the characters I meet in novels, and the dramatic personae that move on stage through the actors who represent them.
No one, I suppose, genuinely admits the real existence of another person. We may concede that the person is alive and that he thinks and feels as we do, but there will always be an unnamed element of difference, a materialized inequality. There are figures from the past and living images from books that are more real to us than the incarnate indifferences that talk to us over shop counters, or happen to glance at us in the streetcars, or brush against us in the dead happenstance of the streets. Most people are no more for us than scenery, generally the invisible scenery of a street we know by heart.
I feel more kinship and intimacy with certain characters described in books and certain images I’ve seen in prints than I feel with many so-called real people, who are of that metaphysical insignificance known as flesh and blood. And “flesh and blood??
? in fact describes them rather well: they’re like chunks of meat displayed in the window of a butcher’s, dead things bleeding as if they were alive, shanks and cutlets of Destiny.
I’m not ashamed of feeling this way, as I’ve discovered that’s how everyone feels. What seems to lie behind people’s mutual contempt and indifference, such that they can kill each other like assassins who don’t really feel they’re killing, or like soldiers who don’t think about what they’re doing, is that no one pays heed to the apparently abstruse fact that other people are also living souls.
On certain days, in certain moments, brought to me by I don’t know what breeze and opened to me by the opening of I don’t know what door, I suddenly feel that the corner grocer is a thinking entity, that his assistant, who at this moment is bent over a sack of potatoes next to the entrance, is truly a soul capable of suffering.
When I was told yesterday that the employee of the tobacco shop had committed suicide, it seemed like a lie. Poor man, he also existed! We had forgotten this, all of us, all who knew him in the same way as all those who never met him. Tomorrow we’ll forget him even better. But he evidently had a soul, for he killed himself. Passion? Anxiety? No doubt.... But for me, as for all humanity, there’s only the memory of a dumb smile and a shabby sports coat that hung unevenly from the shoulders. That’s all that remains to me of this man who felt so much that he killed himself for feeling, since what else does one kill himself for? Once, as I was buying cigarettes from him, it occurred to me that he would go bald early. As it turns out, he didn’t have time enough to go bald. That’s one of the memories I have of him. What other one can I have, if even this one is not of him but of one of my thoughts?