kagablog

171

Only one thing astonishes me more than the stupidity with which most people live their lives, and that’s the intelligence of this stupidity.

On the face of it, the monotony of ordinary lives is horrifying. In this simple restaurant where I’m eating lunch, I look at the figure of the cook behind the counter and at the old waiter, near my table, who serves me and who I believe has been a waiter here for thirty years. What kind of lives do these men lead? For forty years that figure of a man has spent most of every day in a kitchen; he doesn’t get much time off; he sleeps relatively little; he occasionally goes to his home town, returning without hesitation or regret; he slowly saves his slowly earned money, which he has no plans to spend; he would get ill if he had to retire fro good from his kitchen to the piece of land he bought in Galicia; he has been in Lisbon for forty years and has never yet gone to the rotunda or to a theatre, and just once to the circus at the Coliseum, whose clowns still inhabit his life’s inner vestiges. He married - I don’t know how or why - and has four sons and a daughter, and his smile, as he leans over the counter in my direction, expresses a tremendous, solemn, satisfied happiness. And he’s not pretending, nor would he have reason to pretend. If he feels happy, it’s because he really is.

And what of the old waiter who serves me and who has just set before me what must be the millionth coffee he’s set on a customer’s table? He has the same life as the cook, the only difference being the fifteen or twenty feet between the dining area and the kitchen, where they carry out there respective functions. As for the rest, the waiter has only two sons, goes more often to Galicia, has seen more of Lisbon than the cook, knows Oporto, where he spent four years, and is equally happy.

It shocks me to consider the panorama of these lives, but before I can feel horro, pity and indignation on their account, it occurs to me that those who feel no horror or pity or indignation are the very ones who would have every right to - namely, the people who live these lives. It’s the central error of the literary imagination: to suppose that others are like us and must feel as we do. Fortunately for humanity, each man is just who he is, it being given only to the genius to be a few others as well.

What’s given, in fact, always depends on the person or thing it’s given to. A minor incident in the street brings the cook to the door and entertains him more than I owuld be entertained by contemplating the most original idea, by reading the greatest book, or by having the most gratifying of useless dreams. If life is basically monotony, he has escaped it more than I. And he escapes it more easily than I. The truth isn’t with him or me, because it isn’t with anyone, but happiness does belong to him.

Wise is the man who monotonizes his existence, for then each minor incident seems a marvel. A hunter of lions feels no adventure after the third lion. For my monotonous cook, a fist-fight on the street always has something of a modest apocalypse. One who has never been outside Lisbon travels to the infinite in the tram to Benfica, and should he ever go to Sintra, he’ll feel as though he’s been to Mars. The man who has journeyed all over the world can’t find any novelty in five thousand miles, for he finds only new things - yet another novelty, the old routine of the forever new - while his abstract concept of novelty got lost at sea after the second new thing he saw.

A man of true wisdom, with nothing but his senses and a soul that’s never sad, can enjoy the entire spectacle of the world from a chair, without knowing how to read and without talking to anyone.