kagablog

188

The ordinary man, however hard his life may be, at least has the pleasure of not thinking about it. To take life as it comes, living it externally like a cat or a dog - that is how people in general live, and that is how life should be lived, if we would have the contentment of the cat or dog.

To think is to destroy. Thought itself is destroyed in the process of thinking, because to think is to decompose. If men knew how to meditate on the mystery of life, if they knew how to feel the thousand complexities which spy on the soul in every single detail of action, then they would never act - they wouldn’t even live. They would kill themselves from fright, like those who commit suicide to avoid being guillotined the next day.

177

Metaphysical theories that can give us the momentary illusion that we’ve explained the unexplainable; moral theories that can fool us for an hour into thinking we finally know which of all the closed doors leads ot virtue; political theories that convince us for a day that we’ve solved some problem, when there are no solvable problems except in mathematics… May our attitude towards life be summed up in this consciously futile activity, in this preoccupation that gives no pleasure but at least keeps us from feeling the presence of pain.

There’s no better sign that a civilization has reached its height than the awareness, in its members, of the futility of all effort, given that we’re ruled by implacable laws, which nothing can repeal or obstruct. We may be slaves shackled to the whim of gods who are stronger than us, but they’re not any better, being subject - like us - to the iron hand of an abstract Fate, which is superior to justice and kindness, indifferent to good and evil.

176

On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it’s still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there’s something understandable.

175

The generation I belong to was born into a world where those with a brain as well as a heart couldn’t find any support. The destructive work of previous generations left us a world that offered no security in the religious sphere, no guidance in the moral sphere, and no tranquility in the political sphere. We were born into the midst of metaphysical anguish, moral anxiety and political disquiet. Inebriated with objective formulas, with the mere methods of reason and science, the generations that preceded us did away with the foundations of the Christian faith, for their biblical criticism - progressing from textual to mythological criticism - reduced the gospels and the earlier scriptures of the Jews to a doubtful heap of myths, legends and mere literature, while their scientific criticism gradually revealed the mistakes and ingenuous notions of the gospels’ primitive ’science’. At the same time, the spirit of free inquiry brought all metaphysical problems out into the open, and with them all the religious problems that had to do with metaphysics. Drunk with a hazy notion they called ‘positivism’, these generations criticized all morality and scrutinized all rules of life, and all that remained from the clash of doctrines was the certainty of none of them and the grief over there being no certainty. A society so undisciplined in its cultural foundations could obviously not help but be a victim, politically, of its own chaos, and so we woke up to a world eager for social innovations, a world that gleefully pursued a freedom it didn;t grasp and a progress it had never defined.

But while the sloppy criticism of our fathers bequeathed us the impossibility of being Christians, it didn’t bequeath us an acceptance of the impossibility; while it bequeathed us a disbelief in established moral codes, it din’t bequeath us an indifference to morality and the rules for peaceful human coexistence; while it left the thorny problem of politics in doubt, it din’t leave our minds unconcerned about how to solve it. Our father blithely wreaked destruction, for they lived in a time that was still informed by the solidity of the past. The very thing they destroyed was what gave strength to society and enabled them to destroy without noticing that the building was cracking. We inherited the destruction and its aftermath.

Today the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. Today the right to live and triumph is awarded on virtually the same basis as admission into an insane asylum: an inability to think, amorality, and nervous excitability.

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.

169

Page by page I slowly and lucidly reread everything I’ve written, and I find that it’s all worthless and should have been left unwritten. The things we achieve, whether empires or sentences, have (because they’ve been achieved) the worst aspect of real things: the fact they’re perishable. But that’s not what worries or grieves me about these pages as I reread them now, in these idle moments. What grieves me is that it wasn’t worth my trouble to write them, and the time I spent doing it earned me nothing but the illusion, now shattered, that it was worth doing.

Whatever we pursue, we pursue for the sake of an ambition, but either we never realize the ambition, and we’re poor, or we think we’ve realized it, and we’re rich fools.

What grieves me is that my best is no good, and that another whom I dream of, if he existed, would have done it better. Everything we do, in art or in life, is the imperfect copy of what we thought of doing. It belies the notion of inner as well as of outer perfection; it falls short not only of the standard it should meet but also of the standard we thought it could meet. We’re hollow on the inside as well as on the outside, pariahs in our expectations and in our realizations.

With what power of the solitary human soul I produced page after reclusive page, living syllable by syllable the false magic, not of what I wrote, but of what I thought I was writing! As if under an ironic sorcerer’s spell, I imagined myself the poet of my prose, in the winged moments when it welled up inside me - swifter than the strokes of my pen - like an illusory revenge agasint the insults of life! And today, rereading, I see my dolls bursting, the straw coming out of their torn seams, eviscerated without ever having been…

166

If I carefully consider the life men lead, I find nothing to distinguish it from the life of animals. Both man and animal are hurled unconsciously through things and the world; both have their leisure moments; both complete the same organic cycle day after day; both think nothing beyond what they think, nor live beyond what they live. A cat wallows in the sun and goes to sleep. Man wallows in life, with all of its complexities, and goes to sleep. Neither one escapes the fatal law of being what he is. Neither one tries to shake off the wieght of being. The greatest among men love glory, but not the glory of a personal immortality, just an abstract immortality, in which they don’t necessarily participate.

These considerations, which occur to me frequently, prompt an admiration in me for a kind of person that by nautre I abhor. I mean the mystics and ascetics - the recluses of all Tibets, the Simeon Stylites of all columns. These men, albeit by absurd means, do indeed try to escape the animal law. These men, although they act madly, do indeed reject the law of life by which others wallow in the sun and wait for death without thinking about it. They really seek, even if on top of a column; they yearn, even if in an unlit cell; they long for what they don’t know, even if in the suffering and martyrdom they’re condemned to.

The rest of us, living animal lives of varying complexity, cross the stage as walk-ons who don’t speak, satisfied by the pompous solemnity of the crossing. Dogs and men, cats and heroes, fleas and geniuses - we all play at existing without thinking about it (the most advanced of us thinking only about thinking) under the vast stillness of the stars. The others - the mystics of pain and sacrifice - at least feel, in their body and their daily lives, the magic presence of mystery. They have escaped, for they reject the visible sun; they know plenitude, for they’ve emptied themselves of the world’s nothingness.

164

Inaction makes up for everything. Not acting gives us everything. To imagine is everything, as long as it doesn’t tend towards action. No one can be king of the world except in dreams. And every one of us who really knows himself wants to be king of the world.

To imagine, without being, is the throne. To desire, without wanting, is the crown. We have what we renounce, for we conserve it eternally intact in our dreams, byt the light of the sun that isn’t, or of the moon that cannot be.

163

Direct experience is an evasion, or hiding place, for those without any imagination. Reading about the risks incurred by a man who hunts tigers, I feel all the risks worth feeling, save the actual physical risk, which wasn’t really worth feeling, for it vanished without a trace.

Men of action are the involuntary slaves of the men of reason. The worth of things depends on their interpretation. Certain men make things which other men invest with meaning, bringing them to life. To narrate is to create, while to live is merely to be lived.

162

All of life’s unpleasant experiences - when we make fools of ourselves, act thoughtlessly, or lapse in our observance of some virtue - should be regarded as mere external accidents which can’t affect the substance of our soul. We should see them as toothaches or calluses of life, as things that bother us but remain outside us (even though they’re ours).

When we achieve this attitude, which in essence is that of the mystics, we’re protected not only from the world but also from ourselves, for we’ve conquered what is foreign in us, contrary and external to us, and therefore our enemy.

Horace said that the just man will remain undaunted, even if the world crumbles all around him. Although the image is absurd, the point is valid. Even if what we pretend to be (because we coexist with others) crumbles around us, we should remain undaunted - not because we’re just, bu because we’re ourselves, and to be ourselves means having nothing to do with external things that crumble, even if they crumble right on top of what for them we are.

For superior men, life should be a dream that spurns confrontations.

161

Nothing irks me more than the vocabulary of social responsibility. The very word ‘duty’ is unpleasant to me, like an unwanted guest. But the term ‘civic duty’, ’solidarity’, ‘humanitarianism’ and others of the same ilk disgust me like rubbish dumped out of a window right on top of me. I’m offended by the implicit assumption that these expressions pertain to me, that I should find them owrthwhile and even meaningful.

I recently saw in a toy-shop window some objects that reminded me exactly of what these expressions are: make-believe dishes filled with make-believe tidbits for the miniature table of a doll. For the real, sensual, vain and selfish man, the friend of others because he has the gift of speech and the enemy of others because he has the gift of life, what is there to gain from playing with the dolls of hollow and meaningless words?

Government is based on two things: restraint and deception. The problem with those glittering expressions is that they neither restrain nor deceive. At most they intoxicate, which is something else again.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a reformer. A reformer is a man who sees the world’s superficial ills and sets out to cure them by aggravating the more basic ills. A doctor tries to bring a sick body into conformity with a normal, healthy body, but we don’t know what’s healthy or sick in the social sphere.

I see humanity as merely one of Nature’s latest schools of decorative painting. I don’t distinguish in any fundamental way between a man and a tree, and I naturally prefer whichever is more decorative, whichever interests my thinking eyes. If the tree is more interesting to me than the man, I’m sorrier to see the tree felled than to see the man die. There are departing sunsets that grieve me more than the deaths of children. I keep my own feelings out of everything, in order to be able to feel.

I almost reproach myself for writing these sketchy reflections in this moment when a light breeze, rising from the afternoon’s depths, begins to take on colour. In fact it’s not the breeze that takes on colour but the air through which it hesitantly glides. I feel, however, as if the breeze were being coloured, so that’s what I say, for I have to say what I feel, given that I’m I.

160

The entire day, in all the desolation of its scattered and dull clouds, was filled with the news of revolution. Such reports, true or false, always fill me with a peculiar discomfort, a mixture of disdain and physical nausea. It galls my intelligence when someone imagines that things will change by shaking them up. Violence of whatever sort has always been, for me, a flagrant form of human stupidity. All revolutionaries, for that matter, are stupid, as are all reformers to a lesser extent - lesser because they’re less troublesome.

Revolutionary or reformer - the error is the same. Unable to dominate and reform his own attitude to life, which is everything, or his own being, which is almost everything, he flees, devoting himself to modifying others and the outside world. Every revolutionary and reformer is a fugitive. To fight for change is to be incapable of changing oneself. To reform is to be beyond repair.

A sensitive and honest-minded man, if he’s concerned about evil and injustice in the world, will naturally begin his campaign against them by eliminating them at their nearest source: his own person. This task will take his entire life.

Everything, for us, is in our concept of the world. To modify our concept of the world is to modify the world for us, or simply to modify the world, since it will never be, for us, anything but what it is for us. That inner justice we summon to write a fluent and beautiful page, that true reformation of enlivening our dead sensibility - these things are the truth, our truth, the only truth. Everything else in the world is scenery, picture frames for our feelings, book bindings for our thoughts. And this is true whether it be the colourful scenery of beings and things - fields, houses, posters, clothes - or the colourless scenery of monotonous souls that periodically rise to the surface with hackneyed words and gestures, then sink back down into the fundamental stupidity of human expression.

Revolution? Change? What I really want, with all my heart, is for the atonic clouds to stop grely lathering the sky. What I want is to see the blue emerge, a truth that is clear and sure because it is nothing and wants nothing.

152

I’m astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing it; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will’s surrender. I begin because I don’t have the strength to think; I finish because I don’t have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.

If I often interrupt a thought with a scenic description that in some way fits into the real or imagined scheme of my impressions, it’s because the scenery is a door through which I flee from my awareness of my creative impotence. In the middle of the conversations with myself that form the words of this book, I’ll feel the sudden need to talk to someone else, and so i’ll address the light which hovers, as now, over rooftops that glow as if they were damp, or I’ll turn to the urban hillside with its tall and gently swaying trees that seem strangely close and on the verge of silently collapsing, or to the steep houses that overlap like posters, with windows for letters, and the dying sun gilding their moist glue.

Why do I write, if I can’t write any better? But what would become of me if I didn’t write what I can, however inferiior it may be to what I am? In my ambitions I’m a plebeian, because I try to achieve; like someone afraid of a dark room, I’m afraid to be silent. I’m like those who prize the medal more than the struggle to get it, and savour glory in a fur-lined cape.

For me, to write is self-deprecating, and yet I can’t quit doing it. Writing is like the drug I abhor and keep taking, the addiction I despise and depend on. There are necessary poisons, and some are extremely subtle, composed of ingredients from the soul, herbs collected from among the ruins of dreams, black poppies found next to the graves of our intentions, the long leaves of obscene trees whose branches sway on the echoing banks of the soul’s infernal rivers.

To write is to lose myself, yes, but everyone loses himself, because everything gets lost. I, however, lose myself without any joy - not like the river flowing into the sea for which it was secretly born, but like the puddle left on the beach by the high tide, its stranded water never returning to the ocean but merely sinking into the sand.

149

The superior man differs from the inferior man and his animal brothers by the simple trait of irony. Irony is the first sign that our consciousness has become conscious, and it passes through two stages: the one represented by Socrates, when he says, “All I know is that I know nothing,” and the other represented by Sanchez, when he says, “I don’t even know if I know nothing.” In the first stage we dogmatically doubt ourselves, and every superior man arrives there. In the second stage we come to doubt not only ourselves but also our own doubt, and few men have reached that point in the already so long yet short span of time that the human race has beheld the sun and night over the earth’s variegated surface.

To know oneself is to err, and the oracle that said ‘Know thyself’ proposed a task more difficult than the labours of Hercules and a riddle murkier than the Sphinx’s. To consciously not know ourselves - that’s the way! And to conscientiously not know ourselves is the active task of irony. I know nothing greater, nor more truly worthy of the great man, than the patient and expressive analysis of the ways in which we don’t know ourselves, the conscious recording of the unconsciousness of our conscious states, the metaphysics of autonomous shadows, the poetry of the twilight of disillusion.

…

I stand up from the chair where, propped distractedly against the table, I’ve entertained myself with the narration of these strange impressions. I stand up, propping my body on itself, and walk to the window, higher than the surrounding rooftops, and I watch the city going to sleep in a slow beginning of silence. The large and whitely white moon sadly clarifies the terraced differences in the buildings opposite. The moonlight seems to illuminate icily all the world’s mystery. It seems to reveal everything, and everything is shadows with admixtures of faint light, false and unevenly absurd gaps, inconsistencies of the visible. There’s no breeze, and the mystery seems to loom larger. I feel queasy in my abstract thought. I’ll never write a page that sheds light on me or that sheds light on anything. A wispy cloud hovers hazily over the moon, like a coverture. I’m ignorant, like these rooftops. I’ve failed, like all of nature.

148

Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what’s in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there’s always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.

146

Some have a great dream in life that they never accomplish. Others have no dream, and likewise never accomplish it.

145

The higher a man rises, the more things he must do without. There’s no room on the pinnacle except for the man himself. The more perfect he is, the more complete; and the more complete, the less other.

These thoughts occurred to me after reading a newspaper article about the great and multifaceted life of a celebrity - an American millionaire who had been everything. He had achieved all that he’d aspired to - money, love, friendship, recognition, travels, collections. Money can’t buy everything, but the personal magnetism that enables a man to make lots of money can, indeed, obtain most things.

As I laid the paper down on the restaurant table, I was already thinking how a similar article, narrowing the focus, could have been written about the firm’s sales representative, more or less my acquaintance, who’s eating lunch at the table in the back corner, as he does every day. All that the millionaire had, this man has - in smaller measure, to be sure, but abundantly for his stature. Both men have had equal success, and there isn’t even a difference in their fame, for here too we must see each man in his particular context. There’s no one in the world who doesn’t know the name of the American millionaire, but there’s no one in Lisbon’s commercial district who doesn’t know the name of the man eating lunch in the corner.

These men obtained all that their hand could grasp within arm’s reach. What varied in them was the length their arm; they were identical in other respects. I’ve never been able to envy this sort of person. I’ve always felt that virtue lay in obtaining what was out of one’s reach, in living where one isn’t, in being more alive after death than during life, in achieving something impossible, something absurd, in overcoming - like an obstacle - the world’s very reality.

Should someone point out that the pleasure of enduring is nil after one ceases to exist, I would first of all respond that I’m not sure if it is, because I don’t know the truth about human survival. Secondly, the pleasure of future fame is a present pleasure - the fame is what’s future. And it’s the pleasure of feeling proud, equal to no pleasure that material wealth can bring. It may be illusory, but it is in any case far greater than the pleasure of enjoying only what’s here. The American millionaire can’t believe that posterity will appreciate his poems - given that he didn’t write any. The sales representative can’t imagine that the future will admire his pictures, since he never painted any.

I, however, who in this transitory life am nothing, can enjoy the thought of the future reading this very page, since I do actually write it; I can take pride - like a father in his son - in the fame I will have, since at least I have something that could bring me fame. And as I think this, rising from the table, my invisible and inwardly majestic stature rises above Detroit, Michigan, and over the commercial district of Lisbon.

It was not, however, with these reflections that I began to reflect. What I initially thought about was how little a man must be in this life in order to live beyond it. One reflection is as good as another, for they are the same. Glory isn’t a medal but a coin: on one side the head, on the other a stated value. For the larger values there are no coins, just paper, whose value is never much.

With metaphysical psychologies such as these, humble people like me console themselves.

138

There’s an erudition of acquired knowledge, which is erudition in the narrowest sense, and there’s an erudition of understanding, which we call culture. But there’s also an erudition of the sensibility.

Erudition of the sensibility has nothing to do with the experience of life. The experience of life teaches nothing, just as history teaches nothing. True experience comes from restricting our contact with reality while increasing our analysis of that contact. In this way our sensibility becomes broader and deeper, because everything is in us - all we need to do is look for it and know how to look.

128

I’ve always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I’m not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.

Nothing would bother me more than if they found me strange at the office. I like to revel in the irony that they don’t find me at all strange. I like the hair shirt of being regarded by them as their equal. I like the crucifixion of being considered no different. There are martyrdoms more subtle than those recorded for the saints and hermits. There are torments of our mental awareness as there are of the body and of desire. And in the former, as in the latter, there’s a certain sensuality…

123

Travel is for those who cannot feel. That’s why travel books are always so unsatisfying as books of experience. They’re worth only as much as the imagination of the one who writes them, and if the writer has imagination, he can easily enchant us with the detailed, photographic description - down to each tiny coloured pennant of scenes he imagined as he can with the necessarily less detailed description of the scenes he thought he saw. All of us are near-sighted, except on the inside. Only the eyes we use for dreaming truly see.

…

Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.

122

The idea of travelling nauseates me.

I’ve already seen what I’ve never seen.
I’ve already seen what I have yet to see.

The tedium of the forever new, the tedium of discovering - behind the specious differences of things and ideas - the unrelenting sameness of everything, the absolute similarity of a mosque and a temple and a church, the exact equivalence of a cabin and a castle, the same physical body for a king in robes and for a naked savage, the eternal concordance of life with itself, the stagnation of everything I live, all of it equally condemned to change…

Landscapes are repetitions. On a simple train ride I uselessly and restlessly waver between my inattention to the landscape and my inattention tot he book that would amuse me if I were someone else. Life makes me feel a vague nausea, and any kind of movement aggravates it.

Only landscapes that don’t exist and books I’ll never read aren’t tedious. Life, for me, is a drowsiness that never reaches the brain. This I keep free, so that I can be sad there.

Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! For someone who isn’t anything, like a river, forward motion is no doubt life. But for those who are alert, who think and feel, the horrendous hysteria of trains, cars and ships makes it impossible to sleep or to wake up.

120

That obscure and almost imponderable malice that gladdens every human heart when confronted by the pain and discomfort of others has been redirected, in me, to my own pains, so that I can actually take pleasure in feeling ridiculous or contemptible, as if it were someone else in my place. By a strange and fantastic transformation of sentiments, I don’t feel that malicious and all-too-human gladness when faced with other people’s pain and embarrassment. When others are in difficulty, what I feel isn’t sorrow but an aesthetic discomfort and a sinuous irritation. This isn’t due to compassion but to the fact that whoever looks ridiculous looks that way to others and not just to me, and it irritates me when someone looks ridiculous to others; it grieves me that any animal of the human species should laugh at the expense of another when he has no right to. I don’t care if others laugh at my expense, for I have the advantage of an armoured contempt towards whatever’s outside me.

I’ve surrounded the garden of my being with high iron gratings - more imposing than any stone wall - in such a way that I can perfectly see others while perfectly excluding them, keeping them in their place as others.

To discover ways of not acting has been my main concern in life.

117

All literature is an attempt to make life real. As all of us know, even when we don’t act on what we know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are all absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary.

Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel and not what someone has taught them to feel. Once I heard a child, who wished to say that he was on the verge of tears, adn not ‘I feel like crying,’ which is what an adult, i.e. an idiot, would say, but rather, ‘I feel like tears.’ And this phrase - so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it - decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness.

To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming - like worms when a rock is lifted - under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

113

Two or three days like the beginning of love…

The value of this for the aesthete is in the feeling it produces. To go further would be to enter the realm of jealousy, suffering and anxiety. In this antechamber of emotion there’s all the sweetness of love - hints of pleasure, whiffs of passion - without any of its depth. If this means giving up the grandeur of tragic love, we must remember that tragedies, for the aesthete, are interesting to observe but unpleasant to experience. The cultivation of life hinders that of the imagination. It is the aloof, uncommon man who rules.

No doubt this theory would satisfy me, if I could convince myself that it’s not what it is: a complicated jabber to fill the ears of my intelligence, to make it almost forget that at heart I’m just timid, with no aptitude for life.

112

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept - our own selves - that we love.

This is true in the whole gamut of love. In sexual love we seek our own pleasure via another body. The masturbator may be abject, but in point of fact he’s the perfect logical expression of the lover. He’s the only one who doesn’t feign and doesn’t fool himself.

The relations between one soul and another, expressed through such uncertain and variable things as shared words and proffered gestures, are deceptively complex. The very act of meeting each other is a non-meeting. Two people say ‘i love you’ or mutually think it and feel it, and each has in mind a different idea, a different life, perhaps even a different colour or fragrance, in the abstract sum of impressions that constitute the soul’s activity.