I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it – without knowing why. And since the human spirit naturally tends to make judgements based on feeling instead of reason, most of these young people chose Humanity to replace God.

Location 525

For those few like me who live without knowing how to have life, what’s left but renunciation as our way and contemplation as our destiny? Not knowing nor able to know what religious life is, since faith isn’t acquired through reason, and unable to have faith in or even react to the abstract notion of man, we’re left with the aesthetic contemplation of life as our reason for having a soul.

Location 535

Taking nothing seriously and recognizing our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge there, exploring them like large unknown countries.

Location 542

And if we apply ourselves diligently not only to aesthetic contemplation but also to the expression of its methods and results, it’s because the poetry or prose we write – devoid of any desire to move anyone else’s will or to mould anyone’s understanding – is merely like when a reader reads out loud to fully objectify the subjective pleasure of reading.

Location 543

We’re well aware that every creative work is imperfect and that our most dubious aesthetic contemplation will be the one whose object is what we write. But everything is imperfect.

Location 546

And so, contemplators of statues and mountains alike, enjoying both books and the passing days, and dreaming all things so as to transform them into our own substance, we will also write down descriptions and analyses which, when they’re finished, will become extraneous things that we can enjoy as if they happened along one day.

Location 548

I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don’t know where it will take me, because I don’t know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I’m compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social centre, for it’s here that I meet others. But I’m neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlours, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I’m sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colours and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing – for myself alone – wispy songs I compose while waiting. Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up. I enjoy the breeze I’m given and the soul I was given to enjoy it with, and I no longer question or seek. If what I write in the book of travellers can, when read by others at some future date, also entertain them on their journey, then fine. If they don’t read it, or are not entertained, that’s fine too.

Location 554

Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day they’re full of meaningless activity; by night they’re full of a meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things. There is an equal, abstract destiny for men and for things; both have an equally indifferent designation in the algebra of the world’s mystery.

Location 570

In these languid and empty hours, a sadness felt by my entire being rises from my soul to my mind – a bitter awareness that everything is a sensation of mine and at the same time something external, something not in my power to change. Ah, how often my own dreams have raised up before me as things, not to replace reality but to declare themselves its equals, in so far as I scorn them and they exist apart from me, like the tram now turning the corner at the end of the street, or like the voice of an evening crier, crying I don’t know what but with a sound that stands out – an Arabian chant like the sudden patter of a fountain – against the monotony of twilight!

Location 575

Future married couples pass by, chatting seamstresses pass by, young men in a hurry for pleasure pass by, those who have retired from everything smoke on their habitual stroll, and at one or another doorway a shopkeeper stands like an idle vagabond, hardly noticing a thing. Army recruits – some of them brawny, others slight – slowly drift along in noisy and worse-than-noisy clusters. Occasionally someone quite ordinary goes by. Cars at that time of day are rare, and their noise is musical. In my heart there’s a peaceful anguish, and my calm is made of resignation. All of this passes, and none of it means anything to me. It’s all foreign to my fate, and even to fate as a whole. It’s just unconsciousness, curses of protest when chance hurls stones, echoes of unknown voices – a collective mishmash of life.

Location 579

The nocturnal glory of being great without being anything! The sombre majesty of splendours no one knows… And I suddenly experience the sublime feeling of a monk in the wilderness or of a hermit in his retreat, acquainted with the substance of Christ in the sands and in the caves of withdrawal from the world. And at this table in my absurd room, I, a pathetic and anonymous office clerk, write words as if they were the soul’s salvation, and I gild myself with the impossible sunset of high and vast hills in the distance, with the statue I received in exchange for life’s pleasures, and with the ring of renunciation on my evangelical finger, the stagnant jewel of my ecstatic disdain.

Location 589

I lower new eyes to the two white pages, on which my careful numbers have entered the firm’s results. And smiling to myself I remember that life, which contains these pages with fabric types, prices and sales, blank spaces, letters and ruled lines, also includes the great navigators, the great saints, and the poets of every age, not one of whom enters the books – a vast progeny banished from those who determine the world’s worth. In the very act of entering the name of an unfamiliar cloth, the doors of the Indus and of Samarkand open up, and Persian poetry (which is from yet another place), with its quatrains whose third lines don’t rhyme, is a distant anchor for me in my disquiet. But I make no mistake: I write, I add, and the bookkeeping goes on, performed as usual by an employee of this office.

Location 598

I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me – this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we’re mean-hearted but because we don’t feel like unbuttoning our coat.

Location 605

Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self-expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes. In these moments my heart beats faster because I’m conscious of it. I live more because I live on high. I feel a religious force within me, a species of prayer, a kind of public outcry. But my mind quickly puts me in my place… I remember that I’m on the fourth floor of the Rua dos Douradores, and I take a drowsy look at myself. I glance up from this half-written page at life, futile and without beauty, and at the cheap cigarette I’m…

Location 608

Today, in one of the pointless and worthless daydreams that constitute a large part of my inner life, I imagined being forever free from the Rua dos Douradores, from Vasques my boss, from Moreira the head bookkeeper, from all the employees, from the delivery boy, the office boy and the cat. In my dream I experienced freedom, as if the South Seas had offered me marvellous islands to be…

Location 616

an unpleasant thought assaulted my dream: I realized I would feel regret. Yes, I say it as if confronted by the actual circumstance: I would feel regret. Vasques my boss, Moreira the head bookkeeper, Borges the cashier, all the young men, the cheerful boy who takes letters to the post office, the boy who makes deliveries, the gentle cat – all this has become part of my life. And I wouldn’t be able to leave it without crying, without feeling that – like it or not –…

Location 620

We all have a Vasques who’s the boss – visible for some of us, invisible for others. My Vasques goes by that very name, and he’s a hale and pleasant man, occasionally short-tempered but never two-faced, self-interested but basically fair, with a sense of justice that’s lacking in many great geniuses and human marvels of civilization, right and left. Other people answer to vanity, or to the lure of wealth, glory, immortality. For my boss I prefer…

Location 626

I arrive at my desk as at a bulwark against life. I have a tender spot – tender to the point of tears – for my ledgers in which I keep other people’s accounts, for the old inkstand I use, for the hunched back of Sérgio, who draws up invoices a little beyond where I sit. I love all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love, and perhaps also because nothing is worth a human soul’s love, and so it’s all the same – should we feel the urge to give it – whether the recipient be the diminutive form of my inkstand or the vast indifference of the stars.

Location 634

Vasques – the boss. At times I’m inexplicably hypnotized by Senhor Vasques. What is this man to me besides an occasional obstacle, as the owner of my time, in the daylight hours of my life? He treats me well and is polite when he talks to me, except on his grumpy days, when he’s fretting about something and isn’t polite to anyone. But why does he occupy my thoughts? Is he a symbol? A cause? What is he?

Location 639

Vasques – the boss. I already remember him in the future with the nostalgia I know I’m bound to feel. I’ll be peacefully ensconced in a small house on the outskirts of somewhere or other, enjoying a tranquillity in which I won’t write the works I don’t write now, and to keep on not writing them I’ll come up with even better excuses than the ones I use today to elude myself. Or I’ll be in an institution for paupers, happy in my utter defeat, mixed up with the rabble of would-be geniuses who were no more than beggars with dreams, thrown in with the anonymous throng of those who didn’t have strength enough to conquer nor renunciation enough to conquer by not competing. Wherever I may be, I’ll miss Senhor Vasques and the office on the Rua dos Douradores, and the monotony of my daily life will be like the remembrance of the loves that never came my way and the triumphs that weren’t to be mine.

Location 642

I see him, I see his energetically deliberate gestures, his eyes thinking within about things outside. It displeases me when I’ve somehow displeased him, and my soul rejoices when he smiles, with his broad and human smile, like an applauding crowd.

Location 652

Perhaps the lack of some more distinguished figure in my immediate world explains why Senor Vasques, a common and even brutish man, sometimes gets so enmeshed in my thoughts that I forget myself.

Location 654

Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. I note the slightest facial movements of the person I’m talking with, I record the subtlest inflections of his utterances; but I hear without listening, I’m thinking of something else, and what I least catch in the conversation is the sense of what was said, by me or by him. And so I often repeat to someone what I’ve already repeated, or ask him again what he’s already answered. But I’m able to describe, in four photographic words, the facial muscles he used to say what I don’t recall, or the way he listened with his eyes to the words I don’t remember telling him.

Location 666

We never know self-realization. We are two abysses – a well staring at the sky.

Location 673

What is there to confess that’s worthwhile or useful? What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only to us; if to everyone, then it’s no novelty, and if only to us, then it won’t be understood. If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant. I make landscapes out of what I feel. I make holidays of my sensations.

Location 677

My deplorable condition isn’t in the least affected by these words I join together to form, little by little, my haphazard book of musings. My worthless self lives on at the bottom of every expression, like an indissoluble residue at the bottom of a glass from which only water was drunk.

Location 689

I write my literature as I write my ledger entries – carefully and indifferently. Next to the vast starry sky and the enigma of so many souls, the night of the unknown abyss and the chaos of nothing making sense – next to all this, what I write in the ledger and what I write on this paper that tells my soul are equally confined to the Rua dos Douradores, woefully little in the face of the universe’s millionaire expanses.

Location 691

All of this is dream and phantasmagoria, and it matters little whether the dream be of ledger entries or of well-crafted prose. Does dreaming of princesses serve a better purpose than dreaming of the front door to the office? All that we know is our own impression, and all that we are is an exterior impression, a melodrama in which we, the self-aware actors, are also our own spectators, our own gods by permission of some department or other at City Hall.

Location 694

We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.

Location 698

Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I’d languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.

Location 707

With merely a kind of smile in my soul, I passively consider the definitive confinement of my life to the Rua dos Douradores, to this office, to the people who surround me. An income sufficient for food and drink, a roof over my head, and a little free time in which to dream and write, to sleep – what more can I ask of the Gods or expect from Destiny?

Location 719

I’ve had great ambitions and boundless dreams, but so has the delivery boy* or the seamstress, because everyone has dreams. What distinguishes certain of us is our capacity for fulfilling them, or our destiny that they be fulfilled. In dreams I am equal to the delivery boy and the seamstress. I differ from them only in knowing how to write. Yes, writing is an act, a personal circumstance that distinguishes me from them. But in my soul I’m their equal.

Location 722

Let’s act like sphinxes, however falsely, until we reach the point of no longer knowing who we are. For we are, in fact, false sphinxes, with no idea of what we are in reality. The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves. Absurdity is divine. Let’s develop theories, patiently and honestly thinking them out, in order to promptly act against them – acting and justifying our actions with new theories that condemn them. Let’s cut a path in life and then go immediately against that path. Let’s adopt all the poses and gestures of something we aren’t and don’t wish to be, and don’t even wish to be taken for being. Let’s buy books so as not to read them; let’s go to concerts without caring to hear the music or to see who’s there; let’s take long walks because we’re sick of walking; and let’s spend whole days in the country, just because it bores us.

Location 756

Some govern the world, others are the world. Between an American millionaire, a Caesar or Napoleon, or Lenin, and the Socialist leader of a small town, there’s a difference in quantity but not of quality. Below them there’s us, the unnoticed: the reckless playwright William Shakespeare, John Milton the schoolteacher, Dante Alighieri the tramp, the delivery boy who ran an errand for me yesterday, the barber who tells me jokes, and the waiter who just now demonstrated his camaraderie by wishing me well, after noticing I’d drunk only half the wine.

Location 769

Literature – which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality – seems to me the end towards which all human effort would have to strive, if it were truly human and not just a welling up of our animal self. To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colours with a durability not found in cellular life.

Location 800

What moves lives. What is said endures. There’s nothing in life that’s less real for having been well described. Small-minded critics point out that such-and-such poem, with its protracted cadences, in the end says merely that it’s a nice day. But to say it’s a nice day is difficult, and the nice day itself passes on. It’s up to us to conserve the nice day in a wordy, florid memory, sprinkling new flowers and new stars over the fields and skies of the empty, fleeting outer world.

Location 803

Everything is what we are, and everything will be, for those who come after us in the diversity of time, what we will have intensely imagined – what we, that is, by embodying our imagination, will have actually been. The grand, tarnished panorama of History amounts, as I see it, to a flow of interpretations, a confused consensus of unreliable eyewitness accounts. The novelist is all of us, and we narrate whenever we see, because seeing is complex like everything.

Location 807

Ah, it’s my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me! Who would I be now if I’d received the affection that comes from the womb and is placed, through kisses, on a baby’s face?

Location 837

Everything around me is the naked, abstract universe, consisting of nocturnal negations. Divided between tired and restless, I succeed in touching – with the awareness of my body – a metaphysical knowledge of the mystery of things. Sometimes my soul starts fading, and then the random details of daily life float on the surface of consciousness, and I find myself entering amounts while floundering in sleeplessness. At other times I wake up from the half-sleep I’d fallen into, and hazy images with poetical and unpredictable colours play out their silent show to my inattention. My eyes aren’t completely closed. My faint vision is fringed by a light from far away; it’s from the street lamps that border the deserted street down below.

Location 852

During the first days of Autumn when nightfall arrives suddenly, as if prematurely, and it seems we took longer to do our day’s work, I enjoy, while still working, the thought of not working which the darkness brings, for the darkness is night, and night means sleep, home, freedom. When the lights come on, dispelling darkness from the large office, and we continue our day’s work in the beginning of night, I feel a comfort that’s absurd, like a remembrance belonging to someone else, and I’m at peace with the numbers I write, as if I were reading while waiting to fall asleep.

Location 882

and a deep and weary disdain for all those who work for mankind, for all those who fight for their country and give their lives so that civilization may continue… … a disdain full of disgust for those who don’t realize that the only reality is each man’s soul, and that everything else – the exterior world and other people – is but an unaesthetic nightmare, like the result, in dreams, of a mental indigestion. My aversion to effort becomes an almost writhing horror before all forms of violent effort. War, energetic and productive labour, helping others – all this strikes me as the product of an impertinence..... Everything useful and external tastes frivolous and trivial in the light of my soul’s supreme reality and next to the pure sovereign splendour of my more original and frequent dreams. These, for me, are more real.

Location 908

It’s not the cracked walls of my rented room, nor the shabby desks in the office where I work, nor the poverty of the same old downtown streets in between, which I’ve crossed and recrossed so many times they seem to have assumed the immobility of the irreparable – none of that is responsible for my frequent feeling of nausea over the squalor of daily life. It’s the people who habitually surround me, the souls who know me through conversation and daily contact without knowing me at all – they’re the ones who cause a salivary knot of physical disgust to form in my throat. It’s the sordid monotony of their lives, outwardly parallel to my own, and their keen awareness that I’m their fellow man – that is what dresses me in a convict’s clothes, places me in a jail cell, and makes me apocryphal and beggarly.

Location 915

And I start to wonder how I’m able to go on, how I dare have the faint-heartedness to be here among these people, exactly like them, in true conformity to their shoddy illusion. Like flashes from a distant lighthouse, I see all the solutions offered by the imagination’s female side: flight, suicide, renunciation, grandiose acts of our aristocratic self-awareness, the swashbuckling novel of existences without balconies.

Location 926

All of a sudden, as if a surgical hand of destiny had operated on a long-standing blindness with immediate and sensational results, I lift my gaze from my anonymous life to the clear recognition of how I live. And I see that everything I’ve done, thought or been is a species of delusion or madness. I’m amazed by what I managed not to see. I marvel at all that I was and that I now see I’m not. I look at my past life as at a field lit up by the sun when it breaks through the clouds, and I note with metaphysical astonishment how my most deliberate acts, my clearest ideas and my most logical intentions were after all no more than congenital drunkenness, inherent madness and huge ignorance. I didn’t even act anything out. I was the role that got acted. At most, I was the actor’s motions. All that I’ve done, thought or been is a series of submissions, either to a false self that I assumed belonged to me because I expressed myself through it to the outside, or to a weight of circumstances that I supposed was the air I breathed. In this moment of seeing, I suddenly find myself isolated, an exile where I’d always thought I was a citizen. At the heart of my thoughts I wasn’t I. I’m dazed by a sarcastic terror of life, a despondency that exceeds the limits of my conscious being. I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought. I feel, in this moment, like a man who wakes up after a slumber full of real dreams, or like a man freed by an earthquake from the dim light of the prison he’d grown used to.

Location 941

I’m like a traveller who suddenly finds himself in a strange town, without knowing how he got there, which makes me think of those who lose their memory and for a long time are not themselves but someone else. I was someone else for a long time – since birth and consciousness – and suddenly I’ve woken up in the middle of a bridge, leaning over the river and knowing that I exist more solidly than the person I was up till now. But the city is unknown to me, the streets are new, and the trouble has no cure. And so, leaning over the bridge, I wait for the truth to go away and let me return to being fictitious and non-existent, intelligent and natural. It was just a brief moment, and it’s already over. Once more I see the furniture all around me, the pattern on the old wallpaper, and the sun through the dusty panes. I saw the truth for a moment. For a moment I was consciously what great men are their entire lives. I recall their words and deeds and wonder if they were also successfully tempted by the Demon of Reality. To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think. To know yourself in a flash, as I did in this moment, is to have a fleeting notion of the intimate monad, the soul’s magic word. But that sudden light scorches everything, consumes everything. It strips us naked of even ourselves.

Location 956

And then I wonder what this thing is that we call death. I don’t mean the mystery of death, which I can’t begin to fathom, but the physical sensation of ceasing to live. Humanity is afraid of death, but indecisively. The normal man makes a good soldier in combat; the normal man, when sick or old, rarely looks with horror at the abyss of nothing, though he admits its nothingness. This is because he lacks imagination.

Location 971

Whenever I see a dead body, death seems to me a departure. The corpse looks to me like a suit that was left behind. Someone went away and didn’t need to take the one and only outfit he’d worn.

Location 978

To shrug off all duties, even those not assigned to us, to repudiate all homes, even those that weren’t ours, to live off vestiges and the ill-defined, in grand purple robes of madness and in counterfeit laces of dreamed majesties… To be something, anything, that doesn’t feel the weight of the rain outside, nor the anguish of inner emptiness… To wander without thought or soul – sensation without sensation – along mountain roads and through valleys hidden between steep slopes, into the far distance, irrevocably immersed… To be lost in landscapes like paintings… A coloured non-existence in the background…

Location 987

We should wash our destiny the way we wash our body, and change life the way we change clothes – not to preserve life, as when we eat and sleep, but out of objective respect for ourselves, which is what personal hygiene is all about.

Location 1003

There are many people whose lack of hygiene is not a chosen condition but a shrugging of the intellect’s shoulders. And there are many whose dullness and sameness of life is not what they wanted for their life, nor the result of not having wanted any life, but just a dulling of their own self-awareness, a spontaneous irony of the intellect.

Location 1004

There are pigs repelled by their own filth that don’t draw away from it because the feeling of repulsion is so strong it paralyses, as when a frightened man freezes instead of fleeing the danger. There are pigs like me that wallow in their destiny, not drawing away from the banality of daily life because they’re enthralled by their own impotence. They’re like birds captivated by the thought of the snake, like flies that hover around branches without seeing a thing, until they’re within the sticky reach of the chameleon’s tongue.

Location 1007

With death? No, not even with death. Whoever lives like me doesn’t die: he terminates, wilts, devegetates. The place where he was remains without him being there; the street where he walked remains without him being seen on it; the house where he lived is inhabited by not-him. That’s all, and we call it nothing; but not even this tragedy of negation can be staged to applause, for we don’t even know for sure if it’s nothing, we, these vegetable manifestations of both truth and life, dust on both the outside and the inside of the panes, grandchildren of Destiny and stepchildren of God, who married Eternal Night when she was widowed by the Chaos that fathered us. To depart from the Rua dos Douradores for the Impossible… To leave my desk for the Unknown… But with this journey intersected by Reason – the Great Book that says we existed.

Location 1014

Then, as if they were wind-blown clouds, all of the ideas in which we’ve felt life and all the ambitions and plans on which we’ve based our hopes for the future tear apart and scatter like ashes of fog, tatters of what wasn’t nor could ever be. And behind this disastrous rout, the black and implacable solitude of the desolate starry sky appears. The mystery of life distresses and frightens us in many ways. Sometimes it comes upon us like a formless phantom, and the soul trembles with the worst of fears – that of the monstrous incarnation of non-being. At other times it’s behind us, visible only as long as we don’t turn around to look at it, and it’s the truth in its profound horror of our never being able to know it.

Location 1023

To live a dispassionate and cultured life in the open air of ideas, reading, dreaming and thinking of writing – a life so slow it constantly verges on tedium, but pondered enough never to find itself there. To live this life far from emotions and thought, living it only in the thought of emotions and in the emotion of thoughts. To goldenly stagnate in the sun, like a murky pond surrounded by flowers. To possess, in the shade, that nobility of spirit that makes no demands on life. To be in the whirl of the worlds like dust of flowers, sailing through the afternoon air on an unknown wind and falling, in the torpor of dusk, wherever it falls, lost among larger things. To be this with a sure understanding, neither happy nor sad, grateful to the sun for its brilliance and to the stars for their remoteness. To be no more, have no more, want no more… The music of the hungry beggar, the song of the blind man, the relic of the unknown wayfarer, the tracks in the desert of the camel without burden or destination…

Location 1044

Because I’m the size of what I see And not the size of my stature. Lines like these, which seem to spring into being on their own, independently of whoever says them, cleanse me of all the metaphysics that I automatically tack on to life. After reading them, I step over to my window overlooking the narrow street, I look at the immense sky and the countless stars, and I’m free, with a winged splendour whose fluttering sends a shiver throughout my body. ‘I’m the size of what I see!’ Each time I think on this phrase with all my nerves, the more it seems destined to redesign the whole starry universe. ‘I’m the size of what I see!’ How large are the mind’s riches, ranging from the well of profound emotions to the distant stars that are reflected in it and so in some sense are there! And since now I know I can see, I look upon the vast objective metaphysics of all the heavens with a certainty that makes me want to die singing. ‘I’m the size of what I see!’ And the vague moonlight, entirely mine, begins to mar with vagueness the blackish blue horizon. I want to raise my arms and shout wild and strange things, to speak to the lofty mysteries, to affirm a new and vast personality to the boundless expanses of empty matter. But I control myself and calm down. ‘I’m the size of what I see!’ And the phrase becomes my entire soul, I rest all my emotions on it, and over me, on the inside, as over the city on the outside, there descends an indecipherable peace from the hard moonlight that broadly begins to shine as the night falls.

Location 1054

The mere thought of having to enter into contact with someone else makes me nervous. A simple invitation to have dinner with a friend produces an anguish in me that’s hard to define. The idea of any social obligation whatsoever – attending a funeral, dealing with someone about an office matter, going to the station to wait for someone I know or don’t know – the very idea disturbs my thoughts for an entire day, and sometimes I even start worrying the night before, so that I sleep badly. When it takes place, the dreaded encounter is utterly insignificant, justifying none of my anxiety, but the next time is no different: I never learn to learn. ‘My habits are of solitude, not of men.’ I don’t know if it was Rousseau or Senancour who said this. But it was some mind of my species, it being perhaps too much to say of my race.

Location 1082

I rarely go to the country, and almost never for a whole day or to spend the night. But since the friend in whose house I’m staying wouldn’t let me turn down his invitation, today I came out here, feeling all embarrassed, like a bashful person going to a big party. I arrived here in good spirits, I’ve enjoyed the fresh air and wide-open landscape, I ate a good lunch and supper, and now, late at night, in my unlit room, the uncertain surroundings fill me with anxiety. The window of the room where I’m to sleep looks out on to the open field, on to an indefinite field that is all fields, on to the vast and vaguely starry night, in which a breeze that cannot be heard is felt.

Location 1090

I have no use for motor vehicles. I have no use for the products of science – telephones, telegraphs – which make life easy, nor for its fanciful by-products – phonographs, radios – which make life amusing for those who are amused by such things. None of that interests me, none of it appeals. But I love the Tagus because of the big city along its shore. I delight in the sky because I see it from the fourth floor on a downtown street. Nothing nature or the country can give me compares with the jagged majesty of the tranquil, moonlit city as seen from Graça or São Pedro de Alcântara.* There are no flowers for me like the variegated colouring of Lisbon on a sunny day.

Location 1103

The beauty of a naked body is only appreciated by cultures that use clothing. Modesty is important for sensuality like resistance for energy. Artificiality is the best way to enjoy what’s natural. Whatever I’ve enjoyed in these vast fields I’ve enjoyed because I don’t live here. One who has never lived under constraints doesn’t know what freedom is. Civilization is an education in nature. Artificiality is the path for appreciating what’s natural. We should never, however, take the artificial for the natural.

Location 1108

When Christianity passed over souls like a storm that rages all night until morning, the havoc it had invisibly wreaked could be felt, but only after it had passed did the actual damage become clear. Some thought that the damage resulted from Christianity’s departure, but this was just what revealed the damage, not what caused it. And so our world of souls was left with this visible damage, this glaring affliction, without the darkness to cloak it with its false affection. Souls were seen for what they were. In recent times, souls contracted a sickness known as Romanticism, which is Christianity without illusions or myths, stripped to its withered and diseased essence. The fundamental error of Romanticism is to confuse what we need with what we desire. We all need certain basic things for life’s preservation and continuance; we all desire a more perfect life, complete happiness, the fulfilment of our dreams and ..... It’s human to want what we need, and it’s human to desire what we don’t need but find desirable. Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what’s desirable with equal intensity, suffering our lack of perfection as if we were suffering for lack of bread. The Romantic malady is to want the moon as if it could actually be obtained.

Location 1138

The pagan didn’t know, in the real world, this sickly dimension of things and of himself. Being human, he also desired the impossible, but he didn’t crave it. His religion was and only in the inner sanctum of mystery, only to the initiated, far from the common people and the , was it given to know the transcendental things of religions that fill the soul with the world’s emptiness.

Location 1149

In my dreams I’ve sometimes tried to be the unique and imposing individual that the Romantics envisaged in themselves, and I always end up laughing out loud at the very idea. The ultimate man exists in the dreams of all ordinary men, and Romanticism is merely the turning inside out of the empire we normally carry around inside us. Nearly all men dream, deep down, of their own mighty imperialism: the subjection of all men, the surrender of all women, the adoration of all peoples and – for the noblest dreamers – of all eras…

Location 1153

Even I, who laugh at these seductions that play on the mind, very often catch myself thinking how nice it would be to be famous, how pleasant to be doted on, how colourful to be triumphant! But I’m unable to envision myself in these lofty roles without a hearty snicker from the other I that’s always near by, like a downtown street. See myself famous? What I see is a famous bookkeeper. Feel myself raised to the thrones of renown? It happens in the office on the Rua dos Douradores, and my colleagues ruin the scene. Hear myself cheered by swarming crowds? The cheering reaches me in my rented room on the fourth floor and collides with the shabby furniture and the banality that humiliates me from the kitchen to my dreams. I didn’t…

Location 1160

I’ll die as I’ve lived, amid all the junk on the outskirts, sold by weight among the postscripts of the broken.

Location 1171

May I at least carry, to the boundless possibility contained in the abyss of everything, the glory of my disillusion like that of a great dream, and the splendour of not believing like a banner of defeat: a banner in feeble hands, but still and all a banner, dragged through mud and the blood of the weak but raised high for who knows what reason – whether in defiance, or as a challenge, or in mere desperation – as we vanish into quicksand. No one knows for what reason, because no one knows anything, and the sand swallows those with banners as it swallows those without. And the sand covers everything: my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.

Location 1172

The firm’s monied partner, chronically afflicted by a vague illness, decided on a whim during one of his healthy respites to have a group portrait made of the office personnel. And so the day before yesterday a cheerful photographer lined us all up against the grimy white partition, made of flimsy wood, that divides the main office from the private one of Senhor Vasques. In the middle was Vasques himself; flanking him in a definite, then indefinite, ranking by category were the other human souls that daily come together here as one body to accomplish small tasks whose ultimate objective is the secret of the Gods.

Location 1196

I suffered the truth on seeing myself there, since my face was of course the first one I looked for. I’ve never had a flattering notion of my physical appearance, but I never felt it to be more insignificant than there, next to the familiar faces of my colleagues, in that line-up of daily expressions. I look like a nondescript Jesuit. My gaunt and inexpressive face has no intelligence or intensity or anything else to raise it out of that lifeless tide of faces. Lifeless, no. There are some truly expressive physiognomies there. Senhor Vasques looks just like himself – broad, cheerful face with hard features and a steady gaze, completed by his stiff moustache. The man’s shrewdness and energy – banal enough, and recurring in thousands of men throughout the world – are nevertheless inscribed on that photograph as on a psychological passport.

Location 1203

What does this mean? What is this truth that film doesn’t mistake? What is this certainty that a cold lens documents? Who am I, that I should look like that? Anyway… And the insult of the whole ensemble? ‘You came out really well,’ Moreira said suddenly. And then, turning to the sales representative: ‘It’s his spitting image – don’t you think?’ And the sales representative agreed with a happy affability that tossed me into the rubbish bin.

Location 1212

My impression of this table, if I wish to transcribe it, will be composed of the notions that it is made of wood, that I call it a table and attribute certain uses to it, and that it receives, reflects and is transformed by the objects placed on top of it, in whose juxtaposition it has an external soul. And its very colour, the fading of that colour, its spots and cracks – all came from outside it, and this (more than its wooden essence) is what gives it its soul. And the core of that soul, its being a table, also came from the outside, which is its personality.

Location 1228

This little boy playing next to me is an intellectual mass of cells – better yet, he’s a clockwork of subatomic movements, a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in miniature.

Location 1236

Everything comes from outside, and the human soul itself may be no more than the ray of sunlight that shines and isolates from the soil the pile of dung that’s the body.

Location 1238

At this very moment, idle and alone in the office, because everyone else went to lunch, I’m staring through the grimy window at an old man who’s slowly teetering down the other side of the street. He’s not drunk; he’s dreaming. He’s attentive to what doesn’t exist. Perhaps he still hopes. If there’s any justice in the Gods’ injustice, then may they let us keep our dreams, even when they’re impossible, and may our dreams be happy, even when they’re trivial. Today, because I’m still young, I can dream of South Sea islands and impossible Indias. Tomorrow perhaps the same Gods will make me dream of owning a small tobacco shop, or of retiring to a house in the suburbs. Every dream is the same dream, for they’re all dreams. Let the Gods change my dreams, but not my gift for dreaming.

Location 1255

Poor salesmanly demigods who conquer empires with lofty words and intentions but need to scrounge up money for food and the rent! They’re like the troops of a disbanded army whose commanders had a glorious dream, which in them – now trudging through the scum of marshes – has been reduced to a vague notion of grandeur, the consciousness of having belonged to an army, and the vacuity of not even knowing what the commander they never saw had ever done.

Location 1264

My hapless peers with their lofty dreams – how I envy and despise them! I’m with the others, with the even more hapless, who have no one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I’m with these poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature besides their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live. Some are heroes who flattened five men on a street corner just yesterday. Others are seducers to whom even non-existent women have surrendered. They believe these things when they tell them, and perhaps they tell them so as to believe. Others ..... For them the world’s conquerors, whoever they may be, are everyday people. And like eels in a wooden tub, they slither under and over each other, without ever leaving the tub. Sometimes they’re mentioned in…

Location 1271

It’s noble to be timid, illustrious to fail to act, sublime to be…

Location 1282

I’m a well of gestures that haven’t even all been traced in my mind, of words I haven’t even thought to form on my lips, of dreams I forgot to dream to the end. I’m the ruins of buildings that were never more than ruins, whose builder, halfway through, got tired of thinking about what he was building. Let’s not forget to hate those who enjoy, just because they enjoy, and to despise those who are happy, because we didn’t know how to be happy like them. This false disdain and feeble hatred are merely the plinth – rough-hewn and dirtied by the soil where it stands – for the unique and haughty…

Location 1285

The entire life of the human soul is mere motions in the shadows. We live in a twilight of consciousness, never in accord with whom we are or think we are. Everyone harbours some kind of vanity, and there’s an error whose degree we can’t determine. We’re something that goes on during the show’s intermission; sometimes, through certain doors, we catch a glimpse of what may be no more than scenery. The world is one big confusion, like voices in the night.

Location 1316

I’ve just reread these pages on which I write with a lucidity that endures only in them, and I ask myself: What is this, and what good is it? Who am I when I feel? What in me dies when I am? Like someone on a hill who tries to make out the people in the valley, I look down at myself from on high, and I’m a hazy and confused landscape, along with everything else. In these times when an abyss opens up in my soul, the tiniest detail distresses me like a letter of farewell. I feel as if I’m always on the verge of waking up. I’m oppressed by the very self that encases me, asphyxiated by conclusions, and I’d gladly scream if my voice could reach somewhere. But there’s this heavy slumber that moves from one group of my sensations to another, like drifting clouds that make the half-shaded grass of sprawling fields turn various colours of sun and green.

Location 1320

We all have our vanity, and that vanity is our way of forgetting that there are other people with a soul like our own. My vanity consists of a few pages, passages, doubts… I reread? A lie! I don’t dare reread. I can’t reread. What good would it do me to reread? The person in the writing is someone else. I no longer understand a thing…

Location 1329

I weep over my imperfect pages, but if future generations read them, they will be more touched by my weeping than by any perfection I might have achieved, since perfection would have kept me from weeping and, therefore, from writing. Perfection never materializes. The saint weeps, and is human. God is silent. That is why we can love the saint but cannot love God.

Location 1333

That noble and divine timidity which guards the soul’s treasures and regalia… How I’d love to infect at least one soul with some kind of poison, worry or disquiet! This would console me a little for my chronic failure to take action. My life’s purpose would be to pervert. But do my words ring in anyone else’s soul? Does anyone hear them besides me?

Location 1336

We generally colour our ideas of the unknown with our notions of the known. If we call death a sleep, it’s because it seems like sleep on the outside; if we call death a new life, it’s because it seems like something different from life. With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make believe they’re happy. But that’s how all life is, or at least that particular system of life generally known as civilization. Civilization consists in giving something a name that doesn’t belong to it and then dreaming over the result.

Location 1340

A pre-neurosis born of what I’ll be when I no longer am grips my body and soul. An absurd remembrance of my future death sends a shiver down my spine. In the fog of my intuition, I feel like dead matter fallen in the rain and mourned by the howling wind. And the chill of what I won’t feel gnaws at my present heart.

Location 1384

If I have no other virtue, I at least have the permanent novelty of free, uninhibited sensation. Today, walking down the Rua Nova do Almada, I happened to gaze at the back of the man walking ahead of me. It was the ordinary back of an ordinary man, a simple sports coat on the shoulders of an incidental pedestrian. He carried an old briefcase under his left arm, and his right hand held the curved handle of a rolled-up umbrella, which he tapped on the ground to the rhythm of his walking. I suddenly felt something like tenderness for that man. I felt the tenderness one feels for common human banality, for the daily routine of the family breadwinner going to work, for his humble and happy home, for the happy and sad pleasures that necessarily make up his life, for the innocence of living without analysing, for the animal naturalness of that coat-covered back.

Location 1387

I had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and the most self-absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they’re sleeping. For me there’s no discernible difference between killing a child and killing a sleeping man. This man’s back is sleeping. His entire person, walking ahead of me at the very same speed, is sleeping. He walks unconsciously, lives unconsciously. He sleeps, for we all sleep. All life is a dream. No one knows what he’s doing, no one knows what he wants, no one knows what he knows. We sleep our lives, eternal children of Destiny.…

Location 1394

It’s an immediate humanitarianism, without aims or conclusions, that overwhelms me right now. I feel a tenderness as if I were seeing with the eyes of a god. I see everyone as if moved by the compassion of the world’s only conscious being. Poor hapless men, poor hapless humanity! What are they all doing here? I see all the actions and goals of life, from the simple life of lungs to the building of cities and the marking off of empires, as a drowsiness, as involuntary dreams or respites in the gap between one reality and another, between one and another day of the Absolute. And like an abstractly maternal…

Location 1401

I tear my gaze from the back of the man ahead of me and look at all the other people walking down this street, and I embrace each and every one of them with the same cold, absurd tenderness that came to me from the back of the unconscious man I’m following. The whole lot is just like him: the girls chatting on their way to the workshop, the young men laughing on their way to the office, the big-bosomed maids returning with their heavy purchases, the delivery boys running their first errands – all of this is one and the same unconsciousness, diversified among different faces and bodies, like marionettes moved by strings leading to the same fingers of an invisible hand. They go on their way with all the manners and gestures that define consciousness, and they’re conscious of nothing, for they’re…

Location 1406

Wise is the man who has the potential for height in his muscles but who renounces climbing in his consciousness. By virtue of his gaze, he has all hills, and by virtue of his position, all valleys. The sun that gilds the summits will gild them more for him than for someone at the top who must endure the bright light; and the palace perched high in the woods will be more beautiful for those who see it from the valley than for those who, imprisoned in its rooms, forget it.

Location 1445

I don’t need fast cars or express trains to feel the delight and terror of speed. All I require is a tram and my gift for abstraction, which I’ve developed to an astonishing degree.

Location 1458

And should I get bored and want the delirium of excessive speed, I can transfer the idea to the Pure Imitation of Speed, increasing or decreasing it at will, extending it beyond the fastest possible speeds of trains.

Location 1462

I sometimes enjoy (in split fashion) thinking about the possibility of a future geography of our self-awareness. I believe that the future historian of his own sensations may be able to make a precise science out of the attitude he takes towards his self-awareness. We’re only in the beginnings of this difficult art – at this point just an art: the chemistry of sensations in its as yet alchemical stage. This scientist of tomorrow will pay…

Location 1467

I see no inherent obstacle to making, out of steels and bronzes of thought, a precision instrument for self-analysis. I mean steels and bronzes that are really steels and bronzes, but of the mind. Perhaps that’s the only way it can be made. Perhaps it will be necessary to formulate the idea of a precision instrument, concretely visualizing it, in order to undertake a rigorous inner analysis. And it will surely be necessary to reduce the mind to some kind of real matter with a space for it to exist in. All of this depends on an extreme refinement of our inner sensations, which, when taken as far as they can go…

Location 1470

For all I know, this inner space may just be a new dimension of the other one. Perhaps scientific research will eventually discover that everything is dimensions of the same space, which is neither physical nor spiritual, so that in one dimension we live as bodies, and in another as souls. And perhaps there are other dimensions where we live other, equally real facets of ourselves.…

Location 1476

Perhaps it will be discovered that what we call God, so obviously on a plane beyond logic and space-time reality, is one of our modes of existence, a sensation of ourselves in another…

Location 1479

Today’s dreamers are perhaps the great precursors of the ultimate science of the future. Of course I don’t believe in an ultimate science of the future, but that’s beside the point. I periodically formulate metaphysics such as these, with the serious concentration of someone who’s truly at work to forge science. And it’s possible I may actually be forging it. I have to be careful not to take…

Location 1485

I often pass the time by intently studying my psyche as others see it. The pleasure I get from this sterile artifice is sometimes sad, sometimes painful. I carefully study the overall impression I make on others, from which I then draw conclusions. I’m a fellow most people like, and they even have a vague and curious respect for me. But I don’t arouse ardent…

Location 1490

Certain sensations are slumbers that fill up our mind like a fog and prevent us from thinking, from acting, from clearly and simply being. As if we hadn’t slept, something of our undreamed dreams lingers in us, and the torpor of the new day’s sun warms the stagnant surface of our senses. We’re drunk on not being anything, and our…

Location 1494

We look but don’t see. The long street bustling with clothed animals is like a flat-lying signboard whose letters move around and make no sense. The buildings are just buildings. We’re no longer able to give meaning to what we see, though we see perfectly well what’s there.

Location 1497

It’s not tedium that we feel. Nor is it grief. It’s a desire to sleep with another personality, to be able to forget everything with a pay increase.

Location 1501

It’s like a head-cold of the soul. And this literary image of being sick makes us wish that life were a convalescence, obliging us to stay off our feet. And the idea of convalescence makes us think of villas on the outskirts of town – not the gardens that surround them but their cosy interiors, far from the road and the turning wheels. No, we don’t feel anything. We consciously pass through the door we have to enter, and the fact we have to enter it is enough to put us to sleep. We pass through everything. Where’s your tambourine, O bear that just stands there?

Location 1504

Faint, like something just beginning, the low-tide smell wafted over the Tagus and putridly spread over the streets near the shore. The stench was crisply nauseating, with a cold torpor of lukewarm sea. I felt life in my stomach, and my sense of smell shifted to behind my eyes. Tall, sparse bundles of clouds alighted on nothing, their greyness disintegrating into a pseudo-white. A cowardly sky threatened the atmosphere, as if with inaudible thunder, made only of air.

Location 1509

My ill-starred hopes, born of the life I’ve been forced to live! They’re like this hour and this air, fogless fogs, unravelled basting of a false storm. I feel like screaming, to put an end to this landscape and my meditation. But the stench of ocean imbues my intent, and the low tide inside me has exposed the sludgy blackness that’s somewhere out there, though I can see it only by its smell.

Location 1514

There’s a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I can’t touch it.

Location 1524

How often I regret not being the driver of that car or the coachman of that carriage! Or any imaginary banal Other whose life, because it’s not mine, deliciously fills me with desire for it and fills me with its otherness! If I were one of them, I wouldn’t dread life like a Thing, and the thought of life as a Whole wouldn’t crush the shoulders of my thinking. My dreams are a stupid shelter, like an umbrella against lightning. I’m so listless, so pathetic, so short on gestures and acts.

Location 1527

However deeply I delve into myself, all of my dreams’ paths lead to clearings of anxiety.

Location 1530

The carts in the street purr slow, distinct sounds in seeming accord with my drowsiness. It’s lunchtime but I’ve stayed in the office. It’s a warm day, a bit overcast. And the sounds, for some reason, which might be my drowsiness, are exactly like the day.

Location 1535

I know only that the tedium I suffer shifts and gives me a moment’s relief, as when a piece of clothing stops rubbing against a sore.

Location 1539

I can think about sleeping. I can dream of dreaming. I see more clearly the objectivity of everything. The outer feeling of life is more agreeable to me. And all of this because a slight shift in the breeze delights the surface of my skin as I approach the street corner. All that we love or lose – things, human beings, meanings – rubs our skin and so reaches the soul, and in the eyes of God the event is no more than this breeze that brought me nothing besides an imaginary relief, the propitious moment, and the wherewithal to lose everything splendidly.

Location 1542

Towards the east, only partially visible, the city rises almost straight up in a static assault on the Castle. The pallid sun, hidden from view by the sudden outcrop of houses, bathes them in a blurry halo. The sky is a damply whitish blue. Perhaps a gentler version of yesterday’s rain will return today. The wind seems to be easterly, perhaps because it smells vaguely ripe and green, like the adjacent market. There are more out-of-towners on the eastern than the western side of the square. With a racket like carpeted gun reports, the corrugated metal blinds of the market lower upwards; I don’t know why, but that’s the motion the sound suggests to me – perhaps because they usually make this sound when lowered, but now they’re being raised. Everything has an explanation.

Location 1559

Suddenly I’m all alone in the world. I see all this from the summit of a mental rooftop. I’m alone in the world. To see is to be distant. To see clearly is to halt. To analyse is to be foreign. No one who passes by touches me. Around me there is only air. I’m so isolated I can feel the distance between me and my suit. I’m a child in a nightshirt carrying a dimly lit candle and traversing a huge empty house. Living shadows surround me – only shadows, offspring of the stiff furniture* and of the light I carry. Here in the sunlight they surround me but are people.

Location 1564

Today, during a break from feeling, I reflected on the style of my prose. Exactly how do I write? I had, like many others, the perverted desire to adopt a system and a norm. It’s true that I wrote before…

Location 1569

Analysing myself this afternoon, I’ve discovered that my stylistic system is based on two principles, and in the best tradition of the best classical writers I immediately uphold these two principles as general foundations of all good style: 1) to express what one feels exactly as it is felt – clearly, if it is clear; obscurely, if obscure;…

Location 1571

Let’s suppose there’s a girl with masculine gestures. An ordinary human creature will say, ‘That girl acts like a boy.’ Another ordinary human creature, with some awareness that to speak is to tell, will say, ‘That girl is a boy.’ Yet another, equally aware of the duties of expression, but inspired by a fondness for concision (which is the sensual delight of thought), will say, ‘That boy.’ I’ll say, ‘She’s a boy’, violating one of the basic rules of grammar – that pronouns must agree in gender and number with the nouns they refer to. And I’ll have…

Location 1574

In establishing usage, grammar makes valid and invalid divisions. For example, it divides verbs into transitive and intransitive. But a man who knows how to say what he says must sometimes make a transitive verb intransitive so as to photograph what he feels instead of seeing it in the dark, like the common lot of human animals. If I want to say I exist, I’ll say, ‘I am.’ If I want to say I exist as a separate entity, I’ll say, ‘I am myself.’ But if I want to say I exist as an entity that addresses and acts on itself, exercising the divine function of self-creation, then I’ll make to be into a transitive verb. Triumphantly and anti-grammatically supreme, I’ll speak of ‘amming myself’…

Location 1580

Let grammar rule the man who doesn’t know how to think what he feels. Let it serve those who are in command when they express themselves. It is told of Sigismund, King of Rome,* that when someone pointed out a grammatical mistake he had made in a speech, he answered, ‘I am King of Rome, and above all grammar.’ And he went down in history as Sigismund super-grammaticam. A marvellous symbol! Every man who knows how to…

Location 1586

When I consider all the people I know or have heard of who write prolifically or who at least produce lengthy and finished works, I feel an ambivalent envy, a disdainful admiration, an incoherent mixture of mixed feelings. The creation of something complete and whole, be it good or bad – and if it’s never entirely good, it’s very often not all bad – yes, the creation of something complete seems to stir in me above all a feeling of envy. A completed thing is like a child; although imperfect like everything human, it belongs to us like our own children. And I, whose self-critical spirit allows me only to see my lapses and defects, I, who dare write only passages, fragments, excerpts of the non-existent, I myself – in the little that I write – am…

Location 1591

Perhaps everything in life is the degeneration of something else. Perhaps existence is always an approximation – an advent, or surroundings. Just as Christianity was but the prophetic degeneration of a debased Neo-Platonism, the Romanization of Hellenism through Judaism,* so our age – senile and carcinogenic* – is the multiple deviation of all great goals, concordant or conflicting, whose defeat gave rise to all the negations we use to affirm ourselves.* We live an intermission with band music. But what do I, in this fourth-floor room, have to do with sociologies such as these?* They are all a dream to me, like Babylonian princesses, and to occupy ourselves with humanity is a futile enterprise – an archaeology of the…

Location 1598

Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity. If we knew the truth, we’d see it; everything else is systems and approximations. The inscrutability of the universe is quite enough for us to think about; to want to actually understand it is to be…

Location 1606

I’m handed faith like a sealed package on a strange-looking platter and am expected to accept it without opening it. I’m handed science, like a knife on a plate, to cut the folios of a book whose pages are blank. I’m handed doubt, like dust…

Location 1609

I write because I don’t know, and I use whatever abstract and lofty term for Truth a given emotion requires. If the emotion is clear and decisive, then I naturally speak of the gods, thereby framing it in a consciousness of the world’s multiplicity. If the emotion is profound, then I naturally speak of God, thereby placing it in a unified consciousness. If…

Location 1611

Sometimes the mere rhythm of a sentence will require God instead of the Gods; at other times the two syllables of ‘the Gods’ will be necessary, and I’ll verbally change universe; on still other occasions what will matter is an internal rhyme, a metrical displacement, or a burst of emotion, and…

Location 1614

A lap in which to weep, but a huge and shapeless lap, spacious like a summer evening, and yet cosy, warm, feminine, next to a fireplace… To be able to weep in that lap over inconceivable things, failures I can’t remember, poignant things that don’t exist, and huge shuddering doubts concerning I don’t know what future… A second childhood, an old nursemaid like I used to have, and a tiny bed where I’d be lulled to sleep by tales of adventure…

Location 1619

Who am I, finally, when I’m not playing? A poor orphan left out in the cold among sensations, shivering on the street corners of Reality, forced to sleep on the steps of Sadness and to eat the bread offered by Fantasy. I was told that my father, whom I never knew, is called God, but the name means nothing to me. Sometimes at night, when I’m feeling lonely, I call out to him with tears and form an idea of him I can love. But then it occurs to me that I don’t know him, that perhaps he’s not how I imagine, that perhaps this figure has never been the father of my soul…

Location 1629

When will all this end – these streets where I drag my misery, these steps where I coldly crouch and feel the night running its hands through my tatters? If only God would one day come and take me to his house and give me warmth and affection… Sometimes I think about this and weep with joy just because I can think about it. But the wind blows down the street, and the leaves fall on the pavement. I lift my eyes and look at the stars, which make no sense at all. And all that remains of this is I, a poor abandoned child that no Love wanted as its adopted son and no Friendship accepted as its playmate. I’m so cold, so weary in my abandonment. Go and find my Mother, O Wind. Take me in the Night to the house I never knew. Give me back my nursemaid, O vast Silence, and my crib and the lullaby that used to put me to sleep.

Location 1633

The only attitude worthy of a superior man is to persist in an activity he recognizes is useless, to observe a discipline he knows is sterile, and to apply certain norms of philosophical and…

Location 1639

To recognize reality as a form of illusion and illusion as a form of reality is equally necessary and equally useless. The contemplative life, to exist at all, must see real-life accidents as the scattered premises of an unattainable conclusion, but it must also consider the contingencies of dreams as in some sense worthy…

Location 1642

Anything and everything, depending on how one sees it, is a marvel or a hindrance, an all or a nothing, a path or a problem. To see something in constantly new ways is to renew and multiply it. That is why the contemplative person, without ever leaving his village, will nevertheless have the whole universe at his disposal…

Location 1645

But there are times in our meditation – and they come to all who meditate – when everything is suddenly worn-out, old, seen and reseen, even though we have yet to see it. Because no matter how much we meditate on something, and through meditation transform it,…

Location 1648

And so we also have our night, and the profound weariness produced by emotions becomes even more profound, since in this case the emotions come from thought. But it’s a night without slumber or moon or stars, a night as if all had been turned inside out – infinity internalized and ready to…

Location 1652

Yes, it’s always better to be the human slug that loves what it doesn’t know, the leech that’s unaware of how repugnant it is. To ignore so as to live! To feel in order to forget! Ah, and all the events lost in the green-white wake of age-old ships, like a cold spit off the…

Location 1654

A glimpse of open country above a stone wall on the outskirts of town is more liberating for me than an entire journey would be for someone else. Every point of view is the apex of an…

Location 1658

There was a time when I was irritated by certain things that today make me smile. And one of those things, which I’m reminded of nearly every day, is the way men who are active in day-to-day life smile at poets and artists. They don’t always do it, as the intellectuals who write in newspapers suppose, with an air of superiority. Often they do it with affection. But it’s as if…

Location 1659

This used to irritate me, because I naïvely assumed that this outward smile directed at dreaming and self-expression sprang from an inner conviction of superiority. In fact it’s only a reaction to something that’s different. While I once took this smile as an insult, because it seemed to imply a superior attitude, today I see it as the sign of an unconscious doubt. Just as adults often recognize in children a quick-wittedness they don’t have, so the smilers recognize in us, who are devoted to dreaming and expressing, something different that makes them suspicious, just because…

Location 1663

But our superiority is not the kind that many dreamers have imagined we have. The dreamer isn’t superior to the active man because dreaming is superior to reality. The dreamer’s superiority is due to the fact that dreaming is much more practical than living, and the dreamer gets far greater and more varied pleasure out of life than…

Location 1668

Life being fundamentally a mental state, and all that we do or think valid to the extent we consider it valid, the valuation depends on us. The dreamer is an issuer of banknotes, and the notes he issues circulate in the city of his mind just like real notes in the world outside. Why should I care if the currency of my soul…

Location 1671

I’ve never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.* My worst sorrows have evaporated when I’ve opened the window on to the street…

Location 1676

I’ve never aspired to be more than a dreamer. I paid no attention to those who spoke to me of living. I’ve always belonged to what isn’t where I am and to what I could never be. Whatever isn’t mine, no matter how base, has always had poetry for me. The only thing I’ve loved is nothing at all. The only thing I’ve desired is what I couldn’t even imagine. All I asked of life is that it go on by without my feeling it. All I demanded of love is that it never stop being a distant dream. In my own inner landscapes, all of them unreal, I’ve always been attracted to what’s in the distance, and the hazy aqueducts –…

Location 1678

I have a world of friends inside me, with their own real, individual, imperfect lives. Some of them are full of problems, while others live the humble and picturesque life of bohemians. Others are travelling salesmen. (To be able to imagine myself as a travelling salesman has always been one of my great ambitions – unattainable, alas!) Others live in the rural towns and villages of a Portugal inside me; they come to the city, where I sometimes run into…

Location 1687

Ah, no nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed! The longing I feel when I think of the past I’ve lived in real time, when I weep over the corpse of my childhood life – this can’t compare to the fervour of my trembling grief as I weep over the non-reality of my dreams’ humble characters, even the minor ones I recall…

Location 1692

the friends of my dreams – with whom I’ve shared so much in a make-believe life and with whom I’ve had so many stimulating conversations in imaginary cafés – have never had a space of their own where they could…

Location 1697

Oh, the dead past that survives in me and that has never been anywhere but in me! The flowers from the garden of the little country house that never existed except in me! The pine grove, orchards and vegetable plots of the farm that was only a dream of mine! My imaginary excursions, my outings in a countryside that never existed! The trees along the roadside, the pathways, the stones, the rural folk passing by – all of this, which was never more than a dream, is recorded in my memory, where it hurts, and I, who spent so many hours dreaming these things, now spend hours remembering having…

Location 1699

It grieved me that I couldn’t be there too, whether or not the scenes were real. That I couldn’t at least be an inconspicuous figure drawn in at the foot of those moonlit woods I saw on a small print in a room where I once…

Location 1706

By thinking so much, I became echo and abyss. By delving within, I made myself into many. The slightest incident – a change in the light, the tumbling of a dry leaf, the faded petal that falls from a flower, the voice speaking on the other side of the stone wall, the steps of the speaker next to those of the listener, the half-open gate of the old country estate, the courtyard with an arch and houses clustered around it in the moonlight – all these things, although not mine, grab hold of my sensory attention with the chains of longing and emotional resonance. In each of these sensations I am someone else, painfully renewed in each indefinite impression.

Location 1728

It’s not even possible to feel, if one feels today what he felt yesterday. To feel today what one felt yesterday isn’t to feel – it’s to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today’s living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost. To erase everything from the slate from one day to the next, to be new with each new morning, in a perpetual revival of our emotional virginity – this, and only this, is worth being or having, to be or have what we imperfectly are. This dawn is the first dawn of the world. Never did this pink colour yellowing to a warm white so tinge, towards the west, the face of the buildings whose windowpane eyes gaze upon the silence brought by the growing light. There was never this hour, nor this light, nor this person that’s me. What will be tomorrow will be something else, and what I see will be seen by reconstituted eyes, full of a new vision. High city hills! Great marvels of architecture that the steep slopes secure and make even greater, motley chaos of heaped up buildings that the daylight weaves together with bright spots and shadows – you are today, you are me, because I see you, you are what [I’ll be] tomorrow, and I love you from the deck rail as when two ships pass, and there’s a mysterious longing and regret in their passing.

Location 1735

A physical nausea, prompted by all of life, was born in the moment I woke up. A horror at the prospect of having to live got up with me out of bed. Everything seemed hollow, and I had the chilling impression that there is no solution for whatever the problem may be. An extreme nervousness made my slightest gestures tremble. I was afraid I might go mad – not from insanity but from simply being there. My body was a latent shout. My heart pounded as if it were talking.

Location 1776

With jerky and incoherent movements I hit the brushes on top of the dresser, I knocked a chair out of place, and at a certain point my swinging hand struck one of the hard iron posts of my English bed. I lit a cigarette, which I smoked subconsciously, and only when I saw that ashes had fallen on the headboard – how, if I hadn’t leaned against it? – did I understand that I was possessed, or something of the sort, in fact if not in name, and that my normal, everyday self-awareness had intermingled with the abyss.

Location 1781

I received the announcement of morning – the cold faint light that confers a vague whitish blue on the unveiled horizon – like a grateful kiss from creation.

Location 1785

Ah, what a morning this is, awakening me to life’s stupidity, and to its great tenderness! I almost cry when I see the old narrow street come into view down below, and when the shutters of the corner grocer reveal their dirty brown in the slowly growing light, my heart is soothed, as if by a real-life fairy tale, and it begins to have the security of not feeling itself.

Location 1788

What a morning this grief is! And what shadows are retreating? What mysteries have taken place? None. There’s just the sound of the first tram, like a match to light up the soul’s darkness, and the loud steps of my first pedestrian, which are concrete reality telling me in a friendly voice not to be this way.

Location 1790

I always live in the present. I don’t know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing. I have no hopes and no nostalgia. Knowing what my life has been up till now – so often and so completely the opposite of what I wanted –, what can I assume about my life tomorrow, except that it will be what I don’t assume, what I don’t want, what happens to me from the outside, reaching me even via my will? There’s nothing from my past that I recall with the futile wish to repeat it. I was never more than my own vestige or simulacrum. My past is everything I failed to be.

Location 1810

you are in this moment the whole universe for me, for you are the full content of my conscious sensation. All I want from life is to feel it being lost in these unexpected evenings,

Location 1818

Life is whatever we conceive it to be. For the farmer who considers his field to be everything, the field is an empire. For a Caesar whose empire is still not enough, the empire is a field. The poor man possesses an empire, the great man a field. All that we truly possess are our own sensations; it is in them, rather than in what they sense, that we must base our life’s reality.

Location 1827

No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it. Collective thought is stupid because it’s collective. Nothing passes into the realm of the collective without leaving at the border – like a toll – most of the intelligence it contained.

Location 1849

To conform is to submit, and to conquer is to conform, to be conquered. Thus every victory is a debasement. The conqueror inevitably loses all the virtues born of frustration with the status quo that led him to the fight that brought victory. He becomes satisfied, and only those who conform – who lack the conqueror’s mentality – are satisfied. Only the man who never achieves his goal conquers. Only the man who is forever discouraged is strong. The best and most regal course is to abdicate. The supreme empire belongs to the emperor who abdicates from all normal life and from other men, for the preservation of his supremacy won’t weigh on him like a load of jewels.

Location 1855

Again, without warning, magnetic light gushes forth, flickering. My heart beats with a gulp. A glass dome shatters on high into large bits. A new sheet of ruthless rain strikes the sound of the ground.

Location 1896

After I’ve slept many dreams, I go out to the street with eyes wide open but still with the aura and assurance of my dreams. And I’m astonished by my automatism, which prevents others from really knowing me. For I go through daily life still holding the hand of my astral nursemaid; my steps are in perfect accord with the obscure designs of my sleeping mind. And I walk in the right direction; I don’t stagger; I react well; I exist.

Location 1900

when I don’t have to speak to anyone or enter a door up ahead, then I launch once more like a paper boat on to the waters of sleep, and once more I return to the fading illusion that cuddles my hazy consciousness of the morning now emerging amid the sounds of the vegetable carts. And it is then, in the middle of life’s bustle, that my dream becomes a marvellous film. I walk along an unreal downtown street,…

Location 1904

Everyone has his alcohol. To exist is alcohol enough for me. Drunk from feeling, I wander as I walk straight ahead. When it’s time, I show up at the office like everyone else. When it’s not time, I go to the river to gaze at the river, like everyone else. I’m no different. And…

Location 1909

Every man of today, unless his moral stature and intellectual level are that of a pygmy or a churl, loves with romantic love when he loves. Romantic love is a rarefied product of century after century of Christian influence, and everything about its substance and development can be explained to the unenlightened by comparing it to a suit fashioned by the soul or the imagination and used to clothe those whom the mind thinks it fits, when they happen to come along. But every suit, since it isn’t eternal, lasts as long as it lasts; and soon, under the fraying clothes of the ideal we’ve formed, the real body of the person we dressed it in shows through. Romantic love is thus a path to disillusion, unless this disillusion,…

Location 1912

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. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via our own idea. 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…

Location 1919

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.

Location 1937

Having employed my self-awareness in such a purely artistic way, and having become so completely external to myself, I sometimes no longer recognize myself. Who am I behind this unreality? I don’t know. I must be someone. And if I avoid living, acting and feeling, then believe me, it’s so as not to tamper with the contours of my invented personality. I want to be exactly like what I wanted to be and am not. If I were to give in to life, I’d be destroyed. I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can’t be one in my body. That’s why I’ve sculpted myself in quiet isolation and have placed myself in a hothouse, cut off from fresh air and direct light – where the absurd flower of my artificiality can blossom in secluded beauty.

Location 1942

To organize our life in such a way that it becomes a mystery to others, that those who are closest to us will only be closer to not knowing us. That is how I’ve shaped my life, almost without thinking about it, but I did it with so much instinctive art that even to myself I’ve become a not entirely clear and definite individual.

Location 1954

To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarate, and the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning it into a slumber. The other arts make no such retreat – some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself. This isn’t the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, and a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings in a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.

Location 1957

Most people are afflicted by an inability to say what they see or think.

Location 1962

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.

Location 1969

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.

Location 1976

Why should I care that no one reads what I write? I write to forget about life, and I publish because that’s one of the rules of the game. If tomorrow all my writings were lost, I’d be sorry, but I doubt I’d be violently and frantically sorry, as one might expect, given that with my writings would go my entire life. I would probably be like the mother who loses her son but is back to normal in a few months’ time. The great earth that cares for the hills would also, in a less motherly fashion, take care of the pages I’ve written. Nothing matters, and I’m sure there have been people who, looking at life, didn’t have much patience for this child that was still awake, when all they wanted was the peace that would come once the child went to bed.

Location 1979

Amiel’s diary has always grieved me on my own account. When I came to the passage where he says that Scherer* described the fruit of the mind as ‘the consciousness of consciousness’, I felt it as a direct reference to my soul.

Location 1986

Like all men endowed with great mental mobility, I have an irrevocable, organic love of settledness. I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places.

Location 2002

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 to the book that would amuse me if I were someone else. Life makes me feel a vague nausea, and any kind of movement aggravates it.

Location 2005

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.

Location 2012

Renunciation is liberation. Not wanting is power. What can China give me that my soul hasn’t already given me? And if my soul can’t give it to me, how will China give it to me? For it’s with my soul that I’ll see China, if I ever see it. I could go and seek riches in the Orient, but not the riches of the soul, because I am my soul’s riches, and I am where I am, with or without the Orient.

Location 2021

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 as 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.

Location 2024

To describe the universal is to describe what is common to all human souls and to all human experience – the broad sky, with day and night occurring in it and by it; the flowing of rivers, all with the same fresh and nunnish water; the vast waving mountains known as oceans, which hold the majesty of height in the secret of their depths; the fields, the seasons, houses, faces, gestures; clothes and smiles; love and wars; gods both finite and infinite; the formless Night, mother of the world’s origin; Fate, the intellectual monster that is everything… Describing these or any other universals, my soul speaks the primitive and divine language, the Adamic tongue that everyone understands.

Location 2028

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.

Location 2040

The first way to live life in the extreme is by possessing it to an extreme degree, via a Ulyssean journey through all experiential sensations, through all forms of externalized energy. Few people, however, in all the ages of the world, have been able to shut their eyes with a fatigue that’s the sum of all fatigues, having possessed everything in every way.

Location 2046

The other road is that of perfect equilibrium, the search for the Limit in Absolute Proportion, whereby the longing for the Extreme passes from the will and emotion to the Intelligence, one’s entire ambition being not to live all life or to feel all life but to organize all life, to consummate it in intelligent Harmony and Coordination. The longing to understand, which in noble souls often replaces the longing to act, belongs to the sphere of sensibility. To replace energy with the Intelligence, to break the link between will and emotion, stripping the material life’s gestures of any and all interest – this, if achieved, is worth more than life, which is so hard to possess in its entirety and so sad when possessed only in part. The argonauts said* that it wasn’t necessary to live, only to sail. We, argonauts of our pathological sensibility, say that it’s not necessary to live, only to feel.

Location 2053

Your ships, Lord, didn’t make a greater voyage than the one made by my thought, in the disaster of this book. They rounded no cape and sighted no far-flung beach – beyond what daring men had dared and what minds had dreamed – to equal the capes I rounded with my imagination and the beaches where I landed with my ..... Thanks to your initiative, Lord, the Real World was discovered. The Intellectual World will be discovered thanks to mine. Your argonauts* grappled with monsters and fears. In the voyage of my thought, I also had monsters and fears to contend with. On the path to the abstract chasm that lies in the depths of things there are horrors that the world’s men don’t imagine and fears to endure that human experience doesn’t know. The cape of the common sea beyond which all is mystery is perhaps more human than the abstract path to the world’s void.

Location 2061

don’t get indignant, because indignation is for the strong; I’m not resigned, because resignation is for the noble; I don’t hold my peace, because silence is for the great. And I’m neither strong, nor noble, nor great. I suffer and I dream. I complain because I’m weak. And since I’m an artist, I amuse myself by making my complaints musical and by arranging my dreams according to my idea of what makes them beautiful. I only regret not being a child, since then I could believe in my dreams, and not being a madman, since then I could keep everyone around me from getting close to my soul .....

Location 2086

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 .....

Location 2098

I often wonder what I would be like if, shielded from the winds of fate by the screen of wealth, I’d never been brought by the dutiful hand of my uncle to an office in Lisbon, nor risen from it to other offices, all the way up to this paltry pinnacle as a competent assistant bookkeeper, with a job that’s like a siesta and a salary that I can live on.

Location 2110

And if I think, with all the lucidity I can muster, about what my life has apparently been, I see it as a coloured thing – a chocolate wrapper or a cigar band – swept from the dirty tablecloth by the brisk brush of the housemaid (who’s listening overhead) and landing in the dustpan with the crumbs and the crusts of reality proper. It stands out from other things with a similar destiny by its privilege of getting to ride in the dustpan as well. And above the maid’s brushing the gods continue their conversation, indifferent to the affairs of the world’s servants. Yes, if I’d been wealthy, shielded, spruce, ornamental, I wouldn’t even have been this brief episode of pretty paper among crumbs; I would have remained on a lucky dish – ‘Thank you but no’ – and have retreated to the sideboard to grow old. This way, rejected after my useful substance has been eaten, I go to the rubbish bin with the dust of what’s left of Christ’s body, and I can’t imagine what will follow and among what stars, but something – inevitably – will follow.

Location 2123

The sensibility of Mallarmé in the style of Vieira;* to dream like Verlaine in the body of Horace; to be Homer in the moonlight. To feel everything in every way; to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind; not to desire much except with the imagination; to suffer with haughtiness; to see clearly so as to write accurately; to know oneself through diplomacy and dissimulation; to become naturalized as a different person, with all the necessary documents; in short, to use all sensations but only on the inside, peeling them all down to God and then wrapping everything up again and putting it back in the shop window like the sales assistant I can see from here with the small tins of a new brand of shoe polish. All these ideals, possible or impossible, now end. Now I face reality, which isn’t even the sales assistant (whom I don’t see), only his hand, the absurd tentacle of a soul with a family and a fate, and it twists like a spider without a web while putting back tins of polish in the window. And one of the tins fell, like the Fate of us all.*

Location 2133

The more I contemplate the spectacle of the world and the ever-changing state of things, the more profoundly I’m convinced of the inherent fiction of everything, of the false importance exhibited by all realities. And in this contemplation (which has occurred to all thinking souls at one time or another), the colourful parade of customs and fashions, the complex path of civilizations and progress, the grandiose commotion of empires and cultures – all of this strikes me as a myth and a fiction, dreamed among shadows and ruins. But I’m not sure whether the supreme resolution of all these dead intentions – dead even when achieved – lies in the ecstatic resignation of the Buddha, who, once he understood the emptiness of things, stood…

Location 2141

What’s travel and what good is it? Any sunset is the sunset; one doesn’t have to go to Constantinople to see it. The sensation of freedom that travel brings? I can have it by going from Lisbon to Benfica,* and have it more intensely than one who goes from Lisbon to China, because if the freedom isn’t in me, then I won’t have it no matter where I go. ‘Any road,’ said Carlyle,* ‘this simple Entepfuhl road, will lead you to the end of the World.’ But the Entepfuhl road, if it is followed all the way to the end, returns to Entepfuhl; so that Entepfuhl, where we already were, is the same end of the world we set out to find. Condillac begins his celebrated book* with: ‘No matter how high we climb or how low we descend, we never escape our sensations.’ We never disembark from ourselves. We never attain another existence unless we other ourselves by actively, vividly imagining who we are. The true landscapes are those that we ourselves create since, being their gods, we see them as they truly are, which is however we created them. None of the four corners of the world is the one that interests me and that I can truly see; it’s the fifth corner that I travel in, and it belongs to me. Whoever has crossed all the seas has crossed only the monotony of himself. I’ve crossed more seas than anyone. I’ve seen more mountains than there are on earth. I’ve passed through more cities than exist, and the great rivers of non-worlds have flown sovereignly under my watching eyes. If I were to travel, I’d find a poor copy of what I’ve already seen without taking one step. In the countries that others go to, they go as anonymous foreigners. In the countries I’ve visited, I’ve been not only the secret pleasure of the unknown traveller, but also the majesty of the reigning king, the indigenous people and their culture, and the entire history of the nation and its neighbours. I saw every landscape and every house because they were me, made in God from the substance of my imagination.

Location 2188

For a long time now I haven’t written. Months have gone by in which I haven’t lived, just endured, between the office and physiology, in an inward stagnation of thinking and feeling. Unfortunately, this isn’t even restful, since in rotting there’s fermentation. For a long time now I haven’t written and haven’t even existed. I hardly even seem to be dreaming. The streets for me are just streets. I do my office work conscious only of it, though I can’t say without distraction: in the back of my mind I’m sleeping instead of meditating (which is what I usually do), but I still have a different existence behind my work.

Location 2203

I’m beginning to be conscious of being conscious. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll wake up to myself and resume the course of my own existence. I don’t know if that will make me more happy or less. I don’t know anything. I lift my pedestrian’s head and see that, on the hill of the Castle, the sunset’s reflection is burning in dozens of windows, in a lofty brilliance of cold fire. Around these hard-flamed eyes, the entire hillside has the softness of day’s end. I’m able at least to feel sad, and to be conscious that my sadness was just now crossed – I saw it…

Location 2209

I pity those who dream the probable, the reasonable and the accessible more than those who fantasize about the extraordinary and remote. Those who have grandiose dreams are either lunatics who believe in what they dream and are happy, or they’re mere daydreamers whose reveries are like the soul’s music, lulling them and meaning nothing. But those who dream the possible will, very possibly, suffer real disillusion. I can’t be too disappointed over not having become a Roman emperor, but I can sorely regret never once having spoken to the seamstress who at the street corner turns right at about nine o’clock every morning. The dream that promises us the impossible denies us access to it from the start, but the dream that promises the possible interferes with our normal life, relying on it for its fulfilment. The one kind of dream lives by itself, independently, while the other is contingent on what may or may not happen. That’s why I love impossible landscapes and the vast empty stretches of plains I’ll never see. The historical ages of the past are sheer wonder, because I know from the outset that I can’t be part of them. I sleep when I dream of what doesn’t exist; dreaming of what might exist wakes me up.

Location 2245

And suddenly, from behind me, I hear the metaphysically abrupt arrival of the office boy. I feel like I could kill him for barging in on what I wasn’t thinking. I turn around and look at him with a silence full of hatred, tense with latent homicide, my mind already hearing the voice he’ll use to tell me something or other. He smiles from the other side of the room and says ‘Good afternoon’ in a loud voice. I hate him like the universe. My eyes are sore from imagining.

Location 2261

After many days of rain, the sky brings back its hidden blue to the vast expanses on high. Between the streets, whose puddles sleep like country ponds, and the clear and chilly gladness overhead, there’s a contrast that makes the dirty streets congenial and the dreary winter sky spring-like. It’s Sunday and I have nothing to do. It’s such a nice day that I don’t even feel like dreaming. I enjoy it with all the sincerity of my senses, to which my intelligence bows. I walk like a liberated shop assistant. I feel old, just so I can have the pleasure of feeling myself being rejuvenated.

Location 2265

None of these things are important. They are, like everything in the ordinary world, a slumber of mysteries and battlements, and like a herald who has just arrived, I gaze at the open plain of my meditation. When I was a child, I used to go to this Mass, or perhaps another one, but I think it was this one. I wore my only good suit, out of respect, and enjoyed every minute, even when there was nothing special to enjoy. I lived externally, and the suit was clean and new. What more can one want, when he’s going to die and doesn’t know it, led by a mother’s hand? I used to enjoy all of this, but only now do I realize how much I enjoyed it. I would enter Mass as into a great mystery, and come out at the end as into a clearing. And that’s how it really was, and how it still really is. It’s only the self who no longer believes and is now an adult, with a soul that remembers and weeps – only this self is fiction and confusion, anguish and the grave. Yes, what I am would be unbearable if I couldn’t remember what I’ve been. And this crowd of strangers who are still leaving Mass, and the beginning of the potential crowd arriving for the next Mass, are like boats passing by on a slow river, beneath the open windows of my house on the bank. Memories, Sundays, Masses, the pleasure of having been, the miracle of time having remained because it already went by, and since…

Location 2272

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…

Location 2287

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 of 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…

Location 2294

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…

Location 2299

What I initially thought about was how little a man must be in this life in…

Location 2308

Only slight goals are worth pursuing, because only a slight goal can be entirely fulfilled. If I struggle to make a fortune, I can make it in a certain way; the goal is slight, like all quantitative goals, personal or otherwise, and it’s attainable, verifiable. But how shall I fulfil the intention of serving my country, or of enriching human culture, or of improving humanity? I can’t be certain of the right course of action, nor verify whether the goals have been achieved .....

Location 2315

it’s not easy to distinguish man from animals, for there’s no reliable criterion for making the distinction. Human lives run their course with the same inherent unconsciousness as animal lives. The same fundamental laws that rule animal instincts likewise rule human intelligence, which appears to be no more than an instinct in the formative stage, as unconscious as any instinct, and less perfect since still not fully formed. ‘All that exists comes from unreason,’ says The Greek Anthology. And everything, indeed, comes from unreason. Since it deals only with dead numbers and empty formulas, mathematics can be perfectly logical, but the rest of science is no more than child’s play at dusk, an attempt to catch birds’ shadows and to stop the shadows of windblown grass.

Location 2327

The distance between the superior man (a Kant or a Goethe, I believe he says) and the common man is much greater than the distance between the common man and the ape. I’ve never forgotten the phrase, because it’s true. Between me, whose rank is low among thinking men, and a farmer from Loures,* there is undoubtedly a greater distance than between the farmer and, I won’t say a monkey, but a cat or dog. None of us, from the cat on up to me, is really in charge of the life imposed on us or of the destiny we’ve been given; we are all equally derived from no one knows what; we’re shadows of gestures performed by someone else, embodied effects, consequences that feel. But between me and the farmer there’s a difference of quality, due to the presence in me of abstract thought and disinterested emotion; whereas between him and the cat, intellectually and psychologically, there is only a difference of degree.

Location 2336

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 Sanches,* 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.

Location 2343

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 worthy of the truly 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.

Location 2348

From birth to death, man is the slave of the same external dimension that rules animals. Throughout his life he doesn’t live, he vegetatively thrives, with greater intensity and complexity than an animal. He’s guided by norms without knowing that they guide him or even that they exist, and all his ideas, feelings and acts are unconscious –

Location 2364

Flashes of awareness that we live an illusion – that, and no more, is what distinguishes the greatest of men.

Location 2367

I’m astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; 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.

Location 2398

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.

Location 2409

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.

Location 2412

Just as some people work because they’re bored, I sometimes write because I have nothing to say. Daydreaming, which occurs naturally to people when they’re not thinking, in me takes written form, for I know how to dream in prose. And there are many sincere feelings and much genuine emotion that I extract from not feeling.

Location 2419

Sleep is fusion with God, Nirvana, however it be called. Sleep is the slow analysis of sensations, whether used as an atomic science of the soul or left to doze like a music of our will, a slow anagram of monotony.

Location 2427

One day, I don’t know which, I found myself in this world, having lived unfeelingly from the time I was evidently born until then. When I asked where I was, everyone misled me, and they contradicted each other. When I asked them to tell me what I should do, they all spoke falsely, and each one said something different. When in bewilderment I stopped on the road, everyone was shocked that I didn’t keep going to no one knew where, or else turn back – I, who’d woken up at the crossroads and didn’t know where I’d come from. I saw that I was on stage and didn’t know the part that everyone else recited straight off, also without knowing it. I saw that I was dressed as a page, but they didn’t give me the queen, and blamed me for not having her. I saw that I had a message in my hand to deliver, and when I told them that the sheet of paper was blank, they laughed at me. And I still don’t know if they laughed because all sheets are blank, or because all messages are to be guessed.

Location 2431

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writings that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in the shadows ..... I’ve written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that has acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.

Location 2453

For me it’s enough to perceive something clearly, with my eyesight or my hearing or any of my other senses, in order to feel that it’s real. It can even happen that I simultaneously feel two things that can’t logically coexist. No matter.

Location 2459

Were I ever granted a flash of expressive power so great that it concentrated all art in me, I would write a eulogy to sleep. I know no greater pleasure in life than that of being able to sleep. The total snuffing out of life and the soul, the complete banishment of all beings and people, the night without memory or illusion, the absence of past and future .....

Location 2483

Revolutionary or reformer – the error is the same. Unable to dominate and reform his own attitude towards 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.*

Location 2491

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.

Location 2493

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.

Location 2495

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.

Location 2497

The very word ‘duty’ is unpleasant to me, like an unwanted guest. But the terms ‘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 worthwhile and even meaningful.

Location 2504

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?

Location 2508

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.

Location 2513

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.

Location 2524

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.

Location 2530

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.

Location 2554

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.

Location 2556

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.

Location 2561

I will always belong to the Rua dos Douradores, like all of humanity. I will always be, in verse or prose, an office employee. I will always be, with or without mysticism, local and submissive, a servant of my feelings and of the moments when they occur. I will always be, under the large blue canopy of the silent sky, a pageboy in an unintelligible rite, dressed in life for the occasion, executing steps, gestures, stances and expressions without knowing why, until the feast – or my role in it – ends and I can treat myself to tidbits in the large tents I’ve been told are down below, at the back of the garden.

Location 2565

I feel like fleeing. Like fleeing from what I know, fleeing from what’s mine, fleeing from what I love. I want to depart, not for impossible Indias or for the great islands south of everything, but for any place at all – village or wilderness – that isn’t this place. I want to stop seeing these unchanging faces, this routine, these days. I want to rest, far removed, from my inveterate feigning. I want to feel sleep come to me as life, not as rest. A cabin on the seashore or even a cave in a rocky mountainside could give me this, but my will, unfortunately, cannot.

Location 2575

Slavery is the law of life, and it is the only law, for it must be observed: there is no revolt possible, no way to escape it. Some are born slaves, others become slaves, and still others are forced to accept slavery. Our faint-hearted love of freedom – which, if we had it, we would all reject, unable to get used to it – is proof of how ingrained our slavery is.

Location 2579

I myself, who long for pure sunlight and open country, for the ocean in plain view and the unbroken horizon – could I get used to my new bed, the food, not having to descend eight flights of stairs to the street, not entering the tobacco shop on the corner, not saying good-morning to the barber standing outside his shop?

Location 2585

Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us, infiltrating our physical sensations and our feeling of life, and like spittle of the great Spider it subtly binds us to whatever is close, tucking us into a soft bed of slow death which is rocked by the wind. Everything is us, and we are everything, but what good is this, if everything is nothing? A ray of sunlight, a cloud whose shadow tells us it is passing, a breeze that rises, the silence that follows when it ceases, one or another face, a few voices, the incidental laughter of the girls who are talking, and then night with the meaningless, fractured hieroglyphs of the stars.

Location 2587

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.

Location 2598

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.

Location 2603

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 in me – swifter than the strokes of my pen – like an illusory revenge against 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…

Location 2606

It really takes very little to satisfy me: the rain having stopped, there being a bright sun in this happy South, bananas that are yellower for having black splotches, the voices of the people who sell them, the pavement of the Rua da Prata, the Tagus at the end of it, blue with a green-gold tint, this entire familiar corner of the universe.

Location 2617

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 for 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?

Location 2630

It shocks me to consider the panorama of these lives, but before I can feel horror, 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.

Location 2642

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.

Location 2655

Making daily life anodyne, so that the littlest thing will amuse. My days at the office, where I always do the very same dull and useless work, are punctuated by visions of me escaping, by dreamed remnants of faraway islands, by feasts in the promenades of parks from other eras, by other landscapes, other feelings, another I. But I realize, between two ledger entries, that if I had all this, none of it would be mine. Better, after all, to have Vasques my boss than the kings of my dreams;

Location 2656

The slope leads to the mill, but effort leads to nothing.

Location 2668

Dreaming is the worst of drugs, because it’s the most natural of all. It works its way into our habits like no other drug can. We take it unawares, like a poison slipped in a drink. It doesn’t hurt, doesn’t make you pale, and won’t knock you out, but the soul that takes it can’t be cured, for it can never let go of its poison, which is its very own self.

Location 2671

In dreams I learned to crown the foreheads of the ordinary with images; to say the banal with mystery and the simple with meanders; to gild, with the sun of artifice, the dark corners and forgotten furniture; and, whenever I write, to give music (as if lulling myself) to the fluid phrases of my fixation.

Location 2674

And during all of this I walk down the street, a wandering sleepyhead, a stray leaf. Some slow wind has swept me off the ground and I drift, like the end of twilight, among the details of the landscape. My eyelids weigh heavy on my dragging feet.

Location 2686

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 tranquillity in the political sphere. We were born into the midst of metaphysical anguish, moral anxiety and political disquiet.

Location 2694

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’.

Location 2696

We are death. What we call life is the slumber of our real life, the death of what we really are. The dead are born, they don’t die. The worlds are switched around in our eyes. We’re dead when we think we’re living; we start living when we die.

Location 2723

We inhabit dreams, we are shadows roaming through impossible forests, in which the trees are houses, customs, ideas, ideals and philosophies.

Location 2731

We have to depend on a stronger force, to place our small hand in another hand, for today is always uncertain, the sky always far, and life always alien.

Location 2738

If one day I become financially secure, so that I can freely write and publish, I know I’ll miss this precarious life in which I hardly write and don’t publish at all. I’ll miss it not only because it will be a life, however mediocre, that I’ll never have again, but also because every sort of life has a special quality and particular pleasure, and when we take up another life, even a better one, that particular pleasure isn’t as good, that special quality is less special, until they fade away, and there’s something missing.

Location 2741

I’m tired. I had a long day full of idiotic work in this almost deserted office. Two employees are out sick and the others aren’t here. I’m alone, except for the office boy in the back. I miss the future when I’ll be able to look back and miss all of this, however absurdly.

Location 2747

There are those who read as swiftly as they see, and they finish without having taken it all in. So I, from the book skimmed in my soul, glean a hazy story, remembrances of another wanderer, snatches of descriptions of twilights or moonlights, with garden paths in the middle, and various silk figures passing by, passing by…

Location 2754

All things, down to their roots in mystery, have the colour of my boredom.

Location 2769

What would be ideal is to have no more action than the false action of a fountain – to go up so as to fall down in the same place, pointlessly shimmering in the sun and making sound in the silence of the night so that whoever dreams would think of rivers in his dream and smile forgetfully.

Location 2773

My life’s central tragedy is, like all tragedies, an irony of Fate. I reject real life for being a condemnation; I reject dreaming for being an easy way out. But my real life couldn’t be more banal and contemptible, and my dream life couldn’t be more constant and intense. I’m like a slave who gets drunk during siesta – two degradations in one body.

Location 2818

I’m like a slave who gets drunk during siesta – two degradations in one body.

Location 2819

my entire life: this office that’s sordid down to the marrow of its employees, this monthly rented room where nothing transpires but a dead man’s life, this corner grocery whose owner I know in the way people know each other, these young men at the door of the old tavern, this toilsome uselessness of the unchanging days, these same characters repeating their same old lines, like a drama consisting only of secrecy, and with the scenery turned inside out…

Location 2822

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.

Location 2837

It sometimes occurs to me, with sad delight, that if one day (in a future to which I won’t belong) the sentences I write are read and admired, then at last I’ll have my own kin, people who ‘understand’ me, my true family in which to be born and loved. But far from being born into it, I’ll have already died long ago. I’ll be understood only in effigy, when affection can no longer compensate for the indifference that was the dead man’s lot in life. Perhaps one day they’ll understand that I fulfilled, like no one else, my instinctive duty to interpret a portion of our century; and when they’ve understood that, they’ll write that in my time I was misunderstood, that the people around me were unfortunately indifferent and insensitive to my work, and that it was a pity this happened to me. And whoever writes this will fail to understand my literary counterpart in that future time, just as my contemporaries don’t understand me. Because men learn only what would be of use to their great-grandparents. The right way to live is something we can teach only the dead.

Location 2854

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 colour, ancient streets that wind every which way around the city.

Location 2884

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.

Location 2891

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.

Location 2900

– 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 whom 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.

Location 2907

When Mr Pickwick is ridiculous he’s not ridiculous, for it all happens in a novel. Perhaps the novel is a more perfect life and reality, which God creates through us. Perhaps we live only to create it. It seems that civilizations exist only to produce art and literature; words are what speak for them and remain. How do we know that these extra-human figures aren’t truly real? It tortures my mind to think this might be the case…

Location 2918

But what remains from feeling all this is an inevitable disaffection with life and all its gestures, a foretasted weariness of all desires in all their manifestations, a generic distaste for all feelings. In these times of acute grief, it is impossible – even in dreams – to be a lover, to be a hero, to be happy. All of this is empty, even in our idea of what it is. It’s all spoken in another language that we can’t grasp – mere nonsense syllables to our understanding. Life is hollow, the soul hollow, the world hollow. All gods die a death greater than death. All is emptier than the void. All is a chaos of things that are nothing. If, on thinking this, I look up to see if reality can quench my thirst, I see inexpressive façades, inexpressive faces, inexpressive gestures. Stones, bodies, ideas – all dead. All movements are one great standstill. Nothing means anything to me. Nothing is known to me, not because it’s unfamiliar but because I don’t know what it is. The world has slipped away. And in the bottom of my soul – as the only reality of this moment – there’s an intense and invisible grief, a sadness like the sound of someone crying in a dark room.

Location 2932

I sorely grieve over time’s passage. It’s always with exaggerated emotion that I leave something behind, whatever it may be. The miserable rented room where I lived for a few months, the dinner table at the provincial hotel where I stayed for six days, even the sad waiting room at the station where I spent two hours waiting for a train – yes, their loss grieves me. But the special things of life – when I leave them behind and realize with all of my nerves’ sensibility that I’ll never see or have them again, at least not in that exact same moment – grieve me metaphysically. A chasm opens up in my soul and a cold breeze of the hour of God blows across my pallid face.

Location 2941

Time! The past! Something – a voice, a song, a chance fragrance – lifts the curtain on my soul’s memories… That which I was and will never again be! That which I had and will never again have! The dead! The dead who loved me in my childhood. Whenever I remember them, my whole soul shivers and I feel exiled from all hearts, alone…

Location 2946

The small cove with its small beach, cut off from the world by two miniature promontories, was my retreat from myself during those three days of holiday. The beach was reached by a crudely built stairway that began with wooden steps at the top and continued, halfway down, with steps cut directly into the rock, with a rusty iron handrail for support. And each time I went down that old…

Location 2950

Occultists say (or at least some of them do) that the soul has supreme moments when it recalls, with the emotions or with some part of memory, a moment or an aspect or a shadow from a previous incarnation. And since the soul returns to a time that is closer than the present to the beginning and…

Location 2954

Certain aspects and characteristics of my daily existence – represented in my normal self by desires, aversions, worries – vanished from me like fugitives from the law, fading into the shadows beyond recognition, and I attained a state of inward distance in which it was hard to remember yesterday or to believe that the self who lives in me day after day really belongs to me. My usual emotions, my regularly irregular habits, my conversations with others, my adaptations to the world’s social order – all of this seemed like things I’d read somewhere, like inert pages of a published biography, or details from some…

Location 2958

There on the beach, with no sound but that of the ocean waves and of the wind passing high overhead, like a large invisible aeroplane, I experienced dreams of a new sort – soft and shapeless things, marvels that made a deep impression, without images or emotions, clear like the sky and the water, and…

Location 2963

a tremulously slanting blue in the distance that acquired glistening, muddy-green hues as it approached, breaking with a great hissing its thousand crashing arms to scatter…

Location 2966

The sweetness of having neither family nor companions, that pleasant taste as of exile, in which the pride of the expatriate subdues with a strange sensuality our vague anxiety about being far from home – all of this I enjoy in my own way, indifferently.

Location 2973

Commonness is a hearthstone. Banality is a mother’s lap. After a long incursion into lofty poetry, up to the heights of sublime yearning, to the cliffs of the transcendent and the occult, it tastes better than good, it feels like all that is warm in life, to return to the inn with its happily laughing fools and to drink with them as one more fool, as God made us, content with the universe we were given and leaving the rest to those who climb mountains to do nothing at the top.

Location 2979

I’m not impressed should someone tell me that a certain man I consider crazy or stupid surpasses a common man in many achievements and particulars of life. Epileptics have amazing strength when they go into seizure; paranoiacs have an ability to reason that few normal men can match; religious maniacs bring multitudes of believers together as few (if any) demagogues can, and with a force of conviction that the latter can’t inspire in their followers. And all that this proves is that craziness is craziness. I prefer a defeat that knows the beauty of flowers to a victory in the desert, full of blindness in the soul, alone with its isolated nothingness.

Location 2982

The city’s features were reborn once the blurry mask slipped away. As if a window had been opened, the already dawned day dawned. There was a slight change in all the sounds, which had also suddenly returned. A blue tint infiltrated even the stones of the streets and the impersonal auras of pedestrians. The sun was warm, but still humidly so, filtered by the vanished fog.

Location 2996

The awakening of a city, with or without fog, moves me far more than the breaking of dawn in the country. It’s much more of a rebirth, there’s much more to look forward to, when the sun – instead of just gilding the grasses, the shrubs’ silhouettes and the trees’ countless green hands with its murky, then moist, and finally luminously gold light – multiplies its possible effects on windows (in myriad reflections), walls (painting them different colours) and rooftops (shading each one uniquely) to make a glorious morning absolutely distinct from so many other distinctive realities. A dawning in the country does me good; a dawning in the city good and bad, and so it does me more than just good. Yes, because the greater hope it stirs in me has, like all hopes, that slightly bitter, nostalgic taste of not being reality. The country morning exists; the city morning promises. The former makes one live; the latter makes one think. And I’m doomed always to feel, like the world’s great damned men, that it’s better to think than to live.

Location 2999

After the heat began to wane at summer’s end, it sometimes happened in late afternoon that certain softer hues in the broad sky and certain strokes of cold breezes already signalled the coming of autumn. There was still no discolouring or falling of leaves, nor yet that vague anxiety we naturally feel when we see death all around us, since we know ours will also come. But there was a sort of flagging of all effort, a vague slumber fallen over the last signs…

Location 3007

Each new autumn is closer to the last autumn we’ll have, and the same is true of spring or summer; but autumn, by its nature, reminds us that all things will end, which is something we’re apt to…

Location 3011

Yes, we will all pass, we will pass everything. Nothing will remain of the man who wore feelings and gloves, who talked about death and local politics. Just as one and the same light illumines the faces of saints and the gaiters of pedestrians, so too the same lack of light will cause darkness to engulf the nothing that remains of some having been saints and others having used gaiters. In the vast whirlwind where the whole world listlessly turns like so many dry leaves, kingdoms count no more than the dresses of seamstresses, and the pigtails of blonde girls go round in the same mortal whirl as the sceptres that stood for empires. All is nothing, and in the entrance hall to the Invisible, whose open door reveals merely a closed door beyond, all things dance, servants of the wind which churns them without hands – all things, big and small, which for us and in us formed the perceptible system of the universe. All is shadow mixed with dust, and there’s no voice but in the sounds made by what the wind lifts up or sweeps forward, nor silence except from what the wind abandons. Some of us, light leaves, and therefore less earthbound, ascend high in the hall’s whirl and fall farther away from the circle of the heavy. Others, almost invisible but still equally dust, different only if seen close up, form…

Location 3016

All that I’ve thought, all that I’ve dreamed, all that I have or haven’t done – all will go in autumn, like used matches strewn over the floor and pointing various ways, or papers crumpled into fake balls, or the great empires, all religions, the philosophies that the drowsy children of the abyss invented for sport. All that constituted my soul, from my lofty ambitions to my humble rented room, from the gods I had to the boss – Senhor Vasques – that I also had, all will go in autumn, all in autumn, in the tender indifference of autumn. All in autumn, yes, all in autumn.

Location 3034

Gone is the memory of the stories we heard as children, now so much seaweed; still to come is the tenderness of future skies, a breeze in which imprecision slowly opens into stars. The votive lamp flickers uncertainly in the abandoned temple, the ponds of deserted villas stagnate in the sun, the name once carved into the tree now means nothing, and the privileges of the unknown have been blown over the roads like torn-up paper, stopping only when some object blocked their way.

Location 3040

Clouds… Today they are the main reality, worrying me as if an overcast sky were one of the imminent dangers of my destiny. Clouds… They pass from the sea to the Castle, from west to east, in a scattered and naked tumult: white when they raggedly proceed at the forefront of who knows what; half-black when they linger, waiting for the purring wind to blow them away; and black with a dirty whiteness when – as if wishing to stay – they darken with their arrival more than with their shadow the illusory space opened up by the streets between the impassable rows of buildings.

Location 3049

Clouds… They’re like me, a ravaged passage between sky and earth, at the mercy of an invisible impulse, thundering or not thundering, whitely giving joy or blackly spreading gloom, stray fictions in the gap, far from the earth’s noise but without the sky’s peace.

Location 3065

Clouds… They continue to pass, passing always, they will always continue, in a discontinuous rolling of dull-coloured skeins, in a scattered prolongation of false, broken sky.

Location 3067

The day’s fluid departure ends in exhausted purples. No one would be able to say who I am, nor know who I’ve been. I came down from the unknown mountain to the unknown valley, and in the languid evening my steps were tracks left in the woods’ clearings. Everyone I loved had forgotten me in the shade. No one knew when the last boat was. The post office had no information about the letter that nobody would ever write. But it was all false. They told none of the stories that nobody told them, and no one knows anything for sure about the one who departed long ago, placing his hope in the false voyage, son of the fog and indecision to come. I have a name among those who tarry, and that name is shadow, like everything.

Location 3069

The more I meditate on our capacity for self-deception, the more my certainties crumble, slipping through my fingers as fine sand. And when this meditation becomes a feeling that clouds my mind, then the whole world appears to me as a mist made of shadows, a twilight of edges and corners, a fiction of the interlude,* a dawn that never becomes morning. Everything transforms into a dead absolute of itself, into a stagnation of details. And even my senses, to where I transfer my meditation in order to forget it, are a kind of slumber, something remote and derivative, an in-betweenness, variation, by-products of shadows and confusion.

Location 3081

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 traveller’s cordiality.

Location 3096

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.

Location 3098

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.

Location 3107

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.

Location 3112

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 centre 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.

Location 3121

Only my consciousness of myself is real for me; other people are hazy phenomena in this consciousness, and it would be morbid to attribute very much reality to them.

Location 3128

Every spoken word double-crosses us. The only tolerable form of communication is the written word, since it isn’t a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between

Location 3131

The only noble destiny for a writer who publishes is to be denied a celebrity he deserves. But the truly noble destiny belongs to the writer who doesn’t publish. Not who doesn’t write, for then he wouldn’t be a writer. I mean the writer in whose nature it is to write, but whose spiritual temperament prevents him from showing what he writes.

Location 3134

To publish is to give this outer world to others; but what for, if the outer world common to us and to them is the ‘real’ outer world, the one made of visible and tangible matter? What do others have to do with the universe that’s in me?

Location 3137

To have opinions is to sell out to yourself. To have no opinion is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.

Location 3151

Everything slips away from me. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and all it contains, my personality: it all slips away. I constantly feel that I was someone different, that a different I felt, that a different I thought. I’m watching a play with a different, unfamiliar setting, and what I’m watching is me. In the commonplace clutter of my literary drawers I sometimes find things I wrote ten or fifteen years ago, or longer, and many of them seem to be written by a stranger; I can’t recognize the voice as my own. But who wrote them, if not me? I felt those things, but in what seems to be another life, one from which I’ve now awoken, as if from someone else’s sleep. I often come across pages I wrote in my youth, when I was seventeen or twenty, and some of them reveal an expressive power I can’t remember having back then. There are certain phrases and sentences written in the wake of my adolescence that seem like the product of the person I am now, with all that I’ve learned in the intervening years. I see I’m the same as what I was. And since in general I feel that I’ve greatly progressed from what I was, I wonder where the progress is, if back then I was the same as now. There’s a mystery here that discredits and disturbs me.

Location 3153

It’s easy enough to form a theory of the fluidity of things and souls, to understand ourselves as an inner flow of life, to imagine that we’re a large quantity, that we traverse ourselves, that we have been many… But in this case there’s something besides the flow of personality between its own banks: there’s an absolute other, an extraneous self that was me.

Location 3175

I’d like the reading of this book to leave you with the impression that you’ve traversed a sensual nightmare.

Location 3187

absently floating amid the sorrows on high.

Location 3192

the last slow rays of the departing sun

Location 3193

half-coloured, half-shaded rooftops,

Location 3193

colours that are not their own nor of the things they light up.

Location 3193

Everything breathes beyond colour and sound, in a deep and hushed sigh.

Location 3194

On the painted buildings that the sun doesn’t see, the colours are beginning to grey.

Location 3195

A mild anxiety dozes in the pseudo-valleys formed by the streets.

Location 3196

Only in that tiny cloud – a white eagle hovering above everything – does the far-off sun still cast its smiling gold.

Location 3197

Everything I sought in life I abandoned for the sake of the search.

Location 3198

All that I’ve had is like this high and diversely identical sky, tatters of nothing tinged by a distant light, fragments of pseudo-life gilded by death from afar with its sad smile of whole truth. All I’ve had has amounted to my not knowing how to search, like a feudal lord of swamps at twilight, solitary prince of a city of empty tombs.

Location 3201

We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it’s towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses.

Location 3210

I’m older than Time and Space, because I’m conscious. Things derive from me; the whole of Nature is the offspring of my sensations.

Location 3212

That locus of sensations known as my soul sometimes walks with me, consciously, through the city’s nocturnal streets, in the wearisome hours when I feel like a dream among dreams of a different sort, by the…

Location 3217

how the place occupied by the universe is hollower than hollow: all this objectively unfolds before my detached spirit. I don’t know why, but I’m troubled by this objective network of wide and narrow streets, this succession of street lamps, trees, lighted and dark windows, opened and closed gates – heterogeneously nocturnal shapes which my…

Location 3221

Verbal snatches of envy, lust and triviality collide with my sense of hearing. Whispered murmurs…

Location 3224

It becomes gradually, darkly, indistinctly unintelligible to me how all of this can exist in the face of…

Location 3227

Through a passive association of ideas, I start thinking about the men whose consciousness of that space and time was so analytically and intuitively acute that it lost touch with the world. It seems ludicrous that on nights no doubt like this one, in cities surely not very different from the one in which I contemplate, there were men such as Plato, Scotus Erigena,* Kant and Hegel who virtually…

Location 3228

I almost catch myself wanting to scream because of a feeling that I’m sinking in an ocean of whose immensity has nothing to do with the infinity of space or the eternity of time, nor with anything that can be measured and named. In these moments of supremely silent terror, I don’t know what I materially am, what I normally do, what I usually want, feel and think. I feel cut off from myself, outside of my reach. The moral impulse to struggle, the intellectual effort to systematize and understand, the restless artistic yearning to produce something that I no longer fathom but that I remember having fathomed and that I call beauty – all of this vanishes from my sense of reality, all of this strikes me as not even worthy of being considered…

Location 3235

I’ve always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises. Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was, I’ve always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat. I was never convinced of what I believed in. I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through. Words were my only truth…

Location 3245

If it weren’t for my continuous dreaming, my perpetual state of alienation, I could very well call myself a realist – someone, that is, for whom the outer world is an independent nation. But I prefer not to give myself a name, to be somewhat mysterious…

Location 3249

And so I fashion myself out of gold and silks, in imaginary rooms, on a false stage, with ancient scenery: a dream created to invisible…

Location 3252

I cherish, like the memory of a special kiss, my childhood remembrance of a theatre with a bluish, moonlit setting that depicted the terrace of an impossible palace, surrounded by a huge park, likewise painted. I…

Location 3253

The street winced in the stark white light, and the dull darkness trembled all around the world with a boom of echoing crashes. The harsh sadness of the heavy rain accentuated the air’s ugly black hue. Cold and warm and hot at the same time, the air was everywhere equivocal. Then a wedge of metallic light entered the large office, ripping into the peace of each human body, and a huge rock of sound struck with a chill shock on all sides, shattering into a hard silence. The sound of rain diminishes, becoming a soft voice. The noise from the street diminishes out of fear. A new light spreads its swift yellow over the silent darkness, but breathing was again possible before the fist of rumbling sound abruptly echoed from afar; like an angry farewell, the storm was beginning to draw away.

Location 3264

The sound of increasing rain, as if everything were weeping, is a relief.

Location 3272

I feel and forget. A nostalgia – the same one that everyone feels for everything – invades me as if it were an opium in the cold air. I have an inner, pseudo-ecstasy that comes from seeing.

Location 3295

But no: this remote, lofty sky that’s disintegrating is everything right now, and the emotion I feel, which is many confused emotions bunched together, is merely this useless sky’s reflection in a lake in me – a lake secluded among steep rugged rocks, perfectly still, a kind of dead man’s gaze in which the heights distractedly observe themselves.

Location 3299

Ah, who will save me from existing? It’s neither death nor life that I want: it’s that other thing shining in the depths of longing, like a possible diamond in a pit one can’t descend. It’s all the weight and sorrow of this real and impossible universe, of this sky like the flag of an unknown army, of these colours that are paling in the fictitious air, where the imaginary crescent of the moon, cut out of distance and insensibility, now emerges in a still, electric whiteness.

Location 3304

It all amounts to the absence of a true God, an absence that is the empty cadaver of the lofty heavens and the closed soul. Infinite prison – since you’re infinite, there’s no escaping you!

Location 3307

I consider poetry to be an intermediate stage between music and prose. Like music, poetry is bound by rhythmic laws, and even when these are not the strict laws of metre, they still exist as checks, constraints, automatic mechanisms of repression and censure. In prose we speak freely. We can incorporate musical rhythms, and still think. We can incorporate poetic rhythms, and yet remain outside them. An occasional poetic rhythm won’t disturb prose, but an occasional prose rhythm makes poetry fall down.

Location 3316

Prose encompasses all art, in part because words contain the whole world, and in part because the untrammelled word contains every possibility for saying and thinking. In prose, through transposition, we’re able to render everything: colour and form, which painting can render only directly, in themselves, with no inner dimension; rhythm, which music likewise renders only directly, in itself, without a formal body, let alone that second body which is the idea; structure, which the architect must make out of given, hard, external things, and which we build with rhythms, hesitations, successions and fluidities; reality, which the sculptor has to leave in the world, with no aura of transubstantiation; and poetry, finally, to which the poet, like the initiate of a secret society, is the servant (albeit voluntary) of a discipline and a ritual.

Location 3320

I’m convinced that in a perfect, civilized world there would be no other art but prose. We would let sunsets be sunsets, using art merely to understand them verbally, by conveying them in an intelligible music of colour. We wouldn’t sculpt bodies but let them keep for themselves their supple contours and soft warmth that we see and touch. We would build houses only to live in them, which is after all what they’re for. Poetry would be for children, to prepare them for prose, since poetry is obviously something infantile, mnemonic, elementary and auxiliary.

Location 3326

Even what we might call the minor arts have their echoes in prose. There is prose that dances, sings and recites to itself. There are verbal rhythms with a sinuous choreography, in which the idea being expressed strips off its clothing with veritable and exemplary sensuality. And there are also, in prose, gestural subtleties carried out by a great actor, the Word, which rhythmically transforms into its bodily substance the impalpable mystery of the universe.

Location 3330

It comes down to the same thing – the capacity to distinguish and to discriminate. There is no enduring emotion without syntax. Immortality depends on the grammarians.

Location 3336

To read is to dream, guided by someone else’s hand.

Location 3338

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 doesn’t have, and the one who expresses the surplus of what he did have.

Location 3344

to write a work, knowing beforehand that it’s bound to be flawed and imperfect; to see while writing it that it’s flawed and imperfect – this is the height of spiritual torture and humiliation. Not only am I dissatisfied with the poems I write now; I also know that I’ll be dissatisfied with the poems I write in the future. I know it philosophically and in my flesh, through a hazy, gladiolated* foreglimpse.

Location 3350

I wrote my first poems when I was still a child. Though dreadful, they seemed perfect to me. I’ll never again be able to have the illusory pleasure of producing perfect work. What I write today is much better. It’s even better than what some of the best writers write. But it’s infinitely inferior to what I for some reason feel I could – or perhaps should – write. I weep over those first dreadful poems as over a dead child, a dead son, a last hope that has vanished.

Location 3355

The other truth is that, since every noble soul desires to live life in its entirety – experiencing all things, all places and all feelings – and since this is objectively impossible, the only way for a noble soul to live life is subjectively; only by denying life can it be lived in its totality.

Location 3363

We can die if all we’ve done is love.

Location 3379

But on that occasion when circumstances mischievously led me to suppose that I loved and to verify that the other person truly loved me, my first reaction was of bewildered confusion, as if I’d won a grand prize in an unconvertible currency.

Location 3389

The weariness of being loved, of being truly loved! The weariness of being the object of other people’s burdensome emotions! Of seeing yourself – when what you wanted was to remain forever free – transformed into a delivery boy whose duty is to reciprocate, to have the decency not to flee, lest anyone think that you’re cavalier towards emotions and would reject the loftiest sentiment that a human soul can offer. The weariness of your existence becoming absolutely dependent on a relationship with someone else’s feeling! The weariness of having to feel something, of having to love at least a little in return, even if it’s not a true reciprocity!

Location 3403

To belong is synonymous with banality. Creeds, ideals, a woman, a profession – all are prisons and shackles. To be is to be free. Even ambition, if we take pride in it, is a hindrance; we wouldn’t be proud of it if we realized it’s a string by which we’re pulled. No: no ties even to ourselves! Free from ourselves as well as from others, contemplatives without ecstasy, thinkers without conclusions and liberated from God, we will live the few moments of bliss allowed us in the prison yard by the distraction of our executioners. Tomorrow we will face the guillotine. Or if not tomorrow, then the day after. Let us stroll about in the sun before the end comes, deliberately forgetting all projects and pursuits. Without wrinkles our foreheads will glow in the sun, and the breeze will be cool for those who quit hoping.

Location 3420

Enlarge your personality without including anything from the outside – asking nothing from others and imposing nothing on others, but being others when you need them. Reduce your necessities to a minimum, so as not to depend on anyone for anything.

Location 3430

Let’s consider a man who owns and runs an office. He should be able to do without his employees; he should be able to type, to balance the books, to sweep the office. He should depend on others because it saves him time, not because he’s incompetent. Let him tell the office boy to put a letter in the post because he doesn’t want to lose time going to the post office, not because he doesn’t know where the post office is. Let him tell a clerk to take care of a certain matter because he doesn’t want to waste time on it, not because he doesn’t know how to take care of it.

Location 3433

We weary of everything, said the scholiast, except understanding. Let us understand, let us keep understanding, and let us make ghostly flowers out of this understanding, shrewdly entwining them into wreaths and garlands which are also doomed to wilt.

Location 3444

My soul, as always, whether among bedclothes or among people, was painfully conscious of the world. The day, like happiness, kept procrastinating – indefinitely, it seemed.

Location 3457

If I opened my eyes from my pretended slumber I could see, on the darkly visible walls of my room, floating snatches of dreams to be dreamed, dim lights, black lines, hazy shapes climbing up and down. The various pieces of furniture, larger than in the daytime, indistinctly blotted the dark’s absurdity. The door was distinguishable as something no whiter or blacker than night, just different. The window I could only hear, not see.

Location 3463

Even apart from our ordinary dreams – those abominations from the soul’s sewers that no one would dare confess and that oppress our nights like foul phantoms, grimy bubbles and slime of our repressed sensibility – what ridiculous, frightening and unspeakable things the soul, with a little effort, can recognize in its corners! The human soul is a madhouse of the grotesque. If a soul were able to reveal itself truthfully, if its shame and modesty didn’t run deeper than all its known and named ignominies, then it would be – as is said of truth – a well, but a sinister well full of murky echoes and inhabited by abhorrent creatures, slimy non-beings, lifeless slugs, the snot of subjectivity.

Location 3475

The human soul is a madhouse of the grotesque. If a soul were able to reveal itself truthfully, if its shame and modesty didn’t run deeper than all its known and named ignominies, then it would be – as is said of truth – a well, but a sinister well full of murky echoes and inhabited by abhorrent creatures, slimy non-beings, lifeless slugs, the snot of subjectivity.

Location 3478

All it would take to make a catalogue of monsters is to photograph in words the things the night brings to drowsy souls unable to sleep. These things have all the incoherence of dreams without the alibi of sleeping. They hover like bats over the soul’s passivity, or like vampires that suck the blood of submission. They’re larvae from the debris on the hillside, shadows that fill the valley, remnants left by destiny. Sometimes they’re worms, loathsome to the very soul that cradles and breeds them; sometimes they’re ghosts that sinisterly skulk around nothing at all; sometimes they pop out as snakes from the absurd hollows of spent emotions. Ballast of falseness, they’re useful for nothing but to render us useless. They are doubts from the abyss that drag their cold and slithery bodies across the soul. They hang on as smoke, they leave tracks, and they never amounted to more than the sterile substance of our awareness of them. One or another is like an inner firework, sparking between dreams, and the rest is what our unconscious consciousness saw of them.

Location 3481

A dangling, untied ribbon, the soul doesn’t exist in and of itself. The great landscapes belong to tomorrow, and we have already lived. The conversation was cut short and fizzled. Who would have thought life would turn out like this? I’m lost if I find myself; I doubt what I discover; I don’t have what I’ve obtained. I sleep as if I were taking a walk, but I’m awake. I wake up as if I’d been sleeping, and I don’t belong to me. Life, in its essence, is one big insomnia, and all that we think or do occurs in a lucid stupor. I’d be happy if I could sleep. This is what I think now, because I’m not sleeping. The night is an enormous weight beyond the silent blanket of dreams under which I smother myself. I have indigestion of the soul. After this is over, morning will come as always, but it will be too late, as always. Everything sleeps and is happy except me. I rest a little, without even trying to sleep. And huge heads of non-existent monsters rise in confusion from the depths of who I am. They’re Oriental dragons from the abyss, with their red tongues hanging outside of logic and their eyes deadly staring at my lifeless life that doesn’t stare back. The lid, for God’s sake, the lid! Close the lid on unconsciousness and life! Fortunately, through the open shutters of the cold window, a bleak thread of pale light begins to chase darkness from the horizon. Morning, fortunately, is what’s going to break. The disquiet that so wearies me has almost quieted down. A cock crows absurdly in the middle of the city. The wan day begins in my vague slumber. Eventually I’ll sleep. The noise of wheels tells me there’s a cart. My eyelids sleep, but not I. Everything, finally, is Destiny.

Location 3489

Only those who don’t feel don’t experience pain; and the highest, most notable and most prudent men are those who experience and suffer precisely what they foresaw and what they disdained. This is what is known as Life.

Location 3516

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 soul’s inner attitude towards the idea of truth.

Location 3521

The downfall of classical ideals made all men potential artists, and therefore bad artists. When art depended on solid construction and the careful observance of rules, few could attempt to be artists, and a fair number of these were quite good. But when art, instead of being understood as creation, became merely an expression of feelings, then anyone could be an artist, because everyone has feelings.

Location 3557

The only true art is that of construction.

Location 3561

I never found convincing arguments for anything other than inertia, and over time I became ever more keenly, sullenly aware of my inertia as an abdicator. Seeking out modes of inertia, pleading to evade all personal struggle and social responsibility – this is the substance from which I carved the imaginary statue of my existence.

Location 3588

Of the little I saw and heard, I strove to take away only what could be prolonged in me as a distant and distorted reflection. I endeavoured to make all my thoughts and all the daily chapters of my experience provide me with nothing but sensations. I gave my life an aesthetic orientation, and I made that aesthetic utterly personal, exclusively my own.

Location 3592

I reduced my contact with others to a minimum. I did my best to lose all attachment to life ..... In time I even shed my desire for glory, like a sleepy man who takes off his clothes to go to bed.

Location 3596

After studying metaphysics and sciences, I went on to mental occupations that were more threatening to my nervous equilibrium. I spent frightful nights hunched over tomes by mystics and cabbalists which I never had the patience to read except intermittently, trembling and ..... The rites and mysteries of the Rosicrucians, the symbolism of the Cabbala and the Templars ..... – all of this oppressed me for a long time. My feverish days were filled with pernicious speculations based on the demonic logic of metaphysics – magic, alchemy – and I derived a false vital stimulus from the painful and quasi-psychic sensation of being always on the verge of discovering a supreme mystery. I lost myself in the delirious subsystems of metaphysics, systems full of disturbing analogies and pitfalls for lucid thought, vast enigmatic landscapes where glimmers of the supernatural arouse mysteries on the fringes.

Location 3598

I fell into a complex state of mental indiscipline and general indifference. Where did I take refuge? My impression is that I didn’t take refuge anywhere. I abandoned myself to I don’t know what.

Location 3607

Today I’m an ascetic in my religion of myself. A cup of coffee, a cigarette and my dreams can substitute quite well for the universe and its stars, for work, love, and even beauty and glory. I need virtually no stimulants. I have opium enough in my soul.

Location 3610

Thinking is still a form of acting. Only in sheer reverie, where nothing active intervenes and even our self-awareness gets stuck in the mud – only there, in this warm and damp state of non-being, can total renunciation of action be achieved. To stop trying to understand, to stop analysing… To see ourselves as we see nature, to view our impressions as we view a field – that is true wisdom.

Location 3617

…the sacred instinct of having no theories…

Location 3621

More than once, while roaming the streets in the late afternoon, I’ve been suddenly and violently struck by the bizarre presence of organization in things. It’s not so much natural things that arouse this powerful awareness in my soul; it’s the layout of the streets, the signs, the people dressed up and talking, their jobs, the newspapers, the logic of it all. Or rather, it’s the fact that ordered streets, signs, jobs, people and society exist, all of them fitting together and going forward and opening up paths.

Location 3622

I’ve never understood how anyone who has stopped to consider the tremendous fact of this universal watch mechanism can deny the watchmaker, in whom not even Voltaire disbelieved. I understand why, in light of certain events that have apparently deviated from a plan (and only by knowing the plan could one know if they have deviated from it), someone might attribute an element of imperfection to this supreme intelligence. I understand this, although I don’t accept it. And I understand why, in view of the evil that’s in the world, one might not acknowledge that the creating intelligence is infinitely good. I understand this, although again I don’t accept it. But to deny the existence of this intelligence, namely God, strikes me as one of those idiocies that sometimes afflict, in one area of their intelligence, men who in all other areas may be superior – those, for example, who systematically make mistakes in adding and subtracting, or who (considering now the intelligence that rules aesthetic sensibility) cannot feel music, or painting, or poetry.

Location 3633

If there’s one thing life grants us for which we should thank the Gods, besides thanking them for life itself, it’s the gift of not knowing: of not knowing ourselves and of not knowing each other. The human soul is a murky and slimy abyss, a well on the earth’s surface that’s never used. No one would love himself if he really knew himself, and without the vanity which is born of this ignorance and is the blood of the spiritual life, our souls would die of anemia. No one knows anyone else, and it’s just as well, for if he did, he would discover – in his very own mother, wife or son – his inveterate, metaphysical enemy.

Location 3655

All marriages are flawed, because each partner holds inside, in a secret corner where the soul belongs to the Devil, the wispy image of the desired man who is nothing like the husband, the hazy figure of the sublime woman whom the wife doesn’t live up to. The happiest people are unaware of their frustrated inclinations; the less happy are aware but choose to ignore them, and only an occasional jerky movement or brusque remark evokes, on the casual surface of gestures and words, the hidden Demon, the ancient Eve, the Knight and the Sylph.

Location 3662

The life we live is a flexible, fluid misunderstanding, a happy mean between the greatness that doesn’t exist and the happiness that can’t exist. We are content thanks to our capacity, even as we think and feel, for not believing in the soul’s existence. In the masked ball which is our life, we’re satisfied by the agreeable sensation of the costumes, which are all that really count for a ball. We’re servants of the lights and colours, moving in the dance as if in the truth, and we’re not even aware – unless, remaining alone, we don’t dance – of the so cold and lofty night outside, of the mortal body under the tatters that will outlive it, of all that we privately imagine is essentially us but that is actually just an inner parody of that supposedly true self.

Location 3666

And so, dressed in a body and soul, with our multiple costumes stuck to us like feathers on a bird, we live happily or unhappily – or without knowing how we live – this brief time given us by the gods that we might amuse them, like children who play at serious games.

Location 3673

Knowing neither ourselves nor each other, and therefore cheerfully getting along, we keep twirling round in the dance and chatting during the intervals – human, futile, and in earnest – to the sound of the great orchestra of the stars, under the aloof and disdainful gaze of the show’s organizers.

Location 3679

What really shocks me is how these wizards and masters of the invisible, when they write to communicate or intimate their mysteries, all write abominably. It offends my intelligence that a man can master the Devil without being able to master the Portuguese language. Why should dealing with demons be easier than dealing with grammar? If through long exercises of concentration and willpower one can have so-called astral visions, why can’t the same person – applying considerably less concentration and willpower – have a vision of syntax? What is there in the teachings and rituals of the Magic Arts that prevents their adherents from writing – I won’t say with clarity, since obscurity may be part of the occult law – but at least with elegance and fluency, which can exist in the sphere of the abstruse? Why should all the soul’s energy be spent studying the language of the Gods, without a pittance left over to study the colour and rhythm of the language of men? I don’t trust masters who can’t be down-to-earth. For me they’re like those eccentric poets who can’t write like everybody else. I accept that they’re eccentric, but I’d like them to show me that it’s because they’re superior to the norm rather than incapable of it.

Location 3688

To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.

Location 3703

If a man writes well only when he’s drunk, then I’ll tell him: Get drunk. And if he says that it’s bad for his liver, I’ll answer: What’s your liver? A dead thing that lives while you live, whereas the poems you write live without while.

Location 3703

I enjoy speaking. Or rather, I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities. Perhaps because real sensuality doesn’t interest me in the least, not even intellectually or in my dreams, desire in me metamorphosed into my aptitude for creating verbal rhythms and for noting them in the speech of others. I tremble when someone speaks well. Certain pages from Fialho* and from Chateaubriand make my whole being tingle in all of its pores, make me rave in a still shiver with impossible pleasure. Even certain pages of Vieira,* in the cold perfection of their syntactical engineering, make me quiver like a branch in the wind, with the passive delirium of something shaken.

Location 3706

I weep over nothing that life brings or takes away, but there are pages of prose that have made me cry. I remember, as clearly as what’s before my eyes, the night when as a child I read for the first time, in an anthology, Vieira’s famous passage on King Solomon: ‘Solomon built a palace…’ And I read all the way to the end, trembling and confused. Then I broke into joyful tears – tears such as no real joy could make me cry, nor any of life’s sorrows ever make me shed. That hieratic movement of our clear majestic language, that expression of ideas in inevitable words, like water that flows because there’s a slope, that vocalic marvel in which the sounds are ideal colours – all of this instinctively seized me like an overwhelming political emotion. And I cried. Remembering it today, I still cry. Not out of nostalgia for my childhood, which I don’t miss, but because of nostalgia for the emotion of that moment, because of a heartfelt regret that I can no longer read for the first time that great symphonic certitude.

Location 3715

But I hate with genuine hatred, with the only hatred I feel, not those who write bad Portuguese, not those whose syntax is faulty, not those who used phonetic rather than etymological spelling,* but the badly written page itself, as if it were a person, incorrect syntax, as someone who ought to be flogged, the substitution of i for y, as the spit that directly disgusts me, independent of who spat it.

Location 3724

Art consists in making others feel what we feel, in freeing them from themselves by offering them our own personality. The true substance of whatever I feel is absolutely incommunicable, and the more profoundly I feel it, the more incommunicable it is. In order to convey to someone else what I feel, I must translate my feelings into his language – saying things, that is, as if they were what I feel, so that he, reading them, will feel exactly what I felt. And since this someone is presumed by art to be not this or that person but everyone (i.e., that person common to all persons), what I must finally do is convert my feelings into a typical human feeling, even if it means perverting the true nature of what I felt.

Location 3729

Now I have the key to the door of my theme. I write and weep about my lost childhood, going into poignant detail about the people and furniture of our old house in the country. I recall the joy of having no rights or responsibilities, of being free because I still didn’t know how to think or feel – and this recollection, if it’s well written and visually effective, will arouse in my reader exactly the same emotion I was feeling, which had nothing to do with childhood.

Location 3743

Art lies because it is social. And there are two great forms of art: one that speaks to our deepest soul, the other to our attentive soul. The first is poetry, the second is the novel.

Location 3752

Like it or not, we cannot escape universal brotherhood. We all love each other, and the lie is the kiss we exchange.

Location 3758

It’s not demons (who at least have a human face) but hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it’s the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything.

Location 3774

Tedium… Those who have Gods don’t have tedium. Tedium is the lack of a mythology. For people without beliefs, even doubt is impossible, even their scepticism will lack the strength to question. Yes, tedium is the loss of the soul’s capacity for self-delusion; it is the mind’s lack of the non-existent ladder by which it might firmly ascend to truth.

Location 3808