Every struggle, no matter what its goal, is forced by life to make adjustments; it becomes a different struggle, serves different ends, and sometimes accomplishes the very opposite of what it set out to do. 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 .....

148.

The perfect man, for the pagans, was the perfection of the man that exists; for Christians, the perfection of the man that does not exist; and for Buddhists, the perfection of no man existing.

Nature is the difference between the soul and God.

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

149.

Many people have defined man, and in general they've defined him in contrast with animals. That's why definitions of man often take the form, 'Man is a such-and-such animal', or 'Man is an animal that...', and then we're told what. 'Man is a sick animal,' said Rousseau, and that's partly true. 'Man is a rational animal,' says the Church, and that's partly true. 'Man is a tool-using animal,' says Carlyle, and that's partly true. But these definitions, and others like them, are always somewhat off the mark. And the reason is quite simple: 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.

The funny thing is that, while it's difficult to formulate a definition that truly distinguishes man from animals, it's easy to differentiate between the superior man and the common man.

I've never forgotten that phrase from Haeckel,* the biologist, whom I read in the childhood of my intelligence, that period when we're attracted to popular science and writings that attack religion. The phrase is more or less the following: 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.

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.

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.

But something always eludes us, some analysis or other always gets muddled, and the truth even if false is always beyond the next corner. And this is what tires us even more than life (when life tires us) and more than the knowledge and contemplation of life (which always tire us).

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

150.

The persistence of instinctive life in the guise of human intelligence is one of my most constant and profound contemplations. The artificial disguise of consciousness only highlights for me the unconsciousness it doesn't succeed in disguising.

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 not because there's no consciousness in them but because there aren't two consciousnesses.

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

With a wandering mind I consider the common history of common men. I see how in everything they are slaves of a subconscious temperament, of extraneous circumstances, and of the social and anti-social impulses in which, with which and over which they clash like petty objects.

How often I've heard people say the same old phrase that symbolizes all the absurdity, all the nothingness, all the verbalized ignorance of their lives. It's the phrase they use in reference to any material pleasure: 'This is what we take away from life...' Take where? take how? take why? It would be sad to wake them out of their darkness with questions like that... Only a materialist can utter such a phrase, because everyone who utters such a phrase is, whether he knows it or not, a materialist. What does he plan to take from life, and how? Where will he take his pork chops and red wine and lady friend? To what heaven that he doesn't believe in? To what earth, where he'll take only the rottenness that was the latent essence of his whole life? I can think of no phrase that's more tragic, or that reveals more about human humanity. That's what plants would say if they could know that they enjoy the sun. That's what animals would say about their somnambulant pleasures, were their power of self-expression not inferior to man's. And perhaps even I, while writing these words with a vague impression that they might endure, imagine that my memory of having written them is what I 'take away from life'. And just as a common corpse is lowered into the common ground, so the equally useless corpse of the prose I wrote while waiting will be lowered into common oblivion. A man's pork chops, his wine, his lady friend who am I to make fun of them?

Brothers in our common ignorance, different expressions of the same blood, diverse forms of the same heredity which of us can deny the other? A wife can be denied, but not mother, not father, not brother.

151.

Outside, in the slow moonlit night, the wind slowly shakes things that cast fluttering shadows. Perhaps it's just hanging laundry from the floor above, but the shadows don't know they're from shirts, and they impalpably flutter in hushed harmony with everything else.

I left the shutters open so as to wake up early, but so far I haven't succeeded in falling asleep or even in staying wide awake, and the night's already so old that not a sound can be heard. There's moonlight beyond the shadows of my room, but it doesn't come through the window. It exists like a day of hollow silver, and the roof of the building opposite, which I can see from my bed, is liquid with a blackish whiteness. In the moon's hard light there's a sad peace, like lofty congratulations to someone who can't hear them.

And without seeing, without thinking, my eyes now closed on my non-existent slumber, I meditate on what words can truly describe moonlight. The ancients would say that it is silvery or white. But this supposed whiteness actually consists of many colours. Were I to get out of bed and look past the cold panes, I know I would see that in the high lonely air the moonlight is greyish white, blued by a subdued yellow; that over the various, unequally dark rooftops it bathes the submissive buildings with a black white and floods the red brown of the highest clay tiles with a colourless colour. At the end of the street a placid abyss where the naked cobblestones are unevenly rounded it has no colour other than a blue which perhaps comes from the grey of the stones. In the depths of the horizon it must be almost dark blue, different from the black blue in the depths of the sky. On the windows where it strikes, the moonlight is a black yellow.

From here in my bed, if I open my eyes, heavy with the sleep I cannot find, it looks like snow turned into colour, with floating threads of warm nacre. And if I think with what I feel, it's a tedium turned into white shadow, darkening as if eyes were closing on this hazy whiteness.

152.

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.

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

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

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

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

153.

I stand up from my chair with a monstrous effort, but I have the impression that I carry it with me and that it's heavier, for it's the chair of subjectivity.

154.

Who am I to myself? Just one of my sensations.

My heart drains out helplessly, like a broken bucket. Think? Feel? How everything wearies when it's defined!

155.

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.

There are moments when the emptiness of feeling oneself live attains the consistency of a positive thing. In the great men of action, namely the saints, who act with all of their emotion and not just part of it, this sense of life's nothingness leads to the infinite. They crown themselves with night and the stars, and anoint themselves with silence and solitude. In the great men of inaction, to whose number I humbly belong, the same feeling leads to the infinitesimal; sensations are stretched, like rubber bands, to reveal the pores of their slack, false continuity.

And in these moments both types of men love sleep, as much as the common man who doesn't act and doesn't not act, being a mere reflection of the generic existence of the human species. 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.

In my writing I linger over the words, as before shop windows I don't really look at, and what remains are half-meanings and quasi-expressions, like the colours of fabrics that I didn't actually see, harmonious displays composed of I don't know what objects. In writing I rock myself, like a crazed mother her dead child.

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.

Finally I sat down on the rock at the crossroads as before the fireplace I never had. And I began, all by myself, to make paper boats with the lie they'd given me. No one would believe in me, not even as a liar, and there was no lake where I could try out my truth.

Lost and idle words, random metaphors, chained to shadows by a vague anxiety... Remnants of better times, spent on I don't know what garden paths... Extinguished lamp whose gold gleams in the dark, in memory of the dead light... Words tossed not to the wind but to the ground, dropped from limp fingers, like dried leaves that had fallen on them from an invisibly infinite tree... Nostalgia for the pools of unknown farms... Heartfelt affection for what never happened...

To live! To live! And at least the hope that I might sleep soundly in Proserpina's bed.

156.

What imperious queen, standing by her ponds, holds on to the memory of my broken life? I was the pageboy of tree-lined paths that weren't enough for the soaring moments of my blue peace. Ships in the distance completed the sea that lapped my terraces, and in the clouds towards the south I lost my soul, like an oar dropped in the water.

157.

To create in myself a nation with its own politics, parties and revolutions, and to be all of it, everything, to be God in the real pantheism of this people-I, to be the substance and movement of their bodies and their souls, of the very ground they tread and the acts they perform! To be everything, to be them and not them! Ah, this is one of the dreams I'm still far from realizing. And if I realized it, perhaps I would die. I'm not sure why, but it seems one couldn't live after committing such a great sacrilege against God, after usurping the divine power of being everything.

What pleasure it would give me to create a Jesuitry of sensations!

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.

Why do I sometimes set forth contradictory and irreconcilable methods of dreaming and of learning to dream? Probably because I'm so used to feeling what's false as true, and what I dream as vividly as what I see, that I've lost the human distinction false, I believe between truth and falsehood.

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.

There are people who spend long hours suffering because they can't be a figure in a painting or in one of the suits from a deck of cards. There are souls who suffer not being able to live today in the Middle Ages as if this were a divine curse. I used to experience this kind of suffering, but no longer. I've moved beyond that level. But it does sadden me that I can't dream of myself as, say, two kings in different kingdoms that belong to universes with different kinds of space and time. Not to be able to achieve this truly makes me grieve. It smacks to me of going hungry.

To visualize the inconceivable in dreams is one of the great triumphs that I, as advanced a dreamer as I am, only rarely attain. To dream, for example, that I'm simultaneously, separately, severally the man and the woman on a stroll that a man and woman are taking along the river. To see myself at the same time, in the same way, with equal precision and without overlap, being equally but separately integrated into both things as a conscious ship in a South Sea and a printed page from an old book. How absurd this seems! But everything is absurd, and dreaming least of all.

158.

For a man who has ravished Proserpina like Dis, even if only in his dreams, how can the love of an earthly woman be anything but a dream?

Like Shelley, I loved the Absolute Woman before time was; temporal loves were flat to my taste, all reminding me of what I'd lost.

159.

Twice in my adolescence which I feel so remotely it seems like someone else's story that I read or was told I enjoyed the humiliating grief of being in love. From my present vantage point, looking back to that past which I can no longer designate as 'long ago' or 'recent', I think it was good that this experience of disillusion happened to me so early.

Nothing happened, except in what I felt. Outwardly speaking, legions of men have suffered the same inner torments. But .....

Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don't hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can't possibly cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don't die or disappear.

Our soul's great anxieties are always cosmic cataclysms, upsetting the stars all around us and making the sun veer off course. In all souls that feel, Fate sooner or later plays out an apocalypse of anxiety, with all heavens and worlds raining down over their disconsolation.

To feel that you're superior and to be treated by Fate as supremely and incurably inferior who in such a plight can boast about being a man?

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 .....

160.

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

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

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

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

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

161.

Nothing irks me more than the vocabulary of social responsibility. The very word 'duty' is unpleasant to me, like an unwanted guest. But the 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.

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

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

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

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

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

162.

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

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

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

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