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...

196.

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are. The sensation we come to have of ourselves is of a deserted field at dusk, sad with reeds next to a river without boats, its glistening waters blackening between wide banks.

I don't know if these feelings are a slow madness born of disconsolation or if they're reminiscences of some other world in which we've lived jumbled, criss-crossing remembrances, like things seen in dreams, absurd in the form they come to us but not in their origin, if we knew what it was. I don't know if we weren't in fact other beings, whose greater completeness we can sense today, incompletely, forming at best a sketchy notion of their lost solidity in the two dimensions of our present lives, mere shadows of what they were.

I know these thoughts of the emotion ache bitterly in the soul. Our inability to conceive of anything they could correspond to, the impossibility of finding a substitute for what they embrace in our imagination all of this weighs like a harsh sentence handed down no one knows where, or by whom, or why.

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 facades, 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.

197.

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.

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 in the night of myself, weeping like a beggar before the closed silence of all doors.

198.

HOLIDAY N NOTES.

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 stairway, and especially on the part made of stone, I stepped out of my own existence and found myself.

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 origin of things, it experiences a sensation of childhood and of liberation.

In descending that now little-used stairway and slowly stepping out on to the forever deserted beach, it was as if I were using some magical technique to find myself nearer the monad that I perhaps am. 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 novel, in one of the middle chapters we read while thinking about something else, and the story-line slackens until it finally slithers away on the ground.

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 reverberating like the white whorls of ocean rising up from the depths of a vast truth: 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 them over darkish sand where they left dry foam, and then gathering into itself all undertows, all return journeys to that original freedom, all nostalgias for God, all memories (like this one, shapeless and painless) of a prior state, blissful because it was so good or because it was different, a body made of nostalgia with a soul of foam, repose, death, the everything or the nothingness which like a huge ocean surrounds the island of castaways that is life.

And I slept without sleeping, already straying from what I'd seen through my feelings, a twilight of myself, a ripple of water among trees, the peace of wide rivers, the coolness of sad evenings, the slow panting in the white breast of the childhood sleep of contemplation.

199.

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. Because one of the tenets of my mental attitude is that our attention to what we feel shouldn't be unduly cultivated, and even dreams should be regarded with condescension, with an aristocratic awareness that they couldn't exist without us. To give too much importance to a dream would be to give too much importance to something which, after all, broke away from us and set itself up as reality, at least as far as it could, thereby losing its right to special treatment from us.

200.

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.

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.

How often even my futile dreaming makes me loathe my inner life and feel physically nauseated by mysticisms and contemplations. How quickly I then race from my apartment where I dream to the office, and when I see the face of Moreira it's as if I had finally docked at a port. When all is said and done, I prefer Moreira to the astral world; I prefer reality to truth; I prefer life, yes, to the very God who created it. Since this is the life he gave me, this is the life I'll live. I dream because I dream, but I don't suffer the indignity of considering my dreams anything more than my personal theatre, even as I don't consider wine though I enjoy drinking it to be a source of nourishment or a vital necessity.

201.

Since early morning and against the solar custom of this bright city, the fog had wrapped a weightless mantle (which the sun slowly gilded) around the rows of houses, the cancelled open spaces, and the shifting heights of land and of buildings. But as the hours advanced towards midday, the gentle mist began to unravel until, with breaths like flapping shadows of veils, it expired altogether. By ten o'clock, the tenuous blueing of the sky was the only evidence that there had been fog.

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.

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.

202.

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 of action. Ah, with so much sad indifference in these afternoons, the autumn begins in us before it begins in things.

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 forget when we look around us in spring or summer.

It's still not autumn, there's still no yellow of fallen leaves in the air, still none of that damp sadness that marks the weather when it's on its way to becoming winter. But there is a hint of expected sadness a sorrow dressed for the journey in our hazy awareness of colours being smattered, of the wind's different sound, of that ancient stillness which spreads in the falling night across the ineluctable presence of the universe.

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 their own layer in the whirlwind. Still others, tree trunks in miniature, are dragged around and come to a halt here and there. One day, when everything is finally and fully revealed, that other door will open and all that we were rubbish of stars and souls will be swept outside the house, so that what exists can start over.

My heart hurts me like a foreign body. My brain sleeps all that I feel. Yes, it's the beginning of autumn which brings to the air and to my soul that unsmiling light whose lifeless yellow tinges the irregular, rounded edges of the sunset's several clouds. Yes, it's the beginning of autumn and the clear awareness, in the limpid hour, of the anonymous inadequacy of everything. Autumn, yes, autumn, the one that's here or that's yet to come, and the foretasted weariness of all acts, the foretasted disillusion of all dreams. What can I hope for and where would it come from? Already, in what I think of myself, I'm there among the leaves and dust of the entrance hall, in the meaningless orbit of nothing at all, making sounds of life on the clean flagstones gilded by the last rays of a sun setting I don't know where.

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.

203.

We don't even know if what ends with daylight terminates in us as useless grief, or if we are just an illusion among shadows, and reality just this vast silence without wild ducks that falls over the lakes where straight and stiff reeds swoon. We know nothing. 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. Others will lean out the same window as the rest; those who have forgotten the evil shadow will keep sleeping, longing for the sun they never had; and I, venturing without acting, will end without regret amid soggy reeds, covered with mud from the nearby river and from my sluggish weariness, under vast autumn evenings in some impossible distance. And through it all, behind my daydream, I'll feel my soul like a whistle of stark anxiety, a pure and shrill howl, useless in the world's darkness.

204.

Clouds... Today I'm conscious of the sky, but there are days when I just feel it and don't look at it, when I just live in the city and not in the world of nature that includes it. 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.

Clouds... I exist without knowing it and will die without wanting to. I'm the gap between what I am and am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me, the fleshly and abstract average of things that are nothing, I being likewise nothing. Clouds... Such disquiet when I feel, such discomfort when I think, such futility when I desire! Clouds... They're still passing, some of them so huge it seems they'll fill the whole sky (though the buildings prevent us from seeing if they're really as large as they appear), while others are of indefinite size, being perhaps two together or one that's going to split in two, meaningless in the heights of the exhausted sky, and still others are small, as if they were playthings of powerful beings, odd-shaped balls of some absurd game and now placed to one side of the sky, in cold isolation.

Clouds... I question myself and don't know me. Nothing I've done has been useful, and nothing I do will be any different. I've wasted part of my life in confusedly interpreting nothing at all, and the rest of it in writing these verses in prose for my incommunicable sensations, which is how I make the unknown universe mine. I'm objectively and subjectively sick of myself. I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything. Clouds... They're everything: disintegrated fragments of atmosphere, the only real things today between the worthless earth and the non-existent sky, indescribable tatters of the tedium I ascribe to them, mist condensed into colourless threats, dirty wads of cotton from a hospital without walls. 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. 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.

205.

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.

206.

FOREST.

Ah, but not even the alcove was genuine it was the old alcove of my lost childhood! It withdrew like a fog, passing materially through the white walls of my real room, which emerged from the shadows distinct and smaller, like life and the day, like the creaking of the wagon and the faint sound of the whip that puts muscles for standing up into the prone body of the tired animal.

207.

How many things that we consider right or true are merely the vestiges of our dreams, the sleepwalking figures of our incomprehension! Does anyone know what's right or true? How many things we consider beautiful are merely the fashion of the day, the fiction of their time and place? How many things we consider ours are utterly foreign to our blood, we being merely their perfect mirrors or transparent wrappers!

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.

In times like these when I could readily understand ascetics and recluses, were I able to understand how anyone can make an effort on behalf of absolute ends or subscribe to a creed that might produce an effort I would create, if I could, a full-fledged aesthetics of despair, an inner rhythm like a crib's rocking, filtered by the night's caresses in other, far-flung homelands.

Today, at different times, I ran into two friends who'd had a fight. Each one told me his version of why they'd fought. Each one told me the truth. Each one gave me his reasons. They were both right. They were both absolutely right. It's not that one of them saw it one way and the other another way, or that one saw one side of what happened and the other a different side. No: each one saw things exactly as they'd happened, each one saw them according to the same criterion, but each one saw something different, and so each one was right.

I was baffled by this dual existence of truth.

208.

Just as, whether we know it or not, we all have a metaphysics, so too, whether we like it or not, we all have a morality. I have a very simple morality: not to do good or evil to anyone. Not to do evil, because it seems only fair that others enjoy the same right I demand for myself not to be disturbed and also because I think that the world doesn't need more than the natural evils it already has. All of us in this world are living on board a ship that is sailing from one unknown port to another, and we should treat each other with a traveller's cordiality. Not to do good, because I don't know what good is, nor even if I do it when I think I do. How do I know what evils I generate if I give a beggar money? How do I know what evils I produce if I teach or instruct? Not knowing, I refrain. And besides, I think that to help or clarify is, in a certain way, to commit the evil of interfering in the lives of others. Kindness depends on a whim of our mood, and we have no right to make others the victims of our whims, however humane or kind-hearted they may be. Good deeds are impositions; that's why I categorically abhor them.

If, for moral reasons, I don't do good to others, neither do I expect others to do good to me. When I get sick, what I hate most is if someone should feel obliged to take care of me, something I'd loathe doing for another. I've never visited a sick friend. And whenever I've been sick and had visitors, I've always felt their presence as a bother, an insult, an unwarranted violation of my wilful privacy. I don't like people to give me things, because it seems like they're obligating me to give something in return to them or to others, it's all the same.

I'm highly sociable in a highly negative way. I'm inoffensiveness incarnate. But I'm no more than this, I don't want to be more than this, I can't be more than this. For everything that exists I feel a visual affection, an intellectual fondness nothing in the heart. I have faith in nothing, hope in nothing, charity for nothing. I'm nauseated and outraged by the sincere souls of all sincerities and by the mystics of all mysticisms, or rather, by the sincerities of all sincere souls and the mysticisms of all mystics. This nausea is almost physical when the mysticisms are active when they try to convince other people, meddle with their wills, discover the truth, or reform the world.

I consider myself fortunate for no longer having family, as it relieves me of the obligation to love someone, which I would surely find burdensome. Any nostalgia I feel is literary. I remember my childhood with tears, but they're rhythmic tears, in which prose is already being formed. I remember it as something external, and it comes back to me through external things; I remember only external things. It's not the stillness of evenings in the country that endears me to the childhood I spent there, it's the way the table was set for tea, it's the way the furniture was arranged in the room, it's the faces and physical gestures of the people. I feel nostalgia for scenes. Thus someone else's childhood can move me as much as my own; both are purely visual phenomena from a past I'm unable to fathom, and my perception of them is literary. They move me, yes, but because I see them, not because I remember them.

I've never loved anyone. The most that I've loved are my sensations states of conscious seeing, impressions gathered by intently hearing, and aromas through which the modesty of the outer world speaks to me of things from the past (so easily remembered by their smells), giving me a reality and an emotion that go beyond the simple fact of bread being baked inside the bakery, as on that remote afternoon when I was coming back from the funeral of my uncle who so loved me, and I felt a kind of sweet relief about I'm not sure what.

This is my morality, or metaphysics, or me: passer-by of everything, even of my own soul, I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing just an abstract 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.

209.

To join in or collaborate or act with others is a metaphysically morbid impulse. The soul conferred on the individual shouldn't be lent out to its relations with others. The divine fact of existing shouldn't be surrendered to the satanic fact of coexisting.

When I act with others, there's at least one thing I lose acting alone.

When I participate, although it seems that I'm expanding, I'm limiting myself. To associate is to die. 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.

Children, who want at all costs to have their way, are closest to God, for they want to exist.

As adults our life is reduced to giving alms to others and receiving them in return. We squander our personalities in orgies of coexistence.

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 stars.

To explain is to disbelieve. Every philosophy is a diplomacy dressed up as eternity..... Like diplomacy, it has no real substance, existing not in its own right but completely and utterly on behalf of some objective.

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.

To write is to objectify dreams, to create an outer world as a material reward [?] of our nature as creators. 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?

210.

AESTHETICS OF D DISCOURAGEMENT.

To publish the socialization of one's self. A vile necessity! But still not a real act act, since it's the publisher who makes money, the printer who produces. It at least has the merit of being incoherent.

When a man reaches the age of lucidity, one of his main concerns is to actively and thoughtfully shape himself into the image and likeness of his ideal. Since inertia is the ideal that best embodies the logic of our soul's aristocratic attitude vis-a-vis vis-a-vis the the bustle and clamour of the modern world, our Ideal should be the Inert, the Inactive. Futile? Perhaps. But this will only trouble those who feel attracted to futility. bustle and clamour of the modern world, our Ideal should be the Inert, the Inactive. Futile? Perhaps. But this will only trouble those who feel attracted to futility.

211.

Enthusiasm is a vulgarity.

To give expression to enthusiasm is, above all else, to violate the rights of our insincerity.

We never know when we're sincere. Perhaps we never are. And even if we're sincere about something today, tomorrow we may be sincere about its complete opposite.

I myself have never had convictions. I've always had impressions. I could never hate a land in which I'd seen a scandalous sunset.

We externalize impressions not so much because we have them but to convince ourselves that we do.

212.

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.

213.