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.

I have no social or political sentiments, and yet there is a way in which I'm highly nationalistic. My nation is the Portuguese language. It wouldn't trouble me at all if Portugal were invaded or occupied, as long as I was left in peace. 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 i for for y y, as the spit that directly disgusts me, independent of who spat it.

Yes, because spelling is also a person. The word is complete when seen and heard. And the pageantry of Graeco-Roman transliteration dresses it for me in its authentic royal robe, making it a lady and queen.

260.

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.

Abstract things are hard to understand, because they don't easily command the reader's attention, so I'll use a simple example to make my abstractions concrete. Let's suppose that, for some reason or other (which might be that I'm tired of keeping the books or bored because I have nothing to do), I'm overwhelmed by a vague sadness about life, an inner anxiety that makes me nervous and uneasy. If I try to translate this emotion with close-fitting words, then the closer the fit, the more they'll represent my own personal feeling, and so the less they'll communicate it to others. And if there is no communicating it to others, it would be wiser and simpler to feel it without writing it.

But let's suppose that I want to communicate it to others to make it into art, that is, since art is the communication to others of the identity we feel with them, without which there would be no communication and no need for it. I search for the ordinary human emotion that will have the colouring, spirit and shape of the emotion I'm feeling right now for the inhuman, personal reason of being a weary bookkeeper or a bored Lisboan. And I conclude that the ordinary emotion which in ordinary souls has the same characteristics as my emotion is nostalgia for one's lost childhood.

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.

I've lied? No, I've understood. That lying, except for the childish and spontaneous kind that comes from wanting to be dreaming, is merely the recognition of other people's real existence and of the need to conform that existence to our own, which cannot be conformed to theirs. Lying is simply the soul's ideal language. Just as we make use of words, which are sounds articulated in an absurd way, to translate into real language the most private and subtle shifts of our thoughts and emotions (which words on their own would never be able to translate), so we make use of lies and fiction to promote understanding among ourselves, something that the truth personal and incommunicable could never accomplish.

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. The first begins to lie in its very structure; the second in its very intention. One purports to give us the truth through lines that keep strict metres, thus lying against the nature of speech; the other purports to give us the truth by means of a reality that we all know never existed.

To feign is to love. Whenever I see a pretty smile or a meaningful gaze, no matter whom the smile or gaze belongs to, I always plumb to the soul of the smiling or gazing face to discover what politician wants to buy our vote or what prostitute wants us to buy her. But the politician that buys us loved at least the act of buying us, even as the prostitute loved being bought by us. Like it or not, we cannot escape universal brotherhood. We all love each other, and the lie is the kiss we exchange.

261.

In me all affections take place on the surface, but sincerely. I've always been an actor, and in earnest. Whenever I've loved, I've pretended to love, pretending it even to myself.

262.

Today I was struck by an absurd but valid sensation. I realized, in an inner flash, that I'm no one. Absolutely no one. In that flash, what I'd supposed was a city proved to be a barren plain, and the sinister light that showed me myself revealed no sky above. Before the world existed, I was deprived of the power to be. If I was reincarnated, it was without myself, without my I.

I'm the suburbs of a non-existent town, the long-winded commentary on a book never written. I'm no one, no one at all. I don't know how to feel, how to think, how to want. I'm the character of an unwritten novel, wafting in the air, dispersed without ever having been, among the dreams of someone who didn't know how to complete me.

I always think, I always feel, but there's no logic in my thought, no emotions in my emotion. I'm falling from the trapdoor on high through all of infinite space in an aimless, infinitudinous,* empty descent. My soul is a black whirlpool, a vast vertigo circling a void, the racing of an infinite ocean around a hole in nothing. And in these waters which are more a churning than actual waters float the images of all I've seen and heard in the world houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and syllables of voices all moving in a sinister and bottomless swirl.

And amid all this confusion I, what's truly I, am the centre that exists only in the geometry of the abyss: I'm the nothing around which everything spins, existing only so that it can spin, being a centre only because every circle has one. I, what's truly I, am a well without walls but with the walls' viscosity, the centre of everything with nothing around it.

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.

If only I knew how to think! If only I knew how to feel!

My mother died too soon for me to ever know her...

263.

As prone as I am to tedium, it's odd that until now I've never seriously thought about just what it is. Today my soul is in that state of limbo where neither life nor anything else really appeals, and I've decided, since I've never done it before, to analyse tedium through my impressionistic thoughts, even though whatever analysis I dream up will naturally be somewhat factitious.

I don't know if tedium is merely the waking equivalent of a vagrant's drowsy stupor, or if it is something more noble. In my own experience, tedium occurs frequently but unpredictably, without following a set pattern. I can go an entire listless Sunday without tedium, or I can suddenly experience it, like a cloud overhead, in the middle of concentrated labour. As far as I can tell, it isn't related to my state of health (or lack thereof), nor does it result from causes residing in my visible, tangible self.

To say that it's a metaphysical anxiety in disguise, that it's an acute disillusion incognito, that it's a voiceless poetry of the bored soul sitting at the window which looks out on to life to say this or something similar can colour tedium, like a child who colours over the outlines of a figure and effaces them, but it's no more to me than a din of words echoing in the cellar of the mind.

Tedium... To think without thinking, but with the weariness of thinking; to feel without feeling, but with the anxiety of feeling; to shun without shunning, but with the disgust that makes one shun all of this is in tedium but is not tedium itself, being at best a paraphrase or translation of it. In terms of our immediate sensation, it's as if the drawbridge had been raised over the moat of the soul's castle, such that we can only gaze at the lands around the castle, without ever being able to set foot on them. There's something in us that isolates us from ourselves, and the separating element is as stagnant as we are, a ditch of filthy water around our self-alienation.

Tedium... To suffer without suffering, to want without desire, to think without reason... It's like being possessed by a negative demon, like being bewitched by nothing at all. Wizards and witches, by making images of us and subjecting them to torments, can supposedly cause those torments to be reflected in us through an astral transference. Transposing this image, I would say that my tedium is like the fiendish reflection of an elfin demon's sorceries, applied not to my image but to its shadow. It's on my internal shadow, on the outside of my inner soul, that papers are pasted or needles are poked. I'm like the man that sold his shadow,* or, rather, like the shadow that was sold.

Tedium... I work hard. I fulfil what the moralists of action would say is my social duty. I fulfil that duty, or fate, without too much effort and without gross incompetence. But sometimes right in the middle of my work, or in the middle of the rest which, according to the same moralists, I deserve and ought to enjoy, my soul overflows with a bitter inertia, and I'm tired, not of working or of resting, but of me.

Why of me, if I wasn't thinking about myself? Of what other thing, if I wasn't thinking about anything? The mystery of the universe that descends on my bookkeeping or on my repose? The universal sorrow of living which is suddenly particularized in my soul-turned-medium? Why so ennoble someone whose identity isn't even certain? It's a sensation of emptiness, a hunger without appetite, as noble as the sensations that come to our physical brain and stomach when we smoke too much or suffer from indigestion.

Tedium... Perhaps, deep down, it is the soul's dissatisfaction because we didn't give it a belief, the disappointment of the sad child (who we are on the inside) because we didn't buy it the divine toy. Perhaps it is the insecurity of one who needs a guiding hand and who doesn't feel, on the black path of profound sensation, anything more than the soundless night of not being able to think, the empty road of not being able to feel...

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.

264.

I know, by analogy, what it means to overeat. I know it through my sensations, not my stomach. There are days when they've eaten too much, and my body gets heavy, my gestures are clumsy, and I don't feel like moving a muscle.

On these occasions, like a thorn in the side, a vestige of my vanished imagination nearly always emerges from out of my undisturbed torpor. And I make plans founded on ignorance, I raise edifices based on hypotheses, and I'm dazzled by what's bound to never happen.

At these strange times, my moral as well as material life are mere appendages to who I am. I forget not only about the notion of duty but also about the idea of being, and I feel physically tired of the whole universe. I sleep what I know and what I dream with an equal intensity that makes my eyes sore. Yes, at these times I know more about myself than I've ever known, and I'm every snooze of every beggar lying under the trees on the estate of Nobody.

265.

The idea of travelling seduces me vicariously, as if it were the perfect idea for seducing someone I'm not. All the world's vast panorama traverses my alert imagination like a colourful tedium; I trace a desire as one who's tired of making gestures, and the anticipated weariness of potential landscapes scourges the flower of my drooping heart like a harsh wind.

And as with journeys, so with books, and as with books, so with everything... I dream of an erudite life in the quiet company of the ancients and the moderns, a life in which I would renew my emotions via the emotions of others, and fill myself with contradictory thoughts based on the contradiction between the meditators and those who almost thought (and who are the majority of writers). But the very idea of reading vanishes as soon as I pick up a book from the table, the physical act of reading abolishing all desire to read. In the same way, the idea of travelling withers if I happen to go near a platform or port of departure. And I return to the two worthless things that I (likewise worthless) am certain of: my daily life as an inconspicuous passer-by, and the waking insomnia of my dreams.

And as with books, so with everything... As soon as something occurs to me that might interrupt the silent procession of my days, I lift my eyes with heavy protest towards the sylph who belongs to me and who, poor thing, might have been a siren had she only learned to sing.

266.

When I first came to Lisbon I used to hear, from the apartment above ours, the sound of scales played on a piano, the monotonous practising of a girl I never actually saw. Today I realize that in the cellar of my soul, by some mysterious process of infiltration, those scales persist, audible if the door below is opened, played over and over by the girl who is now someone else, a grown woman, or dead and enclosed in a white place where verdant cypresses blackly wave.

I'm no longer the child I was back then, but the sound of the playing is the same in my memory as it was in reality, so that whenever it gets up from where it pretends to be sleeping, it has the same slow finger work, the same rhythmic monotony. When I feel or think about it, I'm overwhelmed by a vague and anxious sadness that's my own.

I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost. It's not the concrete passing of my own days but the abstract flight of time that torments my physical brain with the relentless repetition of the piano scales from upstairs, terribly anonymous and far away. It's the huge mystery of nothing lasting which incessantly hammers things that aren't really music, just nostalgia, in the absurd depths of my memory.

I summon up, insensibly, the vision of the sitting room that I never saw, where the pupil I never met is still playing today, finger by careful finger, the forever identical scales of what's already dead. I see, I see more and more, I reconstruct by seeing. And the entire household of the upstairs apartment, for which today I feel a nostalgia I didn't feel yesterday, is fictitiously constructed by my uncertain contemplation.

I suspect, however, that all of this is vicarious, that the nostalgia I feel isn't truly mine or truly abstract but is the emotion intercepted from an unidentified third party, for whom these emotions, which in me are literary, are as Vieira* would say literal. Conjectured feelings are what grieve and torment me, and the nostalgia that makes my eyes well with tears is conceived and felt through imagination and projection.

And with a relentlessness that comes from the world's depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a piano student keep playing over and over, up and down the physical backbone of my memory. It's the old streets with other people, the same streets that today are different; it's dead people speaking to me through the transparency of their absence; it's remorse for what I did or didn't do; it's the rippling of streams in the night, noises from below in the quiet building.

I feel like screaming inside my head. I want to stop, to break, to smash this impossible phonograph record that keeps playing inside me, where it doesn't belong, an intangible torturer. I want my soul, a vehicle taken over by others, to let me off and go on without me. I'm going crazy from having to hear. And in the end it is I in my odiously impressionable brain, in my thin skin, in my hypersensitive nerves who am the keys played in scales, O horrible and personal piano of our memory.

And always, always, as if in a part of my brain that had become autonomous, the scales play, play, play, below me and above me, in the first building I lived in when I came to Lisbon.

267.

It's the last death of Captain Nemo. Soon I too will die.

All of my childhood was deprived, in that moment, of any possibility of enduring.

268.

Smell is a strange way of seeing. It evokes sentimental scenes, sketched all of a sudden by the subconscious. I've often experienced this. I'm walking down a street. I see nothing, or rather, I look all around and see the way everyone sees. I know I'm walking down a street and don't know that it exists with two sides comprised of variously shaped buildings made by human hands. I'm walking down a street. The smell of bread from a bakery nauseates me with its sweetness, and my childhood rises up from a distant neighbourhood, and another bakery emerges from that fairyland which is everything we ever had that has died. I'm walking down a street. Suddenly I smell the fruit on the slanted rack of the small grocery, and my short life in the country I can't say from when or where has trees in the background and peace in what can only be my childhood heart. I'm walking down a street. I'm unexpectedly thrown off balance by the smell of crates from the crate-maker's: my dear Cesario!* You appear before me and at last I'm happy, for I've returned by way of memory to the only truth, which is literature.

269.

One of my life's greatest tragedies is to have already read The Pickwick Papers The Pickwick Papers. (I can't go back and read them for the first time.)

270.

Art frees us, illusorily, from the squalor of being. While feeling the wrongs and sufferings endured by Hamlet, prince of Denmark, we don't feel our own, which are vile because they're ours and vile because they're vile.

Love, sleep, drugs and intoxicants are elementary forms of art, or rather, of producing the same effect as art. But love, sleep and drugs all have their disillusion. Love wearies or disappoints. We wake up from sleep, and while sleeping we haven't lived. And we pay for drugs with the ruin of the very body they served to stimulate. But in art there is no disillusion, since illusion is accepted from the start. There's no waking up from art, because we dream but don't sleep in it. Nor do we pay a tax or penalty for having enjoyed art.

Since the pleasure we get from art is in a sense not our own, we don't have to pay for it or regret it later.

By art I mean everything that delights us without being ours the trail left by what has passed, a smile given to someone else, a sunset, a poem, the objective universe.

To possess is to lose. To feel without possessing is to preserve and keep, for it is to extract from things their essence.

271.

It's not love but love's outskirts that are worth knowing...

The repression of love sheds much more light on its nature than does the actual experience of it. Virginity can be a key to profound understanding. Action has its rewards but brings confusion. To possess is to be possessed, and therefore to lose oneself. Only the idea can fathom reality without getting ruined.

272.

Christ is a form of emotion.

In the Pantheon there's room for all the gods that mutually exclude each other; all have their throne and their sovereignty. Each one can be everything, for here there are no limits, not even logical ones, and the mingling of various immortals allows us to enjoy the coexistence of diverse infinities and assorted eternities.

273.

Nothing is ever sure in history. There are periods of order when everything is contemptible and periods of disorder in which all is lofty. Decadent eras abound in mental vitality, mighty eras in intellectual weakness. Everything mixes and criss-crosses, and truth exists only in so far as it is presumed.

So many noble ideas fallen into the dung heap, so many heartfelt desires lost in the torrent!

Gods and men they're all the same to me in the rampant confusion of unpredictable fate. They march through my dreams in this anonymous fourth-floor room, and they're no more to me than they were to those who believed in them. Idols of leery, wide-eyed Africans, animal deities of hinterland savages, the Egyptians' personified symbols, luminous Greek divinities, stiff Roman gods, Mithras lord of the Sun and of emotion, Jesus lord of consequences and charity, various versions of the same Christ, new holy gods of new towns all of them make up the funeral march (be it a pilgrimage or burial) of error and illusion. They all march, and behind them march the dreams that are just empty shadows cast on the ground but that the worst dreamers suppose are firmly planted there: pathetic concepts without body or soul Liberty, Humanity, Happiness, a Better Future, Social Science moving forward in the solitude of darkness like leaves dragged along by the train of a royal robe stolen by beggars.

274.

Revolutionaries make a crass and grievous error when they distinguish between the bourgeoisie and the masses, the nobility and the common people, the ruling and the ruled. The only distinction is between those who adapt and those who don't; the rest is literature, and bad literature. The beggar, if he adapts, can become king tomorrow, though in doing so he'll forfeit the virtue of being a beggar. He'll have crossed the border, losing his nationality.

These thoughts console me in this cramped office, whose grimy windows overlook a joyless street. These thoughts console me, and for company I have my fellow creators of the world's consciousness the reckless playwright William Shakespeare, John Milton the schoolteacher, Dante Alighieri the tramp,..... and even, if the reference be permitted, Jesus Christ, who was nothing in the world, his very existence being doubted by history. Quite a different class of men is formed by the likes of the state councillor Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the senator Victor Hugo, the chief of state Lenin, the chief of state Mussolini .....

Those of us in the shade, among the delivery boys and the barbers, constitute humanity .....

On the one hand there are the kings with their prestige, the emperors with their glory, the geniuses with their aura, the saints with their haloes, the leaders with their supremacy, the prostitutes, the prophets and the rich... On the other hand there's us the delivery boy on the corner, the reckless playwright William Shakespeare, the barber with his jokes, John Milton the schoolteacher, the shop assistant, Dante Alighieri the tramp, those whom death forgets or consecrates and whom life forgot without ever consecrating.

275.

Government of the world begins in us. It's not the sincere who govern the world, but neither is it the insincere; it's those who create in themselves a real sincerity by artificial and automatic means. This sincerity is what makes them strong, and it outshines the less false sincerity of others. To be adept at deluding oneself is the first prerequisite for a statesman. Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.

276.

An opinion is a vulgarity, even when it's not sincere.

Every instance of sincerity is an intolerance. There are no sincere liberal minds. There are, for that matter, no liberal minds.

277.