Since I never talk to children, I believe in their artistic instinct... You know, even now as I'm talking I'm trying to fathom the true meaning of the things you've been telling me. Do you forgive me?

= Not entirely... We should never plumb the feelings that other people pretend to have. They're always too intimate... Don't think it doesn't hurt me to share these intimate secrets, all of which are false but which represent true tatters of my pathetic soul... The most pitiful thing about us, believe me, is what we really aren't, and our worst tragedies take place in the idea we have of ourselves.

That's so true... Why say it? You've hurt me. Why ruin the constant unreality of our conversation? This way it almost becomes a plausible interchange at a table set for tea, between a beautiful woman and a dreamer of sensations.

= You're right... Now it's my turn to ask forgiveness... But I was distracted and really didn't notice that I'd said something that makes sense... Let's change the subject... How late it always is!... Don't get upset again the sentence I just said, after all, is complete nonsense...

Don't apologize, and don't pay any attention to what we're talking about... Every good conversation should be a two-way monologue... We should ultimately be unable to tell whether we really talked with someone or simply imagined the conversation... The best and profoundest conversations, and the least morally instructive ones, are those that novelists have between two characters from one of their books. For example...

= For heaven's sake! Don't tell me you were going to cite an example! That's only done in grammars; perhaps you've forgotten that we don't even read them.

Did you ever read a grammar?

= Never. I've always despised knowing the correct way to say something... All I ever liked in grammar books were the exceptions and pleonasms... To dodge the rules and say useless things sums up the essentially modern attitude. Did I say that correctly?...

Absolutely... What's especially irritating in grammars (have you noticed how exquisitely impossible it is for us to be talking about this?) the most irritating part of grammars is the chapter on verbs, since these are what give meaning to sentences... An honest sentence should always have any number of possible meanings... Verbs!... A friend of mine who committed suicide every time I have a longish conversation I suicide a friend was going to dedicate his life to destroying verbs...

= Why did he commit suicide?

Wait, I still don't know... He wanted to discover and develop a method for surreptitiously not completing sentences. He used to say that he was searching for the microbe of meaning... He committed suicide yes, of course because one day he realized what a tremendous responsibility he'd assumed... The enormity of the problem made him go nuts... A revolver and...

= No, that's preposterous... Don't you see that it could never be a revolver? A man like that never shoots himself in the head... You understand very little about the friends you've never had... That's a serious defect, you know... My best girlfriend, a ravishing young man I invented...

Do you get along?

= As best we can... But this girl, you can't imagine.....

The two figures sitting at the table set for tea surely didn't have this conversation. But they were so well groomed and dressed that it seemed a pity for them not to talk this way... That's why I wrote this conversation for them to have had... Their gestures, mannerisms, playful glances and smiles those short interludes in the conversation when we stop feeling our own existence clearly expressed what I faithfully pretend to be reporting... After they go their separate ways, each marrying someone else (since they think too much alike to marry each other), if one day they happen to look at these pages, I think they will recognize what they never said and will be grateful to me for so accurately interpreting not only what they really are but also what they never wished to be nor ever knew they were...

If they read me, may they believe that this was what they really said. In the words that they apparently heard from each other there were so many things missing, such as the fragrance in the air, the tea's aroma, the meaning of the corsage of things missing, such as the fragrance in the air, the tea's aroma, the meaning of the corsage of which she wore on her chest... Although never stated, these things formed part of the conversation... All these things were there, and so my task isn't really to write literature but history. I reconstruct, completing what's missing, and this will serve as my excuse to them for having eavesdropped on what they didn't say and wouldn't have wanted to say.* which she wore on her chest... Although never stated, these things formed part of the conversation... All these things were there, and so my task isn't really to write literature but history. I reconstruct, completing what's missing, and this will serve as my excuse to them for having eavesdropped on what they didn't say and wouldn't have wanted to say.*

371.

IN P PRAISE OF A ABSURDITY.

I speak in earnest and with sadness. This is not a matter for joy, because the joys of dreaming are contradictory and gloomy, and must be enjoyed in a special, mysterious way.

Sometimes I inwardly, objectively observe delightful and absurd things which I can't even imagine seeing, for they're illogical to our eyesight bridges that connect nothing to nothing, roads without beginning or end, upside-down landscapes..... the absurd, the illogical, the contradictory, everything that detaches and removes us from reality and its vast entourage of practical thoughts, human feelings, and all notions of useful and profitable action. Absurdity prevents the state of spirit in which dreaming is a sweet fury from ever becoming too tedious.

And I have a peculiar, mysterious way of envisioning these absurdities. In some way I can't explain, I'm able to see these things that are inconceivable for any kind of human vision.

372.

I N N P PRAISE OF A ABSURDITY.

Let's absurdify life, from east to west.

373.

Life is an experimental journey that we make involuntarily. It is a journey of the mind through matter, and since it is the mind that journeys, that is where we live. And so there are contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely and more turbulently than those who live externally. The end result is what counts. What was felt is what was lived. A dream can tire us out as much as physical labour. We never live as hard as when we've thought a great deal.

The man in the corner of the dance-hall dances with all the dancers. He sees everything, and because he sees everything, he lives everything. Since everything is ultimately our own sensation, to have actual contact with a body counts for no more than seeing it or just remembering it. I dance, therefore, when I see someone dance. I second the English poet* who, lying in the grass and watching three mowers in the distance, said: 'A fourth man is mowing, and that fourth am I.'

All of this, told the way I feel it, has to do with the great weariness that came over me today, suddenly and for no apparent reason. I'm not only weary, but embittered; and the bitterness is also a mystery. I feel so anguished I'm on the verge of tears not the kind that are wept but the kind that stay inside: tears caused by a sickness of the soul, not by a sensible pain.

How much I've lived without having lived! How much I've thought without having thought! I'm exhausted from worlds of static violence, from adventures I've experienced without moving a muscle. I'm surfeited with what I've never had and never will, jaded by gods that so far don't exist. I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided. My muscles are sore from all the effort I have never even thought of making.

Dull, silent, futile... The lofty sky is of a flawed, dead summer. I look at it as if it weren't there. I sleep what I think, I'm lying down as I walk. I suffer without feeling anything. My enormous nostalgia is for nothing, is nothing, like the lofty sky that I don't see, and that I'm staring at impersonally.

374.

In the day's limpid perfection, the sun-filled air nevertheless stagnates. It's not the present pressure of the future storm, not a malaise in our involuntary bodies, not a vague haziness in the truly blue sky. It's the torpor that the thought of not working makes us feel, a feather tickling our dozing face. It's sultry but it's summer. The countryside appeals even to those who don't like it.

If I were someone else, this would no doubt be a happy day for me, because I'd feel it without thinking about it. I would look forward to finishing my normal day's work which to me is monotonously abnormal day after day and then take the tram to Benfica* with some friends. We would eat dinner right as the sun was setting, in one of the garden restaurants. Our happiness in that moment would be part of the landscape, and recognized as such by all who saw us.

But since I am me, I merely take a little pleasure in the little that it is to imagine myself as that someone else. Yes, soon he-I, under a tree or bower, will eat twice what I can eat, drink twice what I dare drink, and laugh twice what I can conceive of laughing. Soon he, now I. Yes, for a moment I was someone else: in someone else I saw and lived this human and humble joy of existing as an animal in shirtsleeves. Great day that made me dream all this! The sky is sublimely blue, like my fleeting dream of being a hale and hearty sales representative on a sort of holiday when the day's work is over.

375.

The countryside is always where we aren't. There, and there alone, do real trees and real shade exist.

Life is the hesitation between an exclamation and a question. Doubt is resolved by a period.

Miracles are God's laziness or rather, the laziness we ascribe to God when we invent miracles.

The Gods are the incarnation of what we can never be.

The weariness of all hypotheses...

376.

The slight inebriation of a mild fever, with its soft and penetrating discomfort that's cold in our aching bones and warm in our eyes, under our throbbing temples I adore that discomfort like a slave his beloved oppressor. It puts me in that state of feeble, quivering passivity in which I glimpse visions, turn corners of ideas and get lost among sudden and unexpected feelings.

Thinking, feeling and wanting become a single confused thing. Beliefs, sensations, imagined things and real things get all mixed up, like the contents of various drawers overturned on to the floor.

377.

There's a kind of sad happiness in the feeling of convalescence, especially if the sickness that preceded it affected the nerves.* There's an autumn in our emotions and thoughts, or rather, a beginning of spring that except for the absence of falling leaves seems, in the air and in the sky, like autumn.

Our fatigue is pleasant, and the pleasantness hurts just a little. We feel a bit removed from life, though still in it, as if on the balcony of life's house. We become pensive without actually thinking; we feel without any definable emotion. Our will grows calm, for we have no need of it.

That's when certain memories, certain hopes and certain vague desires slowly climb the slope of consciousness, like indistinct wayfarers seen from the top of a mountain. Memories of futile things: hopes whose non-fulfilment didn't particularly matter; desires that weren't violent in nature or in their manifestation, that weren't ever able to want really to be.

When the day is in keeping with these sensations today, for example, which is rather cloudy even though it's summer, with a slight wind that feels almost chilly for not being warm , then the particular mood in which we think, feel and live these impressions is accentuated. Not that the memories, hopes and desires we've had become any clearer. But we feel them more, and their indefinite sum total weighs a little, absurdly, on the heart.

In this moment I feel strangely far away. I'm on the balcony of life, yes, but not exactly of this life. I'm above life, looking down on it. It lies before me, descending in a varied landscape of dips and terraces towards the smoke from the white houses of the villages in the valley. If I close my eyes, I keep seeing, because I'm not really seeing. If I open them I see no more, because I wasn't really seeing in the first place. I'm nothing but a vague nostalgia, not for the past nor for the future but for the present anonymous, unending and unintelligible.

378.

The classifiers of things, by which I mean those scientists whose science is merely to classify, generally don't realize that what's classifiable is infinite and thus cannot be classified. But what really astounds me is that they don't realize there are things hidden in the cracks of knowledge things of the soul and of consciousness that can also be classified.

Perhaps because I think too much or dream too much, or perhaps for some other reason, I don't distinguish between the reality that exists and the world of dreams, which is the reality that doesn't exist. And so in my ruminations about the sky and the earth, I insert things that aren't lit up by the sun or trod on by feet fluid wonders of my imagination.

I gild myself with sunsets I invent, but what I invent is alive in my invention. I rejoice in imaginary breezes, but the imaginary lives while it's being imagined. I have a soul, according to various hypotheses, and each of these hypotheses has its own soul, which it gives to me.

The only problem is that of reality, as insoluble as it is alive. What do I know about the difference between a tree and a dream? I can touch the tree; I know that I have the dream. What is all this really?

What is all this? It's that I, alone in the deserted office, can imaginatively live without abstaining from my intelligence. My thinking isn't interrupted by the vacant desks and the shipping division that's empty except for brown paper and balls of string. I'm not at my stool but leaning back in Moreira's comfortable armchair, enjoying a premature promotion. Perhaps it's the influence of my surroundings that has anointed me with distraction. These dog days make me tired; I sleep without sleeping, for lack of energy. And that's why I think this way.

379.

DOLOROUS I INTERLUDE.

I'm tired of the street, but no, I'm not tired of it the street is all of life. There's the tavern opposite, which I can see if I look over my right shoulder, and there are the piled-up crates, which I can see by looking over my left shoulder; and in the middle, which I can only see if I turn around completely, there's the steady sound of the shoemaker's hammer, at the entrance to the offices of the Africa Company. I don't know what's on the upper floors. On the third floor there's a rooming house which is said to be immoral, but so it is with everything, life.

Tired of the street? Only thinking makes me tired. When I look at the street, or feel it, then I don't think: I do my work with great inner repose, ensconced in my corner, bookkeepingly nobody. I have no soul, nobody here does it's all just work in this large office. Where millionaires live the good life, always in some foreign country or other, there is likewise work, and likewise no soul. And all that will remain is one or another poet. If only a phrase of mine could remain, just one thing I've written that would make people say 'Well done!', like the numbers I register, copying them in the book of my entire life.

I think that I shall always be an assistant bookkeeper in a fabric warehouse. I hope, with absolute sincerity, never to be promoted to head bookkeeper.

380.

For a long time I'm not sure if for days or for months I haven't recorded any impressions; I don't think, therefore I don't exist. I've forgotten who I am. I'm unable to write because I'm unable to be. Through an oblique slumber, I've been someone else. To realize I don't remember myself means that I've woken up.

I fainted for a spell, cut off from my life. I return to myself without remembering what I've been, and the memory of what I used to be suffers from having been interrupted. I have a confused impression of a mysterious interlude; part of my memory is vainly struggling to find the other part. I can't pull myself together. If I've lived during this time, I forgot to be aware of it.

It's not that this first day that really feels like autumn the first uncomfortably cool one to dress the dead summer with less light gives me, through a kind of distracted clarity, a sensation of dead purpose and false desire. It's not that in this interlude of lost things there's a pale trace of useless memory. It's more painful than that. It's a tedium of trying to remember what can't be recalled, an anguish over what my consciousness has lost among reeds and seaweed, on the seashore of who knows what.

I know that the clear, still day has a veritable sky whose blue is less vivid than a deep blue. I know that the sun, slightly less golden than it was, bathes the walls and windows with its humid glimmers. I know that, although there is no wind, nor a breeze to recall and negate it, a wakeful coolness dozes in the hazy city. I know all this, without thinking or wanting to, and I'm sleepy only because I remember to be sleepy, nostalgic only because I'm disquieted.

I remotely and futilely convalesce from the sickness I never had. Wide awake, I prepare myself for what I don't dare. What sleepiness kept me from sleeping? What endearment refused to speak to me? How good to be someone else taking in a deep, cold breath of vigorous spring! How good much better than life to be able at least to imagine it, while in the distance, in the image I remember, the blue-green reeds bow along the riverside where there's not a hint of wind!

How often, remembering who I wasn't, I think of myself young and forget all the rest! The landscapes that existed but that I never saw were different then, and the landscapes that didn't exist but that I did see were new to me. Why do I care? I ended up in interstices, led on by chance, and now, as the sun itself seems to radiate coolness, the dark reeds by the river sleep coldly in the sunset that I see but do not have.

381.

No one has yet defined tedium in a language comprehensible to those who have never experienced it. What some people call tedium is merely boredom; others use the term to mean a nagging discomfort; still others consider tedium to be weariness. But while tedium includes weariness, discomfort and boredom, it doesn't resemble them any more than water resembles the hydrogen and oxygen of which it is composed.

If some have a limited and incomplete notion of tedium, a few people give it a meaning that in a certain way transcends it as when they use the word to signify intellectual and visceral dissatisfaction with the world's diversity and uncertainty. What makes us yawn, which we call boredom, what makes us fidget and is known as discomfort, and what makes us practically immobile, namely weariness none of these things is tedium; but neither is tedium the profound sense of life's emptiness that causes frustrated ambition to surface, disappointed longings to rise up, and the seed to be planted in the soul of the future mystic or saint.

Tedium, yes, is boredom with the world, the nagging discomfort of living, the weariness of having lived; tedium is indeed the carnal sensation of the endless emptiness of things. But tedium, even more than all that, is a boredom with other worlds, whether real or imaginary; the discomfort of having to keep living, albeit as someone else, in some other way, in some other world; a weariness not only of yesterday and today but also of tomorrow and of eternity, if such exists, or of nothingness, if that's what eternity is. It's not only the emptiness of things and living beings that troubles the soul afflicted by tedium, it's also the emptiness of something besides things and beings the emptiness of the very soul that feels this vacuum, that feels itself to be this vacuum, and that within this vacuum is nauseated and repelled by its own self.

Tedium is the physical sensation of chaos, a chaos that is everything. The bored, the uncomfortable and the weary feel like prisoners in a narrow cell. Those who abhor the narrowness of life itself feel shackled inside a large cell. But those who suffer tedium feel imprisoned in the worthless freedom of an infinite cell. The walls of the narrow cell may collapse and bury those who are bored, uncomfortable or tired. The shackles may fall and allow the man who abhors life's puniness to escape, or they may cause him pain as he struggles in vain to remove them and, through the feeling of that pain, revive him without his old abhorrence. But the walls of the infinite cell cannot crumble and bury us, because they don't exist; nor can we be revived by the pain of shackles no one has put on us.

This is what I feel before the placid beauty of this eternally dying afternoon. I look at the lofty, clear sky where I see fuzzy, pinkish shapes like the shadows of clouds, an impalpable soft down of a winged and far-away life. I look below me at the river, whose ever-so-slightly shimmering water is of a blue that seems to mirror a deeper sky. I raise my eyes back to the sky, where the coloured fuzziness that shredlessly unravels in the invisible air is now tinged by a frigid shade of dull white, as if something in the higher, more rarefied sphere of things had its own material tedium, an impossibility of being what it is, an imponderable body of anguish and desolation.

But what's in the lofty air besides the lofty air, which is nothing? What's in the sky besides a colour that's not its own? What's in these tatters that aren't even of clouds (and whose very existence I doubt) besides a few glimmers of materially arriving rays from an already resigned sun? What's in all this besides myself? Ah, but that, and that alone, is tedium. In all of this the sky, the earth, the world there is nothing at all but me!

382.

I've reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.

383.

The outer world exists like an actor on stage: it's there but is something else.

384.

...and everything is an incurable sickness.

The indolence of feeling, the frustration of never knowing how to do anything, the inability to take action.....

385.

Fog or smoke? Was it rising from the ground or descending from the sky? Impossible to say: it seemed more like a disease of the air than an emanation or something descended. Sometimes it seemed more like an ailment of the eyes than a reality of nature.

Whatever it was, the entire landscape was cloaked by a hazy uneasiness made of forgetfulness and attenuation. It was as if the silence of the delinquent sun had taken shape in an imperfect body, or as if a general intuition that something was going to happen had caused the visible world to disguise itself.

It was hard to tell if the sky was filled with clouds or fog. It was all a torpid haze that was coloured here and there, a greyness with just a hint of yellow, except where it had dissolved into a false pink or had bluely stagnated, though this blue may have been the sky showing through rather than another blue overlaying it.