Nothing was definite, not even the indefinite. That's why it was only natural to call the fog smoke, since it didn't seem like fog, or to ask whether it was fog or smoke, it being impossible to determine. Even the air's temperature contributed to the doubt. It wasn't hot or cold or in between, but seemed to be composed of elements that had nothing to do with heat. Indeed, the fog that felt cool to the eyes seemed hot to the touch, as if sight and touch were two distinct modes of the same faculty of perception.

One couldn't even find, around the outlines of the trees or the corners of buildings, that blurring of contours and edges caused by true fog when it sets in, nor that slipping into view and out of view caused by real smoke. It was as if each thing projected its own vaguely diurnal shadow, in all directions, without a source of light to explain it as shadow, and without a specific place where it was projected to justify it as something visible.

Nor, in fact, was it visible: it was like something about to appear, equally throughout, as if it hesitated to be revealed.

And what feeling prevailed? The impossibility of having any feeling, the heart all broken to pieces in the mind, feelings all in a jumble, conscious existence in a stupor, and the heightening of some faculty akin to hearing but in the soul in order to apprehend a definitive, useless revelation that's always on the verge of appearing, like truth, and that always remains, like truth, the twin of what never appears.

Even the desire to sleep, remembered by the mind, has withered because mere yawning seems like too much of an effort. Even to stop seeing hurts the eyes. And in the soul's complete and colourless renunciation, only external, distant sounds constitute what's left of the impossible world.

Ah, another world, other things, another soul with which to feel them, another mind with which to know this soul! Anything, even tedium anything but this general blurring of the soul and things, this bluish, forlorn indefiniteness of everything!

386.

Together and apart we walked along the forest's sharply turning paths. Foreign to us, our steps were united, for they went in unison over the crackling softness of the yellow and half-green leaves that matted the ground's unevenness. But they also went separately, for we were two minds, with nothing in common except for the fact that what we weren't was treading in unison over the same resonant ground.

Autumn had already begun, and besides the leaves under our feet we could hear, in the wind's rough accompaniment, the constant falling of other leaves, or sounds of leaves, wherever we walked or had walked. There was no landscape but the forest, which veiled all others. But it was a good enough place for people like us, whose only life was to walk diversely and in unison over a moribund ground. I believe it was the close of day, the close of that day or any day, or perhaps all days, in an autumn that was all autumns, in the symbolic and true forest.

Not even we could say what homes, duties and loves we'd left behind. We were, in that moment, no more than wayfarers between what we had forgotten and what we didn't know, knights on foot defending an abandoned ideal. But that explained, along with the steady sound of trampled leaves and the forever rough sound of an unsteady wind, the reason for our departure, or for our return, since, not knowing what the path was, or why, we didn't know if we were coming or going. And always, all around us, the sound of leaves we couldn't see, falling we didn't know where, lulled the forest to sleep with sadness.

Although we paid no attention to each other, neither of us would have continued alone. We kept each other company with the drowsiness we both felt. The sound of our steps in unison helped each of us to think without the other, whereas our own solitary steps would have brought the other to mind. The forest was all false clearings, as if the forest itself were false, or were ending, but neither it nor the falseness was going to end. Our steps kept going in unison, and around the sound of the leaves we were trampling we heard a very soft sound of leaves falling in the forest that had become everything, in the forest that was the universe.

Who were we? Were we two, or two forms of one? We didn't know and we didn't ask. A hazy sun presumably existed, for it wasn't night in the forest. A vague aim presumably existed, for we were walking. Some world or other presumably existed, since a forest existed. But what it was or might be was foreign to us, two perpetual walkers treading in unison over dead leaves, anonymous and impossible listeners to falling leaves. Nothing else. A now harsh now gentle murmur of the inscrutable wind, a now loud now soft rustle of the unfallen leaves, a vestige, a doubt, a goal that had perished, an illusion that never was the forest, the two walkers, and I, I, unsure of which one I was, or if I was both, or neither, and without seeing it to the end I watched the tragedy of nothing ever having existed but the autumn and the forest, the always rough and unsteady wind, and the always fallen or falling leaves. And always, as if surely there were a sun and day out there, one could see clearly to nowhere in the clamorous silence of the forest.

387.

I suppose I'm what they call a decadent, one whose spirit is outwardly defined by those sad glimmers of artificial eccentricity that incarnate an anxious and artful soul in unusual words. Yes, I think that's what I am, and that I'm absurd. That's why, in the spirit of a classical writer, I try at least to place into an expressive mathematics the decorative sensations of my substituted soul. At a certain point in my written cogitation, I no longer know where the centre of my attention lies whether in the scattered sensations I attempt to describe like enigmatic tapestries, or in the words which absorb me as I try to describe the act of describing and which, absorbing me, distract me and cause me to see other things. Beset by lucid and free associations of ideas, images and words, I say what I imagine I'm feeling as much as what I'm really feeling, and I'm unable to distinguish between the suggestions of my soul and the fruits born of images that fell from my soul to the ground, nor do I know whether the sound of a discordant word or the rhythm of an incidental phrase might not be diverting me from the already hazy point, from the already stowed sensation, thereby absolving me from thinking and saying, like long voyages designed to distract us. And all of this, which even as I'm telling it should stir in me a sense of futility, failure and anguish, gives me only wings of gold. As soon as I start talking about images, even if it's to say they should be used sparingly, images are born in me; as soon as I stand up from myself to repudiate something I don't feel, I start feeling that very thing, and even my repudiation becomes a feeling trimmed with embroidery; as soon as I want to abandon myself to the wind, having lost faith in my efforts, a placid phrase or a sober, concrete adjective suddenly, like sunlight, makes me clearly see the dormantly written page before me, and the letters drawn in my ink are an absurd map of magic signs. And I lay myself aside like my pen, and wrap myself in the flowing cape of obliviously leaning back, far away, intermediate and submissive, doomed like a castaway drowning within sight of marvellous islands, engulfed by the same purplish seas that he had so truly dreamed in distant beds.

388.

Let's make the receptivity of our senses purely literary, and let's convert our emotions, when they stoop to becoming apparent, into visible matter that can be sculpted into statues with fluid, glowing words.

389.

'Creator of indifferences' is the motto I want for my spirit today. I'd like my life's activity to consist, above all, in educating others to feel more and more for themselves, and less and less according to the dynamic law of collectiveness. To educate people in that spiritual antisepsis which precludes contamination by commonness and vulgarity is the loftiest destiny I can imagine for the pedagogue of inner discipline that I aspire to be. If all who read me would learn slowly, of course, as the subject matter requires to be completely insensitive to other people's opinions and even their glances, that would be enough of a garland to make up for my life's scholastic stagnation.

My inability to act has always been an ailment with a metaphysical aetiology. I've always felt that to perform a gesture implied a disturbance, a repercussion, in the outer universe; I've always had the impression that any movement I might make would unsettle the stars and rock the skies. And so the tiniest gesture assumed for me early on a metaphysical significance of astonishing proportions. I developed an attitude of transcendental honesty with respect to all action, and ever since this attitude took firm hold in my consciousness, it has prevented me from having intense relations with the tangible world.

390.

To know how to be superstitious is still one of the arts which, developed to perfection, distinguishes the superior man.

391.

Ever since I've been using my idle moments to observe and meditate, I've noticed that people don't agree or know the truth about anything that's of real importance in life or that would be useful for living it. The most exact science is mathematics, which lives in the cloister of its own laws and rules; when applied, yes, it elucidates other sciences, but it can elucidate only what they discover it cannot help in the discovery. In the other sciences, the only sure and accepted facts are those that don't matter for life's supreme ends. Physics knows the expansion coefficient for iron, but it doesn't know the true mechanics of the world's composition. And the more we advance in what we'd like to know, the more we fall behind in what we do know. Metaphysics would seem to be the supreme guide, since it alone is concerned with ultimate truth and life's supreme ends, but it isn't even a scientific theory, just a pile of bricks that these or those hands form into awkward houses with no mortar holding them together.

I've also noticed that the only difference between humans and animals is the way they deceive themselves and remain ignorant about the life they live. Animals don't know what they do: they're born, they grow up, they live and they die without thought, reflection or a real future. And how many men live differently from animals? We all sleep, and the only difference is in what we dream, and in the degree and quality of our dreaming. Perhaps death will awaken us, but we can't even be sure of that unless it's by faith (for which believing is having), by hope (for which wanting is possessing), or by charity (for which giving is receiving).

It's raining on this cold and sad winter afternoon as if it had been raining, just as monotonously, since the first page of the world. It's raining, and as if the rain had made them hunch forward, my feelings lower their stupid gaze to the ground, where water flows and nourishes nothing, washes nothing, cheers up nothing. It's raining, and I suddenly feel the terrible weight of being an animal that doesn't know what it is, dreaming its thought and emotion, withdrawn into a spatial region of being as into a hovel, satisfied by a little heat as by an eternal truth.

392.

'The people' are a regular chap.

The people are never humanitarian. What most characterizes this fellow called 'the people' is a narrow focus on his own interests, and a careful exclusion as far as possible of the interests of others.

When the people lose their tradition, it means that the social bond has been severed; and when the social bond is severed, then the bond between the people and the minority who aren't like them is also severed. And the severing of the social bond between the minority and the people spells the death of art and true science, the end of the main agencies on whose existence civilization depends.

To exist is to deny. What am I today, living today, but the denial of who and what I was yesterday? To exist is to contradict oneself. Nothing better symbolizes life than those news articles that contradict today what the newspaper said yesterday.

To want is to be unable to achieve. The man who wanted something he achieved didn't want it until it was already in his power to achieve. The man who wants will never achieve, because he loses himself in wanting. These principles seem fundamental to me.

393.

... contemptible like the aims we live for, without our having chosen those aims.

Most if not all men live a contemptible life: contemptible in all its joys, and contemptible in almost all its sorrows, except those that have to do with death, since Mystery plays a part in these.*

Through the filter of my inattention, I hear fluid, scattered sounds which rise like intermittently flowing waves from outside, as if they came from another world: cries of vendors selling what's natural, such as vegetables, or what's social, such as lottery tickets; the round scraping of wheels from carts and wagons that hurriedly jerk forward; cars whose veering makes more noise than their motors; the shaking of some sort of cloth out of some window; the whistle of a little boy; the laughter from an upper floor; the metallic groan of the tram one street over; the jumble of sounds issuing from the cross street; a mishmash of loud noises, soft noises and silences; halting rumbles of traffic; some footsteps; beginnings, middles and ends of people's utterances and all of this exists for me, who am sleeping while thinking of it, like a stone poking out of a patch of grass where it doesn't belong.

Next, and coming through the wall of my rented room, it's domestic sounds that flow together in a stream: footsteps, dishes, the broom, a song (fado?*) that's cut short, last night's balcony rendezvous, irritation because something is missing from the dining table, someone asking for the cigarettes left on top of the cabinet all of this is reality, the anaphrodisiac reality that has no part in my imagination.

Lightly fall the steps of the junior maid, whose slippers I picture having a red and black braid, and since that's how I picture them, their sound takes on something of a red and black braid; loudly fall the boots of the family's son, who's going out and yells goodbye, the slam of the door cutting the echo of the later later that follows the that follows the see you see you; a dead calm, as if the world on this fourth floor had ended; dishes being taken to the kitchen to get washed; water running; 'Didn't I tell you that'... and silence whistling from the river.

But I dreamily and digestively drowse. I have time, between synaesthesias. And it's extraordinary to think that, if I were asked right now what I want for this short life, I could think of nothing better than these long, slow minutes, this absence of thought and emotion, of action and almost of sensation itself, this inner sunset of dissipated desire. And then it occurs to me, almost without thinking, that most if not all people live like this, with greater or lesser consciousness, moving forward or standing still, but with the very same indifference towards ultimate aims, the same renunciation of their personal goals, the same watered-down life.* Whenever I see a cat lying in the sun, I think of humanity. Whenever I see someone sleep, I remember that everything is slumber. Whenever someone tells me he dreamed, I wonder if he realizes that he has never done anything but dream. The sound from the street gets louder, as if a door had opened, and the doorbell rings.

It was nothing, for the door shut immediately. The footsteps die out at the end of the hallway. The washed plates raise their voice of water and porcelain. [...] A passing truck shakes the back of the apartment, and since all things end, I get up from my thinking.

394.

And I reason at will, in the same way I dream, for reasoning is just another kind of dreaming.

O prince of better days, I was once your princess, and we loved each other with another kind of love, whose memory makes me grieve.

395.

The so gentle and ethereal hour was an altar for prayer. The horoscope of our meeting was surely ruled by auspicious conjunctions so subtle and silken was the vague substance of glimpsed dreams that had mingled with our awareness of feeling. Our bitter conviction that life wasn't worth living had come to an end, like one more summer. There was a rebirth of that spring which we could now, albeit fallaciously, imagine had been ours. With humiliating similarity to humans, the pools among the trees also lamented, along with the roses in the unshaded flower beds and the indefinite melody of living all irresponsibly.

It's useless to discern or foresee. The whole of the future is a mist that surrounds us, and when we glimpse tomorrow, it tastes like today. My destinies are the clowns that the caravan left behind, with no better moonlight than that of the open road, nor any quivering in the leaves except what the breeze causes, and the uncertainty of the moment, and our belief that they are quivering. Distant purples, fleeting shadows, the dream incomplete and no hope of death's completing it, the rays of a dying sun, the light in the house on the hill, the anguished night, the perfume of death here among these books, all alone, with life outside, the trees smelling greenly in the vast night that is starrier on the other side of the hill... And so your sorrows had their solemn and benevolent union; your few words royally consecrated the voyage, no ships ever returned, not even the real ones, and the smoke of living stripped everything of its contours, leaving only the shadows and skeletons, the bitter waters of eerie ponds among boxwoods seen through gates that from a distance recall Watteau, anguish, and never again. Millenniums just for you to come, but the road has no curves and so you can never arrive. Goblets reserved for the inevitable hemlocks not yours, but the life of us all, and even the street lamps, the nooks and crannies, the faint wings we only hear, while in the restless, suffocating night our thought slowly rises and paces across its anxiety... Yellow, green-black, love-blue: all dead, my divine nursemaid, all dead, and all ships are the ship that never set sail! Pray for me, and perhaps God will exist because it's for me that you pray. The fountain softly pattering in the distance, life uncertain, the smoke fading to nothing in the village where night is falling, my memory so hazy, the river so far away... Grant that I may sleep, grant that I may forget myself, lady of Obscure Designs, Mother of Endearments and of Blessings incompatible with their own existence...

396.

After the last rains left the sky for earth, making the sky clear and the earth a damp mirror, the brilliant clarity of life that returned with the blue on high and that rejoiced in the freshness of the water here below left its own sky in our souls, a freshness in our hearts.

Whether we like it or not we're servants of the hour and its colours and shapes, we're subjects of the sky and earth. Even those who delve only in themselves, disdaining what surrounds them, delve by different paths when it rains and when it's clear. Obscure transmutations, perhaps felt only in the depths of abstract feelings, occur because it rains or stops raining. They're felt without our feeling them because the weather we didn't feel made itself felt.

Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways. At this very moment, jotting down these impressions during a break that's excusable because today there's not much work, I'm the one who is attentively writing them, I'm the one who is glad not to have to be working right now, I'm the one seeing the sky outside, invisible from in here, I'm the one thinking about all of this, I'm the one feeling my body satisfied and my hands still a bit cold. And my entire world of all these souls who don't know each other casts, like a motley but compact multitude, a single shadow the calm, bookkeeping body with which I lean over Borges's tall desk, where I've come to get the blotter that he borrowed from me.

397.

Falling between the buildings, in alternating patches of light and shadow (or of brighter and less bright light), the morning dawns over the city. It seems to come not from the sun but from the city itself, as if the sunlight emanated from the walls and rooftops not from them physically, but because they happen to be there.

To see and feel it makes me feel a great hope, but I realize that hope is literary. Morning, spring, hope they're linked in music by the same melodic intention; they're linked in the soul by the same memory of an identical intention. No: if I observe myself as I observe the city, I realize that all I can hope is for the day to end, like all days. Reason also sees the dawn. Whatever hope I placed in the day wasn't mine; it was of those who just live the passing hour and whose outer way of understanding I happened, for a moment, to embody.

Hope? What do I have to hope for? The day doesn't promise me more than the day, and I know it has a certain duration and an end. The light heartens but does not improve me, for I'll walk away as the same man just a few hours older, a feeling or two happier, a thought or two sadder. When something is born, we can feel it as a birth or we can think about it having to die. Now, under the full light of the sun, the city landscape is like an open field of buildings natural, vast and harmonious. But while seeing all this, can I forget that I exist? My consciousness of the city is, at its core, my consciousness of myself.

I suddenly remember when I was a child and saw, as today I cannot see, dawn breaking over the city. Back then it didn't break for me but for life, because back then I (not being conscious) was life. I saw dawn break and felt happy; today I see dawn break, feel happy, and become sad. The child is still there but has fallen silent. I see the way I saw, but from behind my eyes I see myself seeing, and that is enough to darken the sun, to make the green of the trees old, and to wilt the flowers before they open. Yes, I once belonged here; but today, before each landscape, no matter how fresh, I stand as a foreigner, a guest and pilgrim before it, an outsider of what I see and hear, old to myself.

I've seen everything, even what I've never seen nor will ever see. Even the memory of future landscapes flows in my blood, and my anxiety over what I'll have to see again is already monotonous to me.

And leaning on the windowsill to enjoy the day, gazing at the variegated mass of the whole city, just one thought fills my soul: that I profoundly wish to die, to cease, to see no more light shining on this city or any city, to think no more, to feel no more, to leave behind the march of time and the sun like a piece of wrapping paper, to remove like a heavy suit next to the big bed the involuntary effort of being.

398.

I'm intuitively certain that for people like me no material circumstance can be propitious, no situation have a favourable outcome. If I already had good reasons for withdrawing from life, this is yet another one. Those courses of events that make success inevitable in an ordinary man have an unexpected, adverse effect in my case.

This observation sometimes causes me a painful impression of divine hostility. It seems that only by some conscious manipulation of events, to make them work against me, could the series of disasters that define my life have happened.

The result of all this is that I never make much of an effort. Let luck come my way, if it will. I know all too well that my greatest effort won't achieve what it would in other people. That's why I give myself up to luck, without expecting anything from it. What should I expect?

My stoicism is an organic necessity; I need to shield myself against life. Since stoicism is after all just a stringent form of Epicureanism, I try to get some amusement out of my misfortune. I don't know to what extent I achieve this. I don't know to what extent I achieve anything. I don't know to what extent anything can be achieved...

Where another man would succeed not so much by his effort as by a circumstantial inevitability, I wouldn't and couldn't succeed, whether by that inevitability or by that effort.

I seem to have been born, spiritually speaking, on a short winter day. Night fell early on my being. The only way I can live my life is in frustration and desolation.

None of this is truly stoical. It's only in words that my suffering is at all noble. I complain like a sick maid. I fret like a housewife. My life is totally futile and totally sad.

399.

All I asked of life is what Diogenes* asked of Alexander: not to stand in the way of the sun. There were things I wanted, but I was denied any reason for wanting them. As for what I found, it would have been better to have found it in real life. Dreaming.....

While out walking I've formulated perfect phrases which I can't remember once I get home. I'm not sure if the ineffable poetry of these phrases belongs totally to what they were (and which I forgot), or partly to what they after all weren't.

I hesitate in everything, often without knowing why. How often I've sought as my own version of the straight line, seeing it in my mind as the ideal straight line the longest distance between two points. I've never had a knack for the active life. I've always taken wrong steps that no one else takes; I've always had to make an effort to do what comes naturally to other people. I've always wanted to achieve what others have achieved almost without wanting it. Between me and life there were always sheets of frosted glass that I couldn't tell were there by sight or by touch; I didn't live that life or that dimension. I was the daydream of what I wanted to be, and my dreaming began in my will: my goals were always the first fiction of what I never was.

I've never known if it was my sensibility that was too much for my intelligence, or my intelligence that was too much for my sensibility. I've always been late, I'm not sure if for the former or for the latter, or perhaps for both, or perhaps it was the third thing that was late.

The dreamers of ideals [?] socialists, altruists, and humanitarians of whatever ilk make me physically sick to my stomach. They're idealists with no ideal, thinkers with no thought. They're enchanted by life's surface because their destiny is to love rubbish, which floats on the water and they think it's beautiful, because scattered shells float on the water too.

400.

An expensive cigar smoked with one's eyes closed that's all it takes to be rich.

Like someone who revisits a place where he lived in his youth, with a cheap cigarette I can return heart and soul to the time in my life when I used to smoke them. Through the mild flavour of the smoke, the whole of the past comes back to me.

At other times it's a certain sweet. A mere piece of chocolate can shake up my nerves with the surfeit of memories it provokes. Childhood! And as my teeth sink into the dark, soft mass, I chew and savour my humble joys as the happy companion of my toy soldiers, as the knight in perfect accord with whatever stick happened to be serving as my horse. Tears well up in my eyes, and along with the flavour of the chocolate I can taste my bygone happiness, my long lost childhood, and I voluptuously bask in the sweetness of my sorrow.

This ritual of taste, however simple it may be, is as solemn as any other.

But it's cigarette smoke that most subtly, spiritually, reconstructs my past. Since it just barely grazes my awareness of taste, it evokes the moments to which I've died in a more general way, by a kind of displacement; it makes them more remotely present, more like mist when they envelop me, more ethereal when I embody them. A menthol cigarette or a cheap cigar wraps certain of my moments in a sweet softness. With what subtle plausibility taste combined with smell I recreate the dead stage settings and reinvest them with the colours of a past, always so eighteenth century in its weary and mischievous aloofness, always so medieval in its irreparable lostness!

401.

Elevating disgrace into splendour, I created for myself a pageantry of pain and effacement. I didn't make a poem out of my pain, but I used it to make a cortege. And from the window that looks on to myself I contemplate in awe the deep-red sunsets, the wispy twilights of my sorrows without cause, where the dangers, burdens and failures of my innate incapacity for existing march by in processions of my aimlessness. The child in me that never died still watches and excitedly waves at the circus I stage for myself. He laughs at the clowns, who exist only in the circus; he fixes his eyes on the stunt men and the acrobats as if they were the whole of life. And thus all the unsuspected anguish of a human soul about to burst, all the incurable despair of a heart forsaken by God, sleeps the innocent child's sleep, without joy and yet contented, within the four walls of my room with their ugly, peeling paper.

I walk not through the streets but through my sorrow. The flanking rows of buildings are all the incomprehension that surrounds my soul;..... my footsteps resound against the pavement like a ridiculous death knell, a frightful noise in the night, final like a receipt or a tomb.

Stepping back from myself, I see that I'm the bottom of a well.

The man I never was died. God forgot who I should have been. I'm just a vacant interlude.

If I were a musician, I would compose my own funeral march, and with such good reason!

402.