I read and abandon myself, not to my reading but to me. I read and fall asleep, and it's as if my already dreaming eyes still followed Father Figueiredo's descriptions of the figures of speech, and it's in enchanted forests that I hear Father Freire explain that one should say 'Magdalena', because only an ignorant person says 'Madalena'.

418.

I hate to read. The mere thought of unfamiliar pages bores me. I can read only what I already know. My bedside book is Father Figueiredo's Rhetoric Rhetoric, where every night I read yet again for the thousandth time, in correct and clerical Portuguese, the descriptions of various figures of speech, whose names I still haven't learned. But the language lulls me....., and I'd sleep fitfully were I to miss out on the Jesuitical words written with c c.*

I must, however, give credit to the exaggerated purism of Father Figueiredo's book for the relative care I take as much as I can muster to write correctly the language in which I express myself.....

And I read: (a passage from Father Figueiredo) pompous, empty[?] and cold, and this helps me forget life.

Or this: (a passage about figures of speech), which returns in the preface.

I'm not exaggerating a verbal smidgen: I feel all this.

As others read passages from the Bible, I read them from this Rhetoric Rhetoric. But I have two advantages: complete repose and lack of devotion.

419.

The trivial things that make up life, the trifles of the ordinary and routine, like a dust that underscores with a hideous, smudged line the sordidness and vileness of my human existence: the Cashbook lying open before eyes that dream of countless Orients; the office manager's inoffensive joke that offends the whole universe; the could you please ask Senhor Vasques to call me, his girlfriend, Miss so -and-so, right when I was pondering the most asexual part of an aesthetic and intellectual theory.

And then there are one's friends, good fellows, good fellows, great to be with them and talk, to have lunch together, dinner together, but all of it, I don't know, so sordid and pathetic and trivial, because even on the street we remain in the fabric warehouse, even overseas we're still seated before the Cashbook, and even in infinity we still have our boss.

Everyone has an office manager with a joke that's out of place, and everyone has a soul that falls outside the normal universe. Everyone has a boss and the boss's girlfriend, and the phone call that arrives at the inevitably worst moment, when the evening is wondrously falling and girlfriends politely offer their apologies [?] or else leave messages for their lover, who we all know has gone out for a fancy tea.

All who dream even if they don't dream in a downtown Lisbon office, bent over the accounts of a fabric warehouse have before them a Cashbook, which may be the woman they married, or the administration of a future they've inherited, or anything at all that positively exists.

All of us who dream and think are assistant bookkeepers in a fabric warehouse or in some other business in this or another downtown. We enter amounts and lose; we add up totals and pass on; we close the books and the invisible balance is always against us.

The words I write make me smile, but my heart is ready to break to break like things that shatter into fragments, shards and debris, hauled away in a bin on somebody's shoulders to the eternal rubbish cart of every City Council.

And everything is waiting, dressed up and expectant, for the King who will come and who is already arriving, for the dust of his retinue forms a new mist in the slowly appearing east, and the lances in the distance are already flashing with their own dawn.

420.

FUNERAL M MARCH.

Hieratic figures from mysterious hierarchies are lined up in the corridors, waiting for you. There are fair-haired boys bearing lances, young men with scattered flashes of naked blades, reflections glancing off helmets and brass, dark glimpses of silks and tarnished gold. with scattered flashes of naked blades, reflections glancing off helmets and brass, dark glimpses of silks and tarnished gold.

All that the imagination infects, the funereal feeling that makes pageants melancholy and even weighs on us in victories, the mysticism of nothing, the asceticism of absolute negation...

Not the six feet of cold earth that cover our closed eyes beneath the warm sun and next to the green grass, but the death that surpasses our life and is a life all its own a dead presence in some god, the unknown god of the religion of my Gods.*

The Ganges also passes by the Rua dos Douradores. All eras exist in this cramped room the mixture the multicoloured march of customs, the distances between cultures, and the vast variety of nations. the multicoloured march of customs, the distances between cultures, and the vast variety of nations.

And right here on this very street I can wait, in ecstasy, for Death among battlements and swords.

421.

JOURNEY IN THE M MIND.

From my fourth-floor room overlooking infinity, in the viable intimacy of the falling evening, at the window before the emerging stars, my dreams in rhythmic accord with the visible distance are of journeys to unknown, imagined, or simply impossible countries.

422.

The blond light of the golden moon shines out of the east. The shimmer it forms on the wider river opens into snakes on the sea.

423.

In lavish satins and puzzled purples the empires proceeded towards death under exotic flags flanking wide roads and luxurious canopies at the stopping-places. Baldachins passed by. Roads now drab, now spruce, let the processions come through. The weapons coldly flashed in the excruciatingly slow, pointless marches. The gardens on the outskirts were forgotten, and the fountains' water was merely the continuation of what had been left behind, a distant laughter falling among memories of lights, which is not to say that the statues along the paths talked, nor did the succession of yellows stifle the autumn colours that embellished the tombs. The halberds were corners around which lay splendorous ages dressed in green-black, faded purple and garnet-coloured robes. Behind all the evasions, the squares lay empty, and never again would the flower beds where we stroll be visited by the shadows that had abandoned the aqueducts.

The drums, like thunder, drummed the tremulous hour.

424.

Every day things happen in the world that can't be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can't be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.

425.

Dreaming itself has become a torture. I've acquired such lucidity in my dreams that I see all dreamed things as real. And so all the value that they had as mere dreams has been lost.

Do I dream of being famous? Then I feel all the public exposure that comes with glory, the total loss of privacy and anonymity that makes glory painful.

426.

To think of our greatest anxiety as an insignificant event, not only in the life of the universe but also in the life of our own soul, is the beginning of wisdom. To think this way right in the midst of our anxiety is the height of wisdom. While we're actually suffering, our human pain seems infinite. But human pain isn't infinite, because nothing human is infinite, and our pain has no value beyond its being a pain we feel.

How often, oppressed by a tedium that seems like insanity or by an anxiety that seems to surpass it, I stop, hesitating, before I revolt, I hesitate, stopping, before I deify myself. From among all the pains there are the pain of not grasping the mystery of the world, the pain of not being loved, the pain of being treated unjustly, the pain of life oppressing us, suffocating and restraining us, the pain of a toothache, the pain of shoes that pinch who can say which is the worst for himself, let alone for someone else, or for the generality of those who exist?

Some of the people I talk with consider me insensitive. But I think I'm more sensitive than the vast majority. I'm a sensitive man who knows himself, and who therefore knows sensitivity.

Ah, it's not true that life is painful, or that it's painful to think about life. What's true is that our pain is grave and serious only when we pretend it is. If we let it be, it will leave just as it came, it will die down the way it grew up. Everything is nothing, our pain included.

I'm writing this under the weight of a tedium that doesn't seem to fit inside me, or that needs more room than is in my soul; a tedium of all people and all things that strangles and deranges me; a physical feeling of being completely misunderstood that unnerves and overwhelms me. But I lift up my head to the blue sky that doesn't know me, I let my face feel the unconsciously cool breeze, I close my eyelids after having looked, and I forget my face after having felt. This doesn't make me feel better, but it makes me different. Seeing myself frees me from myself. I almost smile, not because I understand myself but because, having become another, I've stopped being able to understand myself. High in the sky, like a visible nothingness, floats a tiny white cloud left behind by the universe.

427.

My dreams: In my dreams I create friends friends, with whom I then keep company. They're imperfect in a different way.

Remain pure, not in order to be noble or strong but to be yourself. To give your love is to lose love.

Abdicate from life so as not to abdicate from yourself.

Women are a good source of dreams. Don't ever touch them.

Learn to disassociate the ideas of voluptuousness and pleasure. Learn to delight in everything, not for what it is, but for the ideas and dreams it kindles. (Because nothing is what it is, but dreams are always dreams.) To accomplish this, you mustn't touch anything. As soon as you touch it, your dream will die; the touched object will occupy your capacity for feeling.

Seeing and hearing are the only noble things in life. The other senses are plebeian and carnal. The only aristocracy is never to touch. Avoid getting close that's true nobility.

428.

AESTHETICS OF I INDIFFERENCE.

For each separate thing, the dreamer should strive to feel the complete indifference which it, as a thing, arouses in him.

The ability to spontaneously abstract whatever is dreamable from each object or event, leaving all of its reality as dead matter in the Exterior World that is what the wise man should strive for.

Never to feel his own feelings sincerely, and to raise his pallid triumph to the point of regarding his own ambitions, longings and desires with indifference; to pass alongside his joys and anxieties as if passing by someone who doesn't interest him...

The greatest self-mastery is to be indifferent towards ourselves, to see our body and soul as merely the house and grounds where Destiny willed that we spend our life. To treat our own dreams and deepest desires with arrogance, en grand seigneur en grand seigneur, politely and carefully ignoring them. To act modestly in our own presence; to realize that we are never truly alone, since we are our own witnesses, and should therefore act before ourselves as before a stranger, with a studied and serene outward manner indifferent because it's noble, and cold because it's indifferent.

In order not to sink in our own estimation, all we have to do is quit having ambitions, passions, desires, hopes, whims or nervous disquiet. The key is to remember that we're always in our own presence we're never so alone that we can feel at ease. With this in mind, we will overcome having passions and ambitions, for these make us vulnerable; we won't have desires or hopes, since desires and hopes are plebeian and inelegant; and we won't have whims or be disquieted, because rash behaviour is unpleasant for others to witness, and agitated behaviour is always a vulgarity.

The aristocrat is the one who never forgets that he's never alone; that's why etiquette and decorum are the privilege of aristocracies. Let's internalize the aristocrat. Let's take him out of his gardens and drawing rooms and place him in our soul and in our consciousness of existing. Let's always treat ourselves with etiquette and decorum, with studied and for-other-people gestures.

Each of us is an entire community, an entire neighbourhood of the great Mystery,* and we should at least make sure that the life of our neighbourhood is distinctive and elegant, that the feasts of our sensations are genteel and restrained, and that the banquets of our thoughts are decorous and dignified. Since other souls may build poor and filthy neighbourhoods around us, we should clearly define where our own begins and ends, and from the facades of our feelings to the alcoves of our shyness, everything should be noble and serene, sculpted in sobriety, without ostentation.

We should try to find a serene way to realize each sensation. To reduce love to the shadow of a dream of love, a pale and tremulous interval between the crests of two tiny, moonlit waves. To turn desire into a useless and innocuous thing, a kind of knowing smile in our soul; to make it into something we never dream of achieving or even expressing. To lull hatred to sleep like a captive snake, and to tell fear to give up all its outer manifestations except for anguish in our eyes, or rather, in the eyes of our soul, for only this attitude can be considered aesthetic.

429.

Throughout my life, in every situation and in every social circumstance, everyone has always seen me as an intruder. Or at least as a stranger. Whether among relatives or acquaintances, I've always been regarded as an outsider. I'm not suggesting that this treatment was ever deliberate. It was due, rather, to a natural reaction in the people around me.

Everyone everywhere has always treated me kindly. Rare is the man like me, I suspect, who has caused so few to raise their voice, wrinkle their brow, or speak angrily or askance. But the kindness I've been shown has always been devoid of affection. For those who are closest to me I've always been a guest, and as such treated well, but always with the kind of attention accorded to a stranger and with the lack of affection that's normal for an intruder.

I don't doubt that this attitude in other people derives mainly from some obscure cause intrinsic to my own temperament. Perhaps I have a communicative coldness that makes others automatically reflect my unfeeling manner.

By nature I quickly strike up acquaintances. People are friendly to me right away. But I never receive affection. I've never been shown devotion. To be loved has always seemed impossible to me, like a stranger calling me by my first name.

I don't know if I should regret this, or if I should accept it as an indifferent destiny which there's no reason to regret or accept.

I've always wanted to be liked. It always grieved me that I was treated with indifference. Left an orphan by Fortune, I wanted like all orphans to be the object of someone's affection. This need has always been a hunger that went unsatisfied, and so thoroughly have I adapted to this inevitable hunger that I sometimes wonder if I really feel the need to eat.

Whatever be the case, life pains me.

Other people have someone who is devoted to them. I've never had anyone who even thought of being devoted to me. Others are doted on; I'm treated nicely.

I know I have the capacity to stir respect, but not affection. Unfortunately I've never done anything that would justify, for others, the respect they initially feel, and so they never come to truly respect me.

Sometimes I think I must enjoy suffering. But I know I'd really prefer something else.

I don't have the qualities of a leader or of a follower. Nor even those of a contented man, which are the ones that count when the others are missing.

Other people, less intelligent than I, are stronger. They're better at carving out their place in life; they manage their intelligence more effectively. I have all the qualities it takes to exert influence except for the knack of actually doing it, or even the will to want to do it.

Were I ever to fall in love, I wouldn't be loved back.

All I have to do is want something for it to perish. My destiny lacks the strength to be lethal in general, but it has the weakness of being lethal in whatever specifically concerns me.

430.

Having seen how lucidly and logically certain madmen* justify their lunatic ideas to themselves and to others, I can never again be sure of the lucidness of my lucidity.

431.

One of my life's greatest tragedies albeit a surreptitious tragedy, of the kind that take place in the shadows is my inability to feel anything naturally. I can love and hate like others and, like others, feel fear and enthusiasm; but neither my love nor my hate, nor my fear nor my enthusiasm, are quite like the real thing. Either they lack a certain ingredient, or they have one that doesn't belong. They are at any rate some other thing, and what I feel doesn't square with life.

In what is very aptly called a calculating personality, feelings are shaped by calculation and a kind of scrupulous self-interest to the point that they seem like something else. In what is specifically known as a scrupulous personality, the same displacement of natural instincts can be observed. In me there is a similar disturbance, a lack of clarity in my feelings, yet I am neither calculating nor scrupulous. I have no excuse for feeling things abnormally. I instinctively denature my instincts. Against my will, I will in the wrong way.

432.

The slave of my own character as well as of my circumstances, offended not only by other people's indifference but also by their affection for whom they think I am such are the human insults heaped on me by Destiny.

433.

I was a foreigner in their midst, but no one realized it. I lived among them as a spy and no one, not even I, suspected it. They all took me for a relative; no one knew I'd been swapped at birth. And so I was one of their equals without anything in common, a brother to all without belonging to the family.

I had come from wondrous lands, from landscapes more enchanting than life, but only to myself did I ever mention these lands, and I said nothing about the landscapes which I saw in dreams. My feet stepped like theirs over the floorboards and the flagstones, but my heart was far away, even if it beat close by, false master of an estranged and exiled body.