No one knew me under the mask of similarity, nor ever knew that I had a mask, because no one knew that there are masked people in the world. No one imagined that at my side there was always another, who was in fact I. They always supposed I was identical to myself.

Their houses sheltered me, their hands shook mine, and they saw me walk down the street as if I were there; but the I that I am was never in their living rooms, the I whose life I live has no hands for others to shake, and the I that I know walks down no streets, unless the streets are all streets, nor is seen in them by others, unless he himself is all the others.

We all live far away and anonymous; disguised, we suffer as unknowns. For some, however, this distance between oneself and one's self is never revealed; for others it is occasionally enlightened, to their horror or grief, by a flash without limits; but for still others this is the painful daily reality of life.

To realize that who we are is not ours to know, that what we think or feel is always a translation, that what we want is not what we wanted, nor perhaps what anyone wanted to realize all this at every moment, to feel all this in every feeling isn't this to be foreign in one's own soul, exiled in one's own sensations?

But the mask I'd been staring at as it talked on a street corner with an unmasked man on this last night of Carnival finally held out its hand and laughingly said goodbye. The natural-faced man turned left down the street at whose corner he'd been standing. The mask an uninteresting one walked straight ahead, disappearing among shadows and occasional lights in a definitive farewell, extraneous to what I was thinking. Only then did I notice that there was more in the street than the glowing street lamps, and where the lamplight didn't reach there roiled a hazy moonlight, veiled and speechless and full of nothing, like life...

434.

MOONLIGHTS.

...damply tarnished by a lifeless brown.

...on the frozen avalanche of overlapping rooftops it is a greyish white, damply tarnished by a lifeless brown.

435.

...and the whole ensemble is staggered in diverse clusters of darkness, outlined on one side by white, and dappled with blue shades of cold nacre.

436.

(rain) And finally, over the darkness of the gleaming rooftops, the cold light of the tepid morning breaks like a torment of the Apocalypse. Once again it's the vast night of increasing luminosity. Once again it's the usual horror: the day, life, fictitious purposes, inescapable activity. Once again it's my physical, visible and social personality, communicated by meaningless words and exploited by the acts and consciousness of others. Once again I'm I, exactly as I'm not. And as this light from the darkness fills with grey doubts the cracks around the shutters (far from hermetic, alas!), I begin to realize that I can no longer hold on to this refuge of staying in bed, of not sleeping but being able to, of dreaming without remembering truth and reality, of nestling between a cool warmth of clean sheets and an ignorance of my body's existence beyond its feeling of comfort. I realize that I'm losing the happy unconsciousness with which I've been enjoying my consciousness, the animal drowsiness in which I observe as through the slowly blinking eyelids of a cat in the sun the movements described by my free imagination's logic. I realize that the privileges of darkness are vanishing, and with them the slow rivers under the bowing trees of my glimpsed eyelashes, and the murmur of the cascades lost between the soft flowing of blood in my ears and the faint, steady rain. I'm losing myself to become alive.

I don't know if I'm sleeping or if I just feel as if I were. I'm not exactly dreaming but seem, rather, to be waking up from a sleepless slumber, for I hear the city's first sounds of life rising like floodwaters from that vague place down below, where the streets made by God run this way and that. The sounds are happy, filtered through the sadness of the rain that's falling, or that perhaps has stopped falling, for I don't hear it any more; I'm aware only of the excessive greyness it gives to the light that's advancing through the cracks, in the shadows of a clarity too faint for this time of morning, whatever time that may be. The sounds are happy, scattered, and painful to my heart,* as if they were calling me to an exam or an execution. Each new day, if I hear it break from the bed of my sweet oblivion, seems like the day of a great event in my life that I won't have the courage to face. Each new day, if I feel it rise from its bed of shadows as linens fall in the lanes and streets, comes to summon me to a court of law. Each new day, I'm going to be judged. And the man in me who is perpetually condemned clings to his bed as to the mother he lost, and fondles the pillow as if his nursemaid could protect him from people.

The happy sleep of the hulking animal shaded by trees, the balmy fatigue of the tramp lying in the tall grass, the torpor of the black man on a warm and far-away afternoon, the pleasure of the yawn that weighs in tired eyes, everything that helps us to forget and brings sleep, the peace of mind that gently closes the shutters of our soul's window, the anonymous caress of slumber...

To sleep, to be far away, remote without knowing it, to forget with one's very body, to have the freedom of unconsciousness like a refuge on a forgotten lake, stagnating among thick foliage in the hidden depths of forests...

A nothingness that breathes, a mild death from which we awaken fresh and nostalgic, a deep forgetting that massages the tissues of our soul...

And again I hear, like the renewed protest of one who still isn't convinced, the abrupt clamour of rain spattering the lit-up universe. I feel a chill in my imagined bones, as if I were afraid. And cowering in my insignificance, so human and alone in the last vestige of the darkness that's deserting me, I begin to weep. I weep, yes, over solitude and life, and my useless grief lies like a wheelless cart on the edge of reality, amid the dung of oblivion. I weep over everything the loss of the lap where I once lay, the death of the hand I was given, the arms to embrace me that I never found, the shoulder to lean on that I never had. And the day that breaks definitively, the grief that breaks in me like the naked truth of day, all that I dreamed or thought or forgot all of this, like an amalgam of shadows, fictions and regrets, blends into the wake of the passing worlds and falls among the things of life like the skeleton of a bunch of grapes, filched by young boys and eaten on the street corner.

The noise of the human day suddenly increases, like the sound of a bell that's calling. I hear, inside the building, the softly clicking latch of the first door that opens for someone to go out and live. I hear slippers in an absurd hallway leading to my heart. And with a brusque movement, as when a man finally succeeds in killing himself, I throw off the snug covers that shelter my stiff body. I've woken up. The sound of the rain fades, moving higher in the indefinite outdoors. I feel better. I've fulfilled something or other. I get up, go to the window, and open the shutters with brave determination. A day of clear rain floods my eyes with dull light. I open the window. The cool air moistens my warm skin. It's raining, yes, but although it's the same rain I'd been hearing, it's after all so much less! I want to be refreshed, to live, and I lean my neck out to life as to an enormous yoke.*

437.

A rural calm sometimes visits the city. There are times in sunny Lisbon, especially at midday in summer, when the countryside invades us like a wind. And we sleep peacefully right here, on the Rua dos Douradores.

How refreshing for the soul to see a hush fall, beneath a high, steady sun, over these carts full of straw, these half-built crates, and these unhurried pedestrians who suddenly seem to be walking in a village! I myself, alone in the office and looking at them through the window, am transported: I'm in a quiet little town in the country, or stagnating in an unknown hamlet, and because I feel other, I'm happy.

I know: if I raise my eyes, I'll be confronted by the dingy row of buildings opposite, by the grimy windows of all the downtown offices, by the incongruous windows of the upper floors where people still live, and by the eternal laundry hanging in the sun between the gables at the top, among flowerpots and plants. I know this, but the golden light shining on everything is so soft, and the calm air surrounding me so devoid of sense, that even what I see is no reason to renounce my make-believe village, my rural small town whose commerce is sheer tranquillity.

I know, I know... It is indeed time for lunch, or for resting, or for doing nothing. Everything is going smoothly on the surface of life. Even I am sleeping, although my body is leaning over the balcony as over the rail of a ship sailing past an unfamiliar landscape. Even I have put my mind to rest, as if I were in the country. And suddenly something else looms before me, surrounds me, commands me: I see, behind the small town's midday, all of life in all of the small town; I see the grand stupid happiness of its domestic life, the grand stupid happiness of life in the fields, the grand stupid happiness of peaceful squalor. I see it because I see it. But I didn't see it and I wake up. I look around, smiling, and the first thing I do is shake off the dust from my unfortunately dark suit, whose sleeves had been leaning on the balcony rail which no one has ever cleaned, unaware that one day, if only for a moment, it would have to serve as a deck rail (where there could logically be no dust) of a ship on an infinite sightseeing cruise.

438.

Against the blue made pale by the green of night, the cold unevenness of the buildings on the summer horizon formed a jagged, brownish-black silhouette, vaguely haloed by a yellowed grey.

In another age we mastered the physical ocean, thereby creating universal civilization; now we will master the psychological ocean, emotion, mother human nature, thereby creating intellectual civilization.

439.

... the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.

I'm writing on a Sunday, the morning far advanced, on a day full of soft light in which, above the rooftops of the interrupted city, the blue of the always brand-new sky closes the mysterious existence of stars into oblivion.

In me it is also Sunday...

My heart is also going to a church, located it doesn't know where. It wears a child's velvet suit, and its face, made rosy by first impressions, smiles without sad eyes above the collar that's too big.

440.

Every morning of that lingering summer the sky, when it woke up, was a dull green-blue, which soon changed to a blueness greyed by a silent white. In the west, however, the sky was the colour we usually ascribe to all of it.

When they feel the ground sliding beneath their feet, then how many men begin to speak the truth, to seek and find, to deny the world's illusion! And how their illustrious names mark with capital letters like those found on maps the insights of sober and learned pages!

Cosmorama of things happening tomorrow that could never have ever happened! Lapis lazuli of intermittent emotions! Do you remember how many memories can spring from a false supposition, from mere imagination? And in a delirium sprinkled with certainties, the soft, brisk murmur of all the water from all parks wells up as an emotion from the depths of my self-awareness. The old benches are vacant, and all around them the paths spread their melancholy of empty streets.

Night in Heliopolis! Night in Heliopolis! Who will tell me the useless words? Who, through blood and indecision, will compensate me?

441.

High in the nocturnal solitude an anonymous lamp flourishes behind a window. All else that I see in the city is dark, save where feeble reflections of light hazily ascend from the streets and cause a pallid, inverse moonlight to hover here and there. The buildings' various colours, or shades of colours, are hardly distinguishable in the blackness of the night; only vague, seemingly abstract differences break the regularity of the congested ensemble.

An invisible thread links me to the unknown owner of the lamp. It's not the mutual circumstance of us both being awake; in this there can be no reciprocity, for my window is dark, so that he cannot see me. It's something else, something all my own that's related to my feeling of isolation, that participates in the night and in the silence, and that chooses the lamp as an anchor because it's the only anchor there is. It seems to be its glowing that makes the night so dark. It seems to be the fact I'm awake, dreaming in the dark, that makes the lamp shine.

Everything that exists perhaps exists because something else exists. Nothing is, everything coexists perhaps that's how it really is. I feel I wouldn't exist right now or at least wouldn't exist in the way I'm existing, with this present consciousness of myself, which, because it is consciousness and present, is entirely me in this moment if that lamp weren't shining somewhere over there, a useless lighthouse with a specious advantage of height. I feel this because I feel nothing. I think this because this is nothing. Nothing, nothing, part of the night and the silence and what I share with them of vacancy, of negativity, of in-betweenness, a gap between me and myself, something forgotten by some god or other...

442.

In one of those spells of sleepless somnolence when we intelligently amuse ourselves without the intelligence, I reread some of the pages that together will form my book of random impressions. And they give off, like a familiar smell, an arid impression of monotony. Even while saying that I'm always different, I feel that I've always said the same thing; that I resemble myself more than I'd like to admit; that, when the books are balanced, I've had neither the joy of winning nor the emotion of losing. I'm the absence of a balance of myself, the lack of a natural equilibrium, and this weakens and distresses me.

Everything, all that I've written, is grey. My life, even my mental life, has been like a drizzly day in which everything is non-occurrence and haziness, empty privilege and forgotten purpose. I agonize in tattered silks. In the light and in tedium I see but don't know myself.

My humble attempt to say at least who I am, to record like a machine of nerves the slightest impressions of my subjective and ultra-sensitive life this was all emptied like a bucket that got knocked over, and it poured across the ground like the water of everything. I fashioned myself out of false colours, and the result is an attic made out to be an empire. My heart, out of which I spun the great events of prose I lived, seems to me today in these pages written long ago and reread now with a different soul like a water pump on a homestead, instinctively installed and pressed into service. I shipwrecked on an unstormy sea where my feet could have touched bottom.

And I ask the conscious vestige that I still conserve, in this confused series of intervals between non-existent things, what good it did me to fill so many pages with phrases I believed in as my own, with emotions I felt as if I had thought them up, with flags and army banners that finally amount to no more than pieces of paper stuck together with spit by the daughter of the beggar who sits under the eaves.

I ask what remains of me why I bothered with these useless pages, dedicated to rubbish and dispersion, lost even before existing among Destiny's ripped up papers.

I ask but I proceed. I write down the question, wrap it up in new phrases, unravel it with new emotions. And tomorrow I'll go back to my stupid book, jotting down the daily impressions of my cold lack of conviction.

Let them keep coming. Once the dominoes are all played and the game is won or lost, the pieces are turned over and the finished game is black.

443.

What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life me, so calm and peaceful?

I don't write in Portuguese. I write my own self.

444.

Everything has become unbearable except for life. The office, my home, the streets and even their contrary, if that were my lot overwhelm and oppress me. Only their ensemble brings me relief. Yes, anything that comes from the whole ensemble is enough to console me: a ray of sunlight that eternally enters the dead office, a vendor's cry that flits up to the window of my room, the existence of people, the fact that there are climates and changes in weather, the world's astonishing objectivity...

The ray of sun suddenly entered the office for me, who suddenly saw it... It was actually an extremely sharp, almost colourless blade of light that sliced the dark wooden floor, quickening the old nails over which it passed, along with the furrows between the boards, black lines on non-white.

For several minutes I studied the almost imperceptible effect of the sun penetrating into the still office... Pastimes of prisons! Only the incarcerated watch the sun move this way, like someone observing a file of ants.

445.

It is said that tedium is a disease of the idle, or that it attacks only those who have nothing to do. But this ailment of the soul is in fact more subtle: it attacks people who are predisposed to it, and those who work or who pretend they work (which in this case comes down to the same thing) are less apt to be spared than the truly idle.

Nothing is worse than the contrast between the natural splendour of the inner life, with its natural Indias and its unexplored lands, and the squalor (even when it's not really squalid) of life's daily routine. And tedium is more oppressive when there's not the excuse of idleness. The tedium of those who strive hard is the worst of all.

Tedium is not the disease of being bored because there's nothing to do, but the more serious disease of feeling that there's nothing worth doing. This means that the more there is to do, the more tedium one will feel.

How often, when I look up from the ledger where I enter amounts, my head is devoid of the whole world! I'd be better off remaining idle, doing nothing and having nothing to do, because that tedium, though real enough, I could at least enjoy. In my present tedium there is no rest, no nobility, and no well-being against which to feel unwell: there's a vast effacement of every act I do, rather than a potential weariness from acts I'll never do.

446.

OMAR K KHAYYaM.

The tedium of Khayyam isn't the tedium of those who, because they don't know how to do anything, naturally don't know what to do. This tedium belongs to those who were born dead and who understandably turn to morphine or cocaine. The tedium of the Persian sage is more noble and profound. It's the tedium of one who clearly considered and saw that everything was obscure, of one who took stock of all the religions and philosophies and said, like Solomon: 'I saw that all was vanity and vexation of spirit.' Or in the words of another king, the emperor Septimus Severus, when he said farewell to power and the world: 'Omnia fui, nihil expedit.' 'I've been everything; nothing's worth the trouble.'

Life, according to Tarde,* is the search for the impossible by way of the useless, which is what Omar Khayyam would have said, if he had said it.

That's why the Persian insists on the use of wine. 'Drink! Drink!' sums up his practical philosophy. It's not the kind of drinking inspired by happiness, which drinks to become even happier, more itself. Nor is it the drinking inspired by despair, which drinks to forget, to be less itself. Happiness adds vigour and love to the wine, and in Khayyam we find no note of energy, no words of love. The wispy, gracile figure of Saki appears only occasionally in the Rubaiyat Rubaiyat, and she is merely 'the girl who serves the wine'. The poet appreciates her elegant shape as he appreciated the shape of the amphora containing the wine.

Dean Aldrich* is an example of how happiness speaks of wine: If all be true that I do think,There are five reasons we should drink;Good wine a friend or being dry Or lest we should be by and by Or any other reason why.

The practical philosophy of Khayyam is essentially a mild form of Epicureanism, with only a slight trace of desire for pleasure. To see roses and drink wine is enough for him. A gentle breeze, a conversation without point or purpose, a cup of wine, flowers in this, and in nothing else, the Persian sage places his highest desire. Love agitates and wearies, action dissipates and comes to nothing, no one knows how to know, and to think muddles everything. Better to cease from desire and hope, from the futile pretension of explaining the world, and from the foolish ambition of improving or governing it. Everything is nothing, or, as recorded in The Greek Anthology, 'All that exists comes from unreason.' And it was a Greek,* hence a rational soul, who said it.

447.

We are ultimately indifferent to the truth or falseness of all religions, all philosophies, and all the uselessly verifiable hypotheses we call sciences. Nor are we really concerned about the fate of so-called humanity, or about what as a whole it does or doesn't suffer. Charity, yes, for our 'neighbour', as the Gospel says, and not for man, of whom it says nothing. And we all feel this way to a certain extent. How much does a massacre in China really disturb even the most noble of us? It's more heart-rending, even for the most sensitively imaginative, to see a child in the street get slapped for no apparent reason.

Charity for all, intimacy with none. Thus FitzGerald, in one of his notes, interprets a certain aspect of Khayyam's ethics.

The Gospel recommends love towards our neighbour; it doesn't mention love towards man or towards humanity, which no one can help or improve.

Some may wonder if I myself subscribe to the philosophy of Khayyam as restated and interpreted here (with fair accuracy, I believe). I would have to say that I don't know. On certain days it seems to me the best, and even the only, practical philosophy there is. On other days it strikes me as void, dead and useless, like an empty glass. Because I think, I don't know myself. And so I don't know what I really think. If I had faith, I would be different, but I would also be different if I were crazy. I would be different, yes, if I were different.

Besides these lessons from the profane world, there are, of course, the secret teachings of esoteric orders, the mysteries that are freely acknowledged but kept strictly secret, and the veiled mysteries embodied in public rites. There are things hidden, or half hidden, in great universal rites such as the Marian Ritual of the Roman Church, or the Freemasons' Ceremony of the Spirit.

But who's to say that the initiate, having entered the inner sanctum of mystery, isn't merely the eager prey of a new facet of our illusion? What certainty can he have, if a madman is even more certain of his mad ideas? Spencer compared our knowledge to a sphere which, as it expands, touches more and more on all that we don't know. And I also remember, with respect to secret initiations and what they can offer us, the terrible words of a Grand Wizard: 'I have seen Isis and touched Isis, but I do not know if she exists.'

448.

OMAR K KHAYYaM.

Omar had a personality; I, for better or worse, have none. In an hour I'll have strayed from what I am at this moment; tomorrow I'll have forgotten what I am today. Those who are who they are, like Omar, live in just one world, the external one. Those who aren't who they are, like me, live not only in the external world but also in a diversified, ever-changing inner world. Try as we might, we could never have the same philosophy as Omar's. I harbour in me, like unwanted souls, the very philosophies I criticize. Omar could reject them all, for they were all external to him, but I can't reject them, because they're me.

449.

There are inner sufferings so subtle and so diffuse that we can't tell whether they belong to the body or the soul, whether they're an anxiety that comes from our feeling that life is futile or an indisposition originating in some organic abyss such as the stomach, liver or brain. How often my normal self-awareness becomes turbid with the stirred dregs of an anguished stagnation! How often it hurts me to exist, with a nausea so indefinite I'm not sure if it's tedium or a warning that I'm about to vomit! How often...

Today my soul is sad unto my body. All of me hurts: memory, eyes and arms. It's like a rheumatism in all that I am. My being isn't touched by the day's limpid brightness, by the sheer blue sky, by this unabating high tide of diffuse light. I'm not soothed by the soft cool breeze autumnal but reminiscent of summer which gives the air personality. Nothing touches me. I'm sad, but not with a definite sadness, nor even with an indefinite sadness. I'm sad down there, on the street littered with packing crates.

These expressions don't exactly translate what I feel, for surely nothing can exactly translate what one feels. But I try to convey at least some impression of what I feel, a blend of various views of me and of the street, which is also, since I see it, a part of me in some profound way I can't fathom.

I'd like to live a different life in far-off lands. I'd like to die as someone else among unfamiliar flags. I'd like to be acclaimed emperor in other eras, better today because they're not of today, and we see them as hazy, colourful, enigmatic novelties. I'd like to have all that could make what I am ridiculous, and precisely because it would make what I am ridiculous. I'd like, I'd like... But there's always the sun when the sun is shining and the night when the night falls. There's always grief when grief troubles us and dreams when dreams lull us. There's always what there is, and never what there should be, not for being better or worse but for being different. There's always...

The loaders are clearing the crates off the street. Amid jokes and laughter they place the crates one by one on to wagons. I'm looking down at them from my office window, with sluggish eyes whose eyelids are sleeping. And something subtle and inscrutable links what I feel to the freight that's being loaded; some strange sensation makes a crate out of all my tedium, or anxiety, or nausea, which is hoisted on the shoulders of someone who's loudly joking and then loaded on to a wagon that's not there. And in the narrow street, the ever serene daylight diagonally shines on where they're hoisting the crates not on the crates themselves, which are in the shade, but on the far corner where the delivery boys are occupied in doing nothing, indeterminately.