And thus we died our life, so individually intent on dying it that we never noticed that we were only one, that we were each an illusion of the other, and that each of us as a separate self was nothing on the inside but an echo of that self...

A fly buzzes, uncertain and minute...

Faint and dispersed but definite sounds dawn in my awareness, filling my consciousness of our room with the fact day has broken... Our room? Mine and who else's, if I'm here alone? I don't know. Everything blends and all that remains is a fleeting mist of reality in which my uncertainty founders and my self-awareness is lulled to sleep by opiums...

Morning has broken, as if it had fallen from the pallid summit of Time...

The embers of our dreams have died out, my love, in the hearth of our life...

Let us give up the illusion of hope, which betrays; of love, which wearies; of life, which surfeits but never satisfies; and even of death, which brings more than we want and less than we hope for.

Let us give up, O Veiled One, even our tedium, which wears out its own self and dares not to be all the anxiety that it is.

Let us not weep, nor hate, nor desire...

Let us cover with a sheet of fine linen, O Silent Soulmate, the dead, stiff profile of our Imperfection...

THE L LAKE OF P POSSESSION (I) (I).

I see possession as an absurd lake very large, very dark, and very shallow. The water only seems deep because it's dirty.

Death? But death is part of life. Do I die completely? I know nothing about life. Do I survive myself? I keep on living.

Dreaming? But dreaming is part of life. Do we live our dreams? We live. Do we only dream them? We die. And death is part of life.

Life pursues us like our own shadow. And that shadow disappears only when there's nothing but shadow. Only when we surrender to it does life stop pursuing us.

The most painful thing about dreaming is our not existing. In reality, we cannot dream.

What does it mean to possess? We don't know. So how is it possible to possess anything? You will say that we don't know what life is, and yet we live... But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is is that living?

THE L LAKE OF P POSSESSION (II) (II).

Be it atoms or souls, nothing interpenetrates, which is why possession is impossible. From truth to a handkerchief nothing is possessable. Property isn't a theft: it's nothing.*

A LETTER (I) (I).

For some indefinite number of months you've seen me looking at you, constantly looking at you, always with the same hesitant and solicitous gaze. I know you've noticed this. And since you've noticed, you must have thought it strange that this gaze, which can't really be called shy, has never intimated a meaning. Always attentive, vague and unchanging, as if satisfied to be only the sadness of all this... Nothing else... And when you've thought about this regardless of what you feel when you think about me you must have considered my possible intentions. You must have reasoned, without being too convinced, that I'm either an eccentric version of the shy type or else something on the order of a madman.

I can assure you, Madam, with respect to my habit of looking at you, that I am not merely bashful nor positively mad. I am, first and foremost, something else, as I shall explain, without much hope you'll believe me. How often I've whispered to my dream of you: 'Do your duty as a useless amphora; fulfil your calling as a mere vessel.'

What nostalgia I felt for the idea I wanted to have of you when I learned, one day, that you were married! What a tragic day in my life that was! I wasn't jealous of your husband. It had never even occurred to me to wonder if you had one. I simply felt nostalgia for my idea of you. Were I to learn the absurd fact that a woman in a painting yes, a painting was married, I would feel just as sorry.

Possess you? I don't know how that might be done. And even if I had the human stain of knowing how, what a disgrace I would be to myself, what a flagrant insult to my own greatness were I even to think of putting myself on a par with your husband!

Possess you? One evening when you happen to be alone on a dark street, an attacker can subdue and possess you. He can even fertilize you, leaving behind a trace of himself in your womb. If possessing you means to possess your body, what good is that?

The attacker doesn't possess your soul? But how is a soul possessed? And is there a lover clever enough to be able to possess your 'soul'.....? I leave the job to your husband. Or do you expect me to stoop to his level?

How many hours I've spent in secret company with my idea of you! How much we've loved each other in my dreams! But I swear that even there I've never dreamed of possessing you. I'm a courteous and chaste man, even in my dreams. I have respect for the mere idea of a beautiful woman.

I wouldn't know how to make my soul interested in having my body possess yours. The very idea makes me trip in myself over unseen obstacles, and I get all tangled up in obscure inner webs. Imagine what would happen to me if I really wanted to possess you!

I would, I repeat, be incapable of trying to do it. I can't even make myself dream of doing it.

These, Madam, are the words I have to write in response to your involuntarily interrogative glance. It is in this book that you'll first read this letter to you. If you don't realize it's for you, it won't matter. I write to entertain myself more than to tell you anything. Only business letters are addressed to other people. The rest of one's letters, at least for a superior soul, should be exclusively from and to oneself.

I have nothing else to say to you. Be assured that I esteem you as much as I can. I should be pleased if you sometimes think of me.

A LETTER (II) (II).

Ah, if only you understood your duty to be merely a dreamer's dream. To be nothing but the censer in the cathedral of reveries. To trace your gestures like dreams, like mere windows opening on to new landscapes in your soul. To model your body so perfectly after dreams that no one could look at you without thinking of something else, since you would call to mind everything in the world but you, and to see you would be to hear music and to sleepwalk across vast landscapes with stagnant ponds, through hazy and quiet forests lost in the depths of ages past, where other invisible couples experience feelings we don't have.

The only thing I'd ever want you for is to not have you. If I were dreaming and you appeared, I'd want to be able to imagine I was still dreaming, perhaps without even seeing you, though perhaps noticing that the moonlight had filled the stagnant ponds with and that echoes of songs were suddenly rippling through the great inexplicit forest, lost in impossible ages. and that echoes of songs were suddenly rippling through the great inexplicit forest, lost in impossible ages.

My vision of you would be the bed where my soul would lie down and sleep, like a sick child, to dream once more of other skies. If you could talk? Yes, but only if hearing you wouldn't be hearing you but seeing great bridges joining the two dark shores of a moonlit river leading to the ancient sea where the caravels are forever ours.

You smile? I hadn't realized, but the stars were coursing my inner skies. You call me in my sleep. I hadn't noticed, but from that far-flung boat whose dreamed sail was cutting the moonlight, I can see distant coasts.

LUCID D DIARY.

My life: a tragedy booed off stage by the gods,* never getting beyond the first act.

Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.

The logical reward of my detachment from life is the incapacity I've created in others to feel anything for me. There's an aureole of indifference, an icy halo, that surrounds me and repels others. I still haven't succeeded in not suffering from my solitude. It's hard to achieve that distinction of spirit whereby isolation becomes a repose without anguish.

I put no faith in the friendship I was shown, and I wouldn't have put any in love had I been shown love, which wouldn't even have been possible. Although I never harboured illusions about those who claimed to be my friends, I inevitably managed to feel disillusioned with them such is my complex and subtle destiny of suffering.

I never doubted that everyone would let me down, and I was always dumbfounded when they did. When the thing I was expecting happened, it always hit me like something unexpected.

Having never discovered qualities in myself that might attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me. This opinion of myself would be stupidly modest, if facts on facts those unexpected facts I expected didn't always confirm it.

I can't even imagine receiving affection out of pity, for although physically ungainly and unappealing, I'm not organically malformed enough to enter the sphere of those who deserve the world's pity, nor do I have the winsomeness that attracts pity even when it's not clearly deserved; and what in me deserves pity can't have it, for there is no pity for the lame in spirit. So I fell into the centre of gravity of the world's disdain, in which I tend towards the fellow feeling of nobody.

My entire life has been a struggle to adapt to this circumstance without being overwhelmed by its cruelty and humiliation.

It takes a certain intellectual courage for a man to frankly recognize that he's nothing more than a human tatter, an abortion that survived, a madman not mad enough to be committed; and once he recognizes this, it takes even more moral courage to devise a way of adapting to his destiny, to accept without protest and without resignation, without any gesture or hint of a gesture, the organic curse imposed on him by Nature. To want not to suffer from this is to want too much, for it's beyond human capacity to accept what's obviously bad as if it were something good; and if we accept it as the bad thing it is, then we can't help but suffer.

To conceive of myself from the outside was my ruin the ruin of my happiness. I saw myself as others see me, and I despised myself not because I had character traits that made me worthy of contempt, but because I saw myself through the eyes of others, and felt the contempt they feel towards me. I experienced the humiliation of knowing myself. Since there's nothing noble about this calvary, and no resurrection three days later, I couldn't help but suffer from its disgrace.

I realized that nobody could love me unless he were completely lacking in aesthetic sensibility, in which case I would then despise him; and even a fond feeling towards me couldn't be any more than a whim of someone's basic indifference.

To see clearly into ourselves and into how others see us! To stare into the face of that truth! And in the end the cry of Christ on Calvary, when he stared into the face of his his truth: 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' truth: 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'

THE M MAJOR.

There's nothing that so intimately reveals and so perfectly conveys the substance of my innate misfortune as the type of daydream I most cherish, the personal balsam I most often choose to allay the anxiety I feel for existing. The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life. I love life too much to want it to be over; I love not living too much to have an active craving for life.

That's why, of all my dreams, the one I'm about to write down is my favourite. Sometimes at night, when the house is still because the landlords have gone out or fallen silent, I close my window and its heavy shutters; wearing an old suit, I sink down in my easy chair, and I slide into this dream in which I'm a retired major in a small-town hotel, hanging on after dinner in the company of several other guests who are more sober than I the lingering major, sitting there for no reason.

I imagine myself born that way. I'm not interested in the boyhood of the retired major, nor in the military ranks through which he ascended to arrive at the place I yearn for. Independent of Time and of Life, the major I imagine myself to be doesn't have any kind of past life, nor does he or did he ever have relatives; he exists externally in the life he lives at the small-town hotel, already weary of the jokes and the talk of the other guests who linger there with him.

MAXIMS.

To have sure and definite opinions, instincts, passions, and a dependable, recognizable character all of this leads to the horror of transforming our soul into a fact, into a material and external thing. To live in a sweet, fluid state of ignorance about things and about oneself is the only lifestyle that suits a wise man and makes him warm.

To be adept at constantly standing between ourselves and external things is the highest degree of wisdom and prudence.

Our personality should be inscrutable, even to ourselves. That's why we should always dream, making sure that we're included in our dreams so that we won't be able to have opinions about ourselves.

And we should especially protect our personality against being invaded by others. All outside interest in us is a flagrant disrespect. What saves the banal greeting 'How are you?' from being an inexcusable vulgarity is the fact that it's usually completely empty and insincere.

To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It's exceedingly important that we not love.) To give good advice is to disdain the faculty of erring that God gave to others. Not only that, we should be glad that other people don't act like us. It makes sense only to ask ask for advice from others, so that we can be sure by doing just the opposite that we are totally ourselves, in complete disagreement with all Otherness. for advice from others, so that we can be sure by doing just the opposite that we are totally ourselves, in complete disagreement with all Otherness.

The only advantage of studying is to take delight in all the things that other people haven't said.

Art is an isolation. Every artist should seek to isolate others, to fill their souls with a desire to be alone. The supreme triumph for the artist who writes is when his readers, on reading his works, prefer just to have them and not read them. This doesn't necessarily happen to celebrated writers, but it is the greatest tribute.....

To be lucid is to be out of sorts with oneself. The right state of mind for looking inside ourselves is that of someone looking at nerves and indecisions. of someone looking at nerves and indecisions.

The only intellectual attitude worthy of a superior creature is that of a calm and cold compassion for everything that isn't himself. Not that this attitude has a grain of legitimacy or truth, but it's so enviable that he must adopt it.

MILKY W WAY.

...with twisting phrases that have a poisonous spirituality...

...rituals clothed in tattered purples, mysterious ceremonial rites from the time of no one*...

...sequestered sensations felt in a body that is not our physical body and yet is physical in its own way, with subtleties that fall between the complex and the simple...

...lakes where a pellucid hint of muted gold hovers, hazily divested of ever having been materialized, and no doubt through tortuous refinements, a lily in sheer white hands...

...pacts between torpor and anguish dull green-black and looking terribly weary between their sentries of tedium...

...nacre of useless consequences, alabaster of many macerations the welcome distraction of violet gold sunsets with fringes, but no boats leading to better shores, nor bridges to better twilights...

...nor even to the edge of the idea of pools, lots of pools, in the distance amid poplar trees or perhaps cypresses, depending on the syllables employed by the wistful moment to utter their name...

...hence windows opening on to wharfs, a continual pounding of waves against docks, a mad and enraptured retinue like a confusion of opals in which amaranths and terebinths write with lucid insomnias on the dark stone walls of being able to hear...

...strands of fine silver, ties made from the thread of unravelled robes, futile feelings beneath linden trees, ancient couples on quiet paths lined by hedges, sudden fans, vague gestures, and no doubt better gardens awaiting the placid weariness of nothing but paths and promenades...

...bowers, trees in quincunxes, artificial grottoes, sculpted flower beds, fountains, all the art that survives from the dead masters whose dissatisfaction duelled with the visible, and they authored whole processions of things made for dreams along the narrow streets of the ancient villages of sensations...

...melodies that resound against the marble of distant palaces, reminiscences that place their hands on ours, sunsets in fateful skies like fortuitous glances of uncertainty, giving way to starlit nights over silently decaying empires...

_____.

To reduce sensation to a science, to make psychological analysis into a microscopically precise method that's the goal that occupies, like a steady thirst, the hub of my life's will.

It's between my sensations and my consciousness of them that all of my life's great tragedies occur. It's there in that murky, indefinite region of nothing but woods and every kind of water sound, where not even the commotion of our wars is felt, that my true being which I try in vain to see clearly takes place.

I lay down my life. (My sensations are a long-drawn-out epitaph* on top of my dead life.) I subsist in death and dusk. The most I can sculpt is my tomb of inner beauty.

The gates of my seclusion open on to parks of infinity, but no one passes through them, not even in my dreams and yet they are open eternally on to the useless, they are eternally of iron opening on to the unreal...

I pluck the petals of private glories in the gardens of my inner splendours, and between dreamed hedges my feet loudly tread the paths that lead to the Confused.

I've pitched my Empires in the Confused, at the edge of silences, in the tawny war that will do away with the Exact.

_____.

The man of science realizes that the only reality for him is his own self, and that the only real world is the world as his sensations give it to him. That's why, instead of following the fallacious path of adapting his sensations to other people's, he uses objective science to try to achieve a perfect knowledge of his world and his personality. There's nothing more objective than his dreams, and nothing more infallibly his than his self-awareness. Around these two realities he refines his science. It's very different from the one practised by the old scientists, who, rather than studying the laws of their own personality and the organization of their dreams, sought the laws of the 'outside' and the organization of what they called 'Nature'.

What's primordial in me are my habit of dreaming and my knack for dreaming. The circumstances of my life, solitary and quiet since my childhood, and perhaps forces that go further back, moulding me to their sinister specifications through the obscure action of heredity, have made my mind an endless stream of daydreams. Everything I am comes down to this, and even what seems farthest in me from the dreamer belongs unequivocally to the soul of one who only dreams, with his soul as elevated as it can be.

For the sake of my own pleasure in self-analysis, I would like to express in words, as far as I'm able, the mental processes which in me are really just one process that of a life devoted to dreaming, of a soul that knows only how to dream.

Seeing myself from the outside (as I almost always do), I'm unfit for action, flustered when I have to take a step or make a move, tongue-tied when I have to talk to someone, lacking the inner lucidity needed to enjoy things that require mental effort, and without the physical stamina to entertain myself through some merely mechanical labour.

It's only natural that I'm this way. A dreamer is expected to be this way. All reality disconcerts me. Other people's speech throws me into a state of great anguish. The reality of other souls always astounds me. The vast network of unconscious behaviours responsible for all the action I see strikes me as an absurd illusion, without any plausible coherence, nothing.

But should someone imagine that I'm ignorant of the workings of other people's psychology, that I'm not clearly aware of their motives and private thoughts, then he'll be quite mistaken about what I am.

For I'm not just a dreamer, I'm exclusively a dreamer. My sole habit to dream has endowed me with an extraordinarily keen inner eyesight. I not only see the figures and stage sets of my dreams with astounding and startling clarity, I see just as clearly my abstract ideas, my human feelings (what's left of them), my secret urges and my psychological attitudes towards myself. I even see, inside myself, my own abstract ideas; I see them in an internal space, with my veritable inner eyesight. And thus their meanders are visible to me in every detail.

I therefore know myself completely and, knowing myself completely, I know all of humanity completely. There is no base impulse or noble intention that hasn't been a flash in my soul, and I know the tell-tale gestures of each one. Beneath the masks of goodness or indifference that wicked thoughts wear, even within us, I recognize them for what they are by their gestures. I know what strives, inside us, to delude us. And thus I know most people better than they know themselves. I often probe them at some length, for in that way I make them mine. I conquer every psyche I fathom, because for me to dream is to possess. And so it's only natural that I, dreamer that I am, should be the analyst I profess to be.

That's why plays count among the few things I occasionally enjoy reading. Plays are performed in me every day, and I know exactly how souls are laid out flat, in a Mercator projection. But this doesn't really amuse me much, because playwrights are always making the same trite and glaring errors. No play ever satisfied me. Knowing human psychology with a lightning precision that probes every cranny with a single glance, I find the crude analysis and construction of playwrights offensive, and the little that I read in this genre annoys me like a blot of ink on a handwritten page.

Things are the raw material of my dreams; that's why I apply a distractedly hyperattentive attention to certain details of the Outside.

To give contours and relief to my dreams, I have to understand how life's characters and reality's landscapes appear to us with contours and relief. Because the dreamer's eyesight is not like the eyesight we use to see actual things. In dreams we do not, as in reality, focus equally on the important and unimportant aspects of an object. The dreamer sees only what's important. An object's true reality is only a portion of what it is; the rest is the heavy tribute it pays to physical matter for the right to exist in space. In like manner, certain phenomena that are palpably real in dreams have no reality in space. A real sunset is imponderable and transitory. A dreamed sunset is fixed and eternal. Those who can write are those who know how to see their dreams with sharp clarity (and do so) and to see life as they see dreams, to see life immaterially, taking pictures of it with reverie's camera, which is insensible to the rays of what's heavy, useful and circumscribed, such things yielding nothing but a black blur on the photographic plate of the soul.

This attitude, engrafted into me from so much dreaming, makes me always see the dream side of reality. My eyesight suppresses those aspects of an object that my dreams can't use. And so I always live in dreams, even when I live in life. To look at a sunset inside me or at a sunset on the Outside is all the same to me, for I see them in the same way, my eyesight registering the same thing in both cases.

It will therefore seem to many that I have a distorted view of myself. In a certain way it is distorted. But I dream myself and choose those parts of me that are dreamable, constructing and reconstructing myself in every way possible until what I am and what I am not conform to my ideal. Sometimes the best way to see an object is to delete it, because it subsists in a way I can't quite explain, consisting of the substance of its negation and deletion; this is what I do with vast areas of my real-life being, which, after they're deleted from my picture of myself, transfigure my true being, the one that's real for me.

How do I keep from deceiving myself in these processes of illusion applied to my own person? Well, the process that thrusts a certain aspect of the world or the figure of a dream into a more-than-real reality also thrusts emotions and thoughts into the more-than-real sphere, stripping them of all the false trappings (and only rarely are they not false) of nobility and purity. It should be noted that my objectivity couldn't be more absolute, for I create each object absolute, with absolute qualities in its concrete form. I haven't really fled from life, in the sense of seeking a softer bed for my soul; I've merely changed lives, finding in my dreams the same objectivity that I found in life. My dreams I discuss this in another passage take shape independently of my will, and they frequently shock and offend me. The things I discover in myself very often make me feel dismayed, ashamed (perhaps due to some vestige of humanity in me what is shame?), and alarmed.

In me ceaseless daydreaming has replaced attention. Over everything I see, including things seen in dreams, I've taken to superimposing other dreams I have inside me. I'm already sufficiently inattentive to be adept at what I've dubbed 'the dream view' of things. Even so, since this inattentiveness was motivated by a perpetual daydreaming and by a preoccupation (likewise not overly attentive) with the course of my dreams, I superimpose what I dream on the dreams I see in the real world around me, intersecting reality already stripped of its physical matter with an absolute immateriality.

This explains the ability I've acquired to focus on various ideas at the same time, to observe certain things while at the same time dreaming other, very different things, to dream simultaneously of a real sunset over the real Tagus River and a dreamed morning on an inner Pacific Ocean; and the two dreamed things crisscross without blending, without anything getting mixed up besides the different emotional states induced by each. It's as if I saw a number of people walking down a street and felt all their souls inside me (which could occur only in a unity of feeling) at the same time that I saw their various bodies (these I could see only separately) crossing paths on the street full of legs in motion.