Only one thing surprises me more than the stupidity which most men live their lives and that is the intelligence inherent to stupidity.
To all appearances, the monotony of ordinary lives is horrific. I’m having lunch in this ordinary restaurant and I look over to the cook behind the counter and at the old server next to me, serving me as he has served others here for, I believe, the past thirty years. What are these men’s lives like? For forty years the cook has spent mostly all of every day in the kitchen; he has a few breaks, he sleeps relatively a little, sometimes he goes back to his village whence he returns unhesitatingly and without regret; he slowly accumulates his slow earned money, which he does not propose spending; he would fall ill if he had to abandon (for ever9 his kitchen for the land he bought in Galicia; he’s lived in Lisbon for forty years and he’s not even been to Rotunda*, or to the theatre and only once to the Coliseu (whose clowns still inhabit the inner interstices of his life). He got married, how or why I don’t know, has four sons and one daughter and, as he leans out over the counter towards my table, his smile conveys a great, solemn, contented happiness. He isn’t pretending, nor does he have any reason to. If he seems happy it’s because he is.
And what about the old waiter who serves me and who, for what must be the millionth time in his career, has just placed a coffee on the table before me? His life is the same as the cook’s, the only difference being the four or five yards that separate the kitchen where one works from the restaurant dining room where the other works. Apart from minor differences like having two rather than five children, paying more frequent visits to Galicia, and knowing Lisbon better than the cook (as well as Oporto where he lived for four years), he is equally contented.
I look again, with real terror, at the panorama of those lives and, just as I’m about to feel horror, sorrow and revulsion for them, discover that the people who feel no horror or sorrow or revulsion are the very people who have the most right to, the people living those lives. That is the central error of the literary imagination: the idea that other people are like us and must therefore feel like us. Fortunately for humanity, each man is only himself and only the genius is given the ability to be others as well.
In the end, everything is relative. A tiny incident in the street, which draws the restaurant cook to the door, affords him more entertainment than any I might get from the contemplation of the most original idea, from reading the best book or from the most pleasant of useless dreams. And, if life is essentially monotonous, the truth is that he has escaped from that monotony better and more easily than I. He is no more possessor of the truth that I am, because the truth doesn’t belong to anyone; but what he does possess is happiness.
The wise man makes his life monotonous, for then even the tiniest incident becomes imbued with great significance. After his third lion the lionhunter loses interest in the adventure of the hunt. For my monotonous cook there is something modestly apocalyptic about every streetfight he witnesses. To someone who has never been out of Lisbon the tram ride to Benfica is like a trip to the infinite and if one day he were to visit Sintra, he would feel as if he had journeyed to Mars. On the other hand, the traveller who has covered the globe can find nothing new for 5.000miles around, because he’s always seeing new thigns; there’s novelty and there’s the boredom of the eternally new and the latter brings about the death of the former.
The truly wise man could enjoy the whole spectacle of the world from his armchair; he wouldn’t need tot talk to anyone or to know how to read, just how to make use of his five senses and a soul innocent of sadness.
*The Rotunda was the name given by lisboetas (natives of Lisbon) to the Praça Marquês de Pombal.
