37 [130]

The moment I find myself, I am lost; if I believe, I doubt; I grasp hold of something but hold nothing in my hand. I go to sleep as if I were going for a walk, but I’m awake. I wake as if I slept, and I am not myself. Life, after all, is but one great insomnia and there is a lucid half-awakeness about everything we think or do.

34 [158]

Everything that happens in the world we live in, happens in us. Anything that ceases to exist in the world we see around us, ceases to exist in us. Everything that was, assuming that we noticed it when it was there, is torn from us when it leaves. The office boy left today. 

33 [154]

Clouds... I'm very conscious of the sky today, though there are days that, when I feel it, I don't see it, living as I do in the city and not in the country where the sky is always so present. 

Clouds... They are the principal reality of the day and I'm as preoccupied with them as if the clouding over the sky were one of the great dangers that fate has in store for me. Clouds... from the river up to the castle, from west to east, they drift along, a disparate, naked tumult. Some are white, the tattered vanguard of some unknown army; others, more ponderous and almost black, are swept along by the audible wind; besmirched with white, they seem inclined to linger and plunge into darkness the illusion of space afforded to the serried ranks of houses by the narrow streets, a darkness provoked more by their approach than by any actual shadow they cast.

Clouds... I exist unconsciously and I'll die unwillingly. I am the interval between what I am and what I am not, between what I dream and what life has made out of me, the abstract, the carnal halfway-house between things, like myself, that are nothing. Clouds... how disquieting it is to feel, how troubling to think, how vain to want! Clouds... They continue to pass, some so large (though just how large it's hard to judge because of the houses) they seem about to take over the whole sky; others, of uncertain size, which could be two clouds together or one about to split in two, drift, directionless, through the high air across the weary sky; to one side, in grand and chilly isolation, are other small clouds that look like the playthings of powerful creatures, irregularly shaped balls to be used in some absurd game. 

Clouds... I question myself but I do not know myself. I've done nothing nor will I ever do anything useful to justify my existence. The part of my life not wasted in thinking up confused interpretations of nothing at all, has been spent making prose poems out of incommunicable feelings I use to make the unknown universe my own. Both objectively and subjectively speaking, I'm sick of myself. I'm sick of everything, and of everything about everything. Clouds... Today they are the everything, dismantled fragments of heaven, the only real thing between the empty earth and the non-existent sky, indescribable scraps of tedium I impose on them, mist condensed into bland threads, soiled tufts of cotton wool in a hospital without walls. Clouds... They are, like me, a ruined road between sky and earth, at the mercy of some invisible impulse, they may or may not thunder, they gladden the earth with their whiteness, sadden it with their darkness, fictions born of empty intervals and aimless meanderings, remote from earthly noises, but lacking the silence of the sky. Clouds... they continue to drift past, on and on, as they always will, like a constantly interrupted winding and unwinding of dull yarns, the diffuse prolongation of a false, fragmented sky.

Read on a cloudy, Sunday afternoon.

20 [56]

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 5.000 miles around, because he’s always seeing new things; 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. 

Fa temps que penso que l’estimo. Però potser no és estimar, en el sentit que pesa sobre la majoria de la gent, sinó en el sentit d’admiració, de veure com s’il·lumina el cel quan ella mostra els pensaments que li corren per dins, com se li esquerda el cel quan recorre paratges foscos de la seva memòria. Quan desplega una sensibilitat que et desarma quan no sabies ni que portaves una feixuga armadura.

No sé si la seva energia i la meva acaben d’encaixar, però és un dubte que cada volta em preocupa menys. Quan agafo distància, i m’enlairo fora de les meves idees, és quan ho sento més clar.

Grief is a beautiful kind of suffering.

Not because it feels good, 

but because you loved deeply enough

to be changed forever.

There is not a singular human being that escapes grief.

Not the strongest, 

not the most spiritual, 

and not the most healed.

To love someone is to sign a contract with loss.

And grief is not a malfunction of the heart,

it's proof that your heart worked.

Grief feels like breaking, 

because something did break.

Your reality, 

your expectations, 

the version of life that you thought you'd keep.

Your brain searches for them in rooms

they no longer exist in.

Your body waits for a voice

that won't come back in the same way.

That disorientation, that ache, 

that's love, with nowhere to land.

But here's the quiet truth:

grief doesn't just take, 

it transforms you.

You don't just move on;

you expand to carry both, 

the loss

and the love.

They don't leave you.

They relocate.

Into your voice.

Your choices.

Your softness.

Your strength.

You begin to live with them.

Grief is not here to destroy you, 

it's here to deepen you.

Because only those who have loved deeply will know the meaning of carrying something sacred.

Even after it's gone.

Non hai ieri

Non hai domani

Tutto è ormai.