That all of us are different is an axiom of our true nature.* We only look like each other from a distance to the extent, therefore, that we are not ourselves. That's why life is for the indefinite; the only people who get along well are those who never define themselves, those who are equally nobody.
Each of us is two, and when two people meet, come into contact or join together, it's rare that the four of them can agree. If the man who dreams in the man who acts is so frequently at odds with him, how can he help but be at odds with the man who acts and the man who dreams in the Other?
Each life, because it's life, is a distinct force, and each of us naturally tends towards himself, stopping at other people along the way. If we have enough self-respect to find ourselves interesting..... Every coming together is a conflict. The other is always an obstacle for those who seek. Only those who don't seek are happy, because only those who don't seek find; since they seek nothing, they already have it, and to already have whatever it may be is to be happy, just as not to think is the best part of being rich.
Within me I look at you, imagined bride, and we start to clash even before you exist. My habit of dreaming things vividly gives me an accurate notion of reality. Whoever dreams to excess must give reality to his dreams. Whoever gives reality to his dreams must give them the equilibrium of reality. Whoever gives the equilibrium of reality to his dreams will suffer from the reality of dreaming as much as from the reality of life, and from the unreality of his dreams as much as from his feeling that life is unreal.
I'm waiting for you, in a state of reverie, in our bedroom that has two doors; I dream I hear you coming, and in my dream you enter by the door on the right. If, when you actually enter, it's by the door on the left, there will already be a difference between you and my dream. The whole of the human tragedy is summed up in this tiny example of how the people we think about are never the people we think they are.
Love demands identification with something different, which isn't even possible in logic, much less in real life. Love wants to possess. It wants to make into its own that which must remain outside it; otherwise the distinction between what it is is in itself and what it in itself and what it makes makes into itself will be lost. Love is surrender. The greater the surrender, the greater the love. But total surrender also surrenders its consciousness of the other. The greatest love is therefore death, or forgetting, or renunciation all forms of love that make love an absurdity. into itself will be lost. Love is surrender. The greater the surrender, the greater the love. But total surrender also surrenders its consciousness of the other. The greatest love is therefore death, or forgetting, or renunciation all forms of love that make love an absurdity.
On the ancient terrace of the seaside palace, we will meditate in silence on the difference between us. I was the prince and you the princess, on the terrace by the sea. Our love was born in our meeting, the way beauty was born when the moon met the waves.
Love wants to possess, but it doesn't know what possession is. If I'm not my own, how can I be yours, or you mine? If I don't possess my own being, how can I possess an extraneous being? If I'm even different from my own identical self, how can I be identical to a completely different self?
Love is a mysticism that wants to be materialized, an impossibility that our dreams always insist must be possible.
I'm talking metaphysics? But all of life is a metaphysics in the darkness, with a vague murmur of the gods and only one way to follow, which is our ignorance of the right way.
The most insidious aspect of my decadence is my love of health and clarity. I've always felt that a handsome body and the carefree rhythm of a youthful stride were more useful in the world than all the dreams that exist in me. It's with a joy of the old in spirit that I sometimes observe, without envy or desire, the casual couples that the afternoon brings together and that walk arm-in-arm towards the unconscious consciousness of youth. I enjoy them as I enjoy a truth, without considering whether it applies to me. If I compare them to myself, I still enjoy them, but as one who enjoys a truth that hurts, the pain of the hurt being compensated by the pride of having understood the gods.
I'm the opposite of the Platonic* symbolists, for whom every being and every event is the shadow and only the shadow of a reality. Everything for me, rather than a point of arrival, is a point of departure. For the occultist everything ends in everything; for me everything begins in everything.
I proceed, as they do, by way of analogy and suggestion, but the small garden that to them suggests the soul's order and beauty, to me suggests merely the larger garden where, far away from humans, this unhappy life perhaps could be happy. Each thing suggests to me not the reality of which it is the shadow, but the reality for which it is the path.
The garden of Estrela,* in late afternoon, suggests to me a park from olden times, in the centuries before the soul became disenchanted.
SELF-EXAMINATION.
One who lives life falsely, in dreams, is still living life. Renunciation is an act. Dreaming is a confession of one's need to live, with real life simply being replaced by unreal life, to compensate for the irrepressible urge to live.
What does all this amount to but the search for happiness? And does anyone search for anything else?
Have constant daydreaming and endless analysis given me anything essentially essentially different from what life would have given me? different from what life would have given me?
Withdrawing from people didn't help me find myself, nor.....
This book is a single state of soul, analysed from all sides, investigated in all directions.
Has this attitude at least brought me something new? Not even this consolation is mine. Everything was already said long ago, by Heraclitus and Ecclesiastes: Life is a child's game in the sand... vanity and vexation of spirit Life is a child's game in the sand... vanity and vexation of spirit... And in that single phrase of poor Job: My soul is weary of my life My soul is weary of my life.
I listen to myself dream. I lull myself with the sound of my images. Strange melodies inside me spell out . .
A phrase that resonates with images is worth so many gestures! A metaphor can make up for so many things!
I listen to myself... Inside me there are ceremonies, corteges... Spangles in my tedium... Masked balls... I observe my soul with astonishment...
Kaleidoscope of fragmented sequences.....
Splendour of intensely experienced sensations... Royal beds in deserted castles, jewels of dead princesses, sea coves seen through castle loopholes... Honour and power will doubtless come, and the happiest souls will have corteges in their exile... Sleeping orchestras, threads embroidering silks... threads embroidering silks...
In Pascal: In Vigny: In you.....
In Amiel,* so completely in Amiel:... (certain phrases)...
In Verlaine and the symbolists: I feel so sick inside, and without even a little originality in my sickness... I do what countless others have done before me... I suffer what's old and hackneyed... Why do I even think these things, when so many have already thought and suffered them?...
And yet I have after all introduced something new, although I'm not responsible for it. It came from the Night and glows in me like a star... All of my effort couldn't have produced it or snuffed it out... I'm a bridge between two mysteries, with no idea of how I got built.
THE S SENSATIONIST.
In this twilight of spiritual disciplines, with beliefs dying out and the old cults gathering dust, our sensations are the only reality we have left. The only scruples we have at this point, and the only science that satisfies, are those of our sensations.
I'm more convinced than ever that inferior adornment is the highest and most enlightened destiny we can confer on our souls. If my life could be lived in tapestries of the spirit, I'd have no depths of despair to bemoan.
I belong to a generation or rather, to part of a generation that lost all respect for the past and all belief or hope in the future. And so we live off the present with the hunger and eagerness of those who have no other home. And since it is in our sensations, and particularly in the useless sensations of our dreams, that we find a present which remembers neither past nor future, we smile indulgently at our inner life while yawning with disdain at the quantitative reality of things.
Perhaps we are not all that different from those who, in real life, think only of amusing themselves. But the sun of our egoistic concern is setting, and it's in colours of twilight and contradiction that our hedonism is slowly cooling.
We're convalescents. Most of us are people who never learned an art or a trade, not even the art of enjoying life. Since we're basically averse to prolonged social contact, even the greatest of friends tend to bore us after half an hour; we long to see them only when we think about seeing them, and the best moments we spend with them occur in our dreams. I don't know if this is indicative of superficial friendship. Perhaps not. What I do know is that the things we love, or think we love, have their full weight and worth only when simply dreamed.
We don't care for shows. We despise actors and dancers. Every show is a coarse imitation of what should have been only dreamed.
We're indifferent to other people's opinion not innately, but because of an education of our sentiments that has generally been forced on us by various painful experiences. But we treat others courteously and even like them, with an indifferent sort of interest, because everyone is interesting and convertible into dreams and into other people.....
With no aptitude for loving, we are wearied by the mere thought of the words we would have to say in order to be loved. Besides, who among us wants to be loved? The 'on le fatigait en l'aimant'* apropos Rene is not quite the right motto for us. The very idea of being loved wearies us, and to the point of panic.
My life is an unrelenting fever, an unquenchable thirst. Real life afflicts me like a hot day, and there's something mean about the way it afflicts me.
SENTIMENTAL E EDUCATION.
For those who choose to make dreams their life, and to make a religion and politics out of cultivating sensations like plants in a hothouse, the sign that they've successfully taken the first step is when they feel the tiniest things in an extraordinary and extravagant way. That's all there is to the first step. To know how to sip a cup of tea with the extreme voluptuousness that the normal man experiences only when overcome by joy at seeing his ambition suddenly fulfilled or himself suddenly cured of a terrible nostalgia, or when he's in the final, carnal acts of love; to be able to achieve in the vision of a sunset or in the contemplation of a decorative detail that intensity of feeling which generally can't occur through sight or hearing but only by way of the carnal senses touch, taste and smell when they sculpt the object of sensation on our consciousness; to be able to convert our interior vision, the hearing in our dreams, and all imagined senses and the senses of the imagination into tangible receptors like the five senses that receive the outside world: these are some of the sensations (and similar examples can be imagined) that the trained cultivator of his own feelings is able to experience with a convulsive fervour, and I mention them so as to give a rough but concrete idea of what I'm trying to convey.
Arriving at this degree of sensation, however, causes the lover of sensations to feel griefs both from the outside and from inside himself with the same conscious intensity. It is when he realizes, and because he realizes, that to feel in the extreme can mean not only extreme pleasure but also acute suffering that the dreamer is led to take the second step in his self-ascension.
I'll leave aside the step that he might or might not take and that, if he can and does take it, will determine certain of his attitudes and affect the general way he proceeds I mean the step of completely isolating himself from the real world, which of course he can take only if he's rich. For I suppose it's clear by reading between the lines that the dreamer, depending on his relative possibility of isolation and self-dedication, should with greater or lesser intensity concentrate on his work of pathologically stimulating his sensitivity to things and dreams. The man who must actively live and associate with people and even in this case it's possible to reduce intimacy with others to a minimum (intimacy with people, and not mere contact, is what's detrimental) will have to freeze the entire surface of his social self, so that every fraternal and friendly gesture he receives will slide off and not enter or make a lasting impression. This seems hard to do but isn't. People are easy to drive away: all we have to do is not go near them. Anyway, I'll pass over this point and return to what I was explaining.
The creation of an automatically heightened and complex awareness of the simplest and commonest sensations leads not only to a vast increase in the enjoyment we get from feeling but also, as I've said, to a tremendous upsurge in the amount of pain we experience. The second step for the dreamer should therefore be to avoid pain. He shouldn't avoid it like the Stoics or the early Epicureans, by abandoning the nest, for that will harden him against pleasure as well as against pain. He should, instead, seek pleasure in pain, and then learn how to feel pain falsely to feel some kind of pleasure, that is, whenever he feels pain. There are various paths for reaching this goal. One is to hyperanalyse our pain (but only after we've first trained ourselves to react to pleasure by exclusively feeling it, with no analysis). This is an easier technique than it seems, at least for superior souls. To analyse pain and to get in the habit of submitting all pains to analysis, until we do it automatically, by instinct, will endow every pain imaginable with the pleasure of analysing it. Once our ability and instinct to analyse grow large enough, our practice of it will absorb everything, and there will be nothing left of pain but an indefinite substance for analysis.
Another method, more subtle and more difficult, is to develop the habit of incarnating the pain in an ideal figure. First we must create another I, charged with suffering in and for us everything we suffer. Next we need to create an inner sadism, completely masochistic, that enjoys its suffering as if it were someone else's. This method, which on first reading seems impossible, isn't easy, but it is eminently attainable, presenting no special difficulties for those who are well versed in lying to themselves. Once this is achieved, pain and suffering acquire an absolutely tantalizing flavour of blood and disease, an incredibly exotic pungency of decadent gratification! The feeling of pain resembles the anguished, troubled height of convulsions, and suffering the long and slow kind has the intimate yellow which colours the vague bliss of a profoundly felt convalescence. And an exquisite exhaustion tinged with disquiet and melancholy evokes the complex sensation of anguish that our pleasures arouse, in the thought that they will vanish, as well as the melancholy pre-weariness we feel in our sensual delights, when we think of the weariness they'll bring.
There is a third method for subtilizing pains into pleasures and for making doubts and worries into a soft bed. It consists in intensely concentrating on our anxieties and sufferings, making them so fiercely felt that by their very excess they bring the pleasure of excess, while by their violence they suggest the pleasure that hurts for being so pleasurable and the gratification that smacks of blood for having wounded us. This can only happen, of course, in souls dedicated to pleasure by habit and by education. And when, as in me refiner that I am of fallacious refinements, an architect dedicated to building myself out of sensations subtilized through the intellect, through abdication from life, through analysis and through pain itself , all three methods are employed simultaneously, when every felt pain (felt so quickly there's no time for the soul to plan any defence) is automatically analysed to the core, ruthlessly foisted on an extraneous I, and buried in me to the utmost height of pain, then I truly feel like a victor and a hero. Then life stops for me, and art grovels at my feet.
Everything I've been describing is just the second step that the dreamer must take to reach his dream.
Who besides me has been able to take the third step, which leads to the sumptuous threshold of the Temple? This is the step which is indeed hard to take, for it requires an inward effort vastly greater than any effort we make in life, but it also rewards us to the heights and depths of our soul in a way that life never could. This step is once everything else has been completely and simultaneously carried out, the three subtle methods having been applied to exhaustion to immediately pass the sensation through pure intelligence, filtering it through a higher analysis that shapes it into a literary form with its own substance and character. Then I have completely fixed the sensation. Then I have made the unreal real and have given the unattainable an eternal pedestal. Then, within myself, I have been crowned Emperor.
Don't imagine that I write to publish, or merely to write, or to produce art. I write because this is the final goal, the supreme refinement, the organically illogical refinement, of my cultivation of the states of soul. If I take one of my sensations and unravel it so as to use it to weave the inner reality I call 'The Forest of Estrangement' or 'A Voyage I Never Made', you can be sure I don't do it for the sake of a lucid and shimmering prose, nor even for the sake of the pleasure I get from that prose though I'm quite glad to have it as an additional final touch, like a splendidly falling curtain over my dreamed stage settings but to give complete exteriority to what is interior, thereby enabling me to realize the unrealizable, to conjoin the contradictory and, having exteriorized my dream, to give it its most powerful expression as pure dream. Yes, this is my role as a stagnator of life, chiseller of inaccuracies, sick pageboy of my soul and Queen, reading to her at twilight not the poems from the book of my Life that lies open on my knees, but the poems that I invent and pretend to read, and that she pretends to hear, while somewhere and somehow the Evening is softening over this metaphor raised up in me into Absolute Reality the last hazy light of a mysterious spiritual day. of my cultivation of the states of soul. If I take one of my sensations and unravel it so as to use it to weave the inner reality I call 'The Forest of Estrangement' or 'A Voyage I Never Made', you can be sure I don't do it for the sake of a lucid and shimmering prose, nor even for the sake of the pleasure I get from that prose though I'm quite glad to have it as an additional final touch, like a splendidly falling curtain over my dreamed stage settings but to give complete exteriority to what is interior, thereby enabling me to realize the unrealizable, to conjoin the contradictory and, having exteriorized my dream, to give it its most powerful expression as pure dream. Yes, this is my role as a stagnator of life, chiseller of inaccuracies, sick pageboy of my soul and Queen, reading to her at twilight not the poems from the book of my Life that lies open on my knees, but the poems that I invent and pretend to read, and that she pretends to hear, while somewhere and somehow the Evening is softening over this metaphor raised up in me into Absolute Reality the last hazy light of a mysterious spiritual day.
SYMPHONY OF THE R RESTLESS N NIGHT.
The twilights of ancient cities, with lost traditions inscribed in the black stones of their massive buildings; tremulous dawns over inundated fields, swampy and damp like the air before the sun comes out; the narrow lanes where anything could happen; the heavy chests in age-old sitting rooms; the well behind the farmhouse on a moonlit night; the letter dating from when our grandmother whom we never met was first in love; the mildew in the rooms where the past is stored; the rifle no one knows how to use any more; the fever of hot afternoons next to the window; not a soul on the road; fitful slumber; the blight in the vineyards; church bells; the cloistral grief of living... Hour of blessings: your soft, frail hands... The caress never comes, the stone in your ring bleeds in the growing darkness... Religious celebrations with no belief in our soul: the material beauty of the ugly, roughhewn saints, romantic passions lived in the mind, the smell of the sea as night falls on the docks of the city made damp by the chilling air...
Your slender hands hover, like wings, over someone whom life sequesters. Long corridors and cracks around the windows, open even when closed, the floor as cold as tombstones, the nostalgia for love like a trip yet to be made to incomplete lands... Names of ancient queens... Stained-glass windows depicting stalwart counts... The vaguely scattered morning light, like a cold incense filling the air of the church and concentrated in the darkness of the impenetrable ground... Dry hands pressed one against the other.
The scruples of the monk when he discovers the teachings of occult masters in the strange ciphers of an ancient book, and the steps of Initiation in the book's decorative prints.
A beach in the sun fever in me... The sea that shimmers in the anxiety that chokes me... The sails in the distance and how they sail in my fever... The steps leading down to the beach in my fever... Warmth in the cool breeze from across the sea, mare vorax, minax mare vorax, minax, mare tenebrosum mare tenebrosum the dark, far-away night of the argonauts,* and my forehead burning with their primitive ships... the dark, far-away night of the argonauts,* and my forehead burning with their primitive ships...
Everything belongs to others except my grief for not having any of it.
Give me the needle... Today the house is missing the sound of her soft footsteps, and I miss not knowing where she might be and what she might be making with pleats, with colours, with pins... Today her sewing, locked for ever in the drawers of the chest, is superfluous, and there is no warmth of dreamed arms clasping round my mother's neck.
THE V VISUAL L LOVER(I).
Anteros*
I have a decorative and superficial concept of profound love and its usefulness. I prefer visual passions, keeping my heart intact for the sake of more unreal destinies.
I don't remember having ever loved more than the 'painting' in someone, the pure exterior, in which the soul's only role is to animate and enliven it, making it different from a painting done on canvas.
This is how I love: I fix my attention on a beautiful or attractive or otherwise lovable figure, whether of a woman or a man (where there's no desire, there's no sexual preference), and that figure captivates, obsesses, possesses me. But I want only to see it, and nothing would horrify me more than the prospect of meeting and speaking to the real person whom the figure visibly manifests.
I love with my gaze, and not even with fantasy. Because there's nothing I fantasize about the figure that captivates me. I don't imagine myself linked to it in any other way, because my decorative love has no psychological depth. I'm not interested in knowing the identity, activities or opinions of the human creature whose outward appearance I see.
The vast succession of persons and things that make up the world is for me an endless gallery of paintings, whose inner dimension doesn't interest me. It doesn't interest me, because the soul is monotonous and always the same in everybody; only its personal manifestations change, and the best part of the soul spills over into dreams, behaviour and gestures, thereby entering the painting which captivates me and in which I see faces that are faithful to my affection.
A human creature, as far as I'm concerned, has no soul. The soul is his own affair.
It is thus in pure vision that I experience the animated exterior of things and beings, indifferent like a god from another world to their spirit content. I delve into their being by exploring the surface; when I want depth, I look for it in myself and in my concept of things.
What can I gain from personal acquaintance with people I love merely as decor? Not disillusion, since I harbour no fantasies and love only their appearance, which won't be affected by their stupidity or mediocrity; I hoped for nothing from them but their appearance, which was already there and which persists. But personal acquaintance is harmful because it's useless; materially useless things are always harmful. What's the point of knowing the person's name? And yet it's inevitably the first thing I'm told when we're introduced.
Personal acquaintance should also mean the freedom to contemplate, which is my way of loving. But we can't freely regard or contemplate someone we know personally.
From the artist's viewpoint, anything extra counts as a deficit, for it interferes with and thus diminishes the desired effect.
My natural destiny is to be a visual lover of nature's shapes and forms, an objectifier of dreams, a passionate and indefinite contemplator of appearances and the manifestations of things.....
It's not a case of what psychiatrists call psychic onanism, nor is it what they term erotomania. I don't fantasize, as in psychic onanism; I don't imagine myself as a carnal lover or even as a casual friend of the person I gaze at and remember. Nor, as in erotomania, do I idealize and remove the person from the concretely aesthetic sphere; I don't think about or desire anything more from the person than what I receive from my eyes and from the pure, direct memory of what my eyes have seen.
THE V VISUAL L LOVER(II).
And I avoid spinning webs of fantasy around the figures I contemplate to entertain myself. I see them, and their value for me consists only in their being seen. Anything I might add to them would only diminish them, for it would diminish their 'visibility'.
Whatever I might fantasize about them would instantly hit me with its obvious falseness; and while dreamed things please me, false things disgust me. I'm enchanted by pure dreams, those which have no relation to reality nor even any point of contact with it. But imperfect dreams, which have their basis in life, fill me with loathing, or would fill me with loathing were I to indulge in them.
I see humanity as a vast decorative motif that lives through our eyes and ears, as well as through psychological emotion. All I want from life is to observe humanity. All I want from myself is to observe life.
I'm like a being from another existence who passes, with a certain amount of interest, through this one. I'm alien to it in every way. There's a kind of glass sheet between me and it. I want the glass to be perfectly clear, so that it will in no way hinder my examination of what's behind it, but I always want the glass.
For every scientifically minded spirit, to see in something more than what's there is to see it less. Materially adding to it spiritually diminishes it.
This attitude is no doubt responsible for my aversion to museums. The only museum for me is the whole of life, in which the picture is always absolutely accurate, with any inaccuracy being due to the spectator's imperfection. I do what I can to reduce that imperfection, and if I can't do anything, then I rest content with the way it is, because, like everything else, it can't be any other way.
A VOYAGE IN INEVER M MADE(I).
It was at a vaguely autumnal twilight hour that I set out on the voyage I never made.
The sky, as I impossibly remember, was tinged by a purplish remnant of sad gold, and the clear, agonizing line of the hills was wrapped by a deathly-coloured glow that penetrated and softened the accuracy of its contours. On the other side of the ship (the night was colder and farther advanced under that side of the deck awning) lay the open ocean, trembling all the way out to where the eastern horizon was growing sad and where a darker air, placing shadows of early night on the obscure liquid line of the sea's visible limit, hovered like haze on a hot day.
The sea, I remember, had shadowy hues mixed in with wavy patches of faint light and it was all mysterious like a sad idea in a happy hour, portending I don't know what.
I didn't set out from any port I knew. Even today I don't know what port it was, for I've still never been there. And besides, the ritual purpose of my journey was to go in search of non-existent ports ports that would be merely a putting-in at ports; forgotten inlets of rivers, straits running through irreproachably unreal cities. You will doubtless think, on reading me, that my words are absurd. That's because you've never journeyed like I have.
I set out? I wouldn't swear to you that I set out. I found myself in other lands, in other ports, and I passed through cities that were not the one I started from, which, like all the others, was no city at all. I can't swear to you that it was I who set out and not the landscape, that it was I who visited other lands and not they that visited me. Not knowing what life is, nor if I'm the one living it rather than it living me (whatever the hollow verb 'live' may mean), I'm not about to swear anything.
I made a voyage. I presume it's not necessary to explain that my voyage didn't last for months or for days or for any other quantity of measurable time. I journeyed in time, to be sure, but not on this side of time, which we count by hours, days and months. My voyage took place on the other side of time, where it cannot be counted or measured but where it nevertheless flows, and it would seem to be faster than the time that has lived us. You are no doubt asking me, within yourselves, what meaning these sentences have. Don't make that mistake. Say goodbye to the childish error of asking words and things what they mean. Nothing means anything.
On what ship did I make this voyage? On the steamer Whichever Whichever. You laugh. Me too, and perhaps at you. How do you (or even I) know that I'm not writing symbols for the gods alone to understand?
No matter. I set out at twilight. In my ears I can still hear the clanging iron of the anchor being pulled up. In the corner of my memory's eye I can still see the arms of the crane which some hours before sailing had tortured my vision with countless crates and barrels slowly moving until at last they enter their position of rest. These crates and barrels, secured by a chain, would suddenly appear over the gunwale, after first hitting against it and making a scraping sound; then, swaying, they were pushed along to the hatchway, where they abruptly descended....., until with a dull wooden, crashing thud they arrived at some invisible place in the hold. From below came the sound of them being untied, and then the chain would rise up by itself, jingling, and everything would start over in seeming futility.
Why am I telling you this? Because it's absurd to be telling you this, after having said I would talk about my voyages.
I visited New Europes and was greeted by different Constantinoples as I sailed into the ports of pseudo-Bosporuses. It baffles you that I sailed in? You read me right. The steamer in which I set out came into port as a sailboat [...]. That's impossible, you say. That's why it happened to me.
Other steamboats brought us news of imaginary wars in impossible Indias. And when we heard about those lands, we felt an annoying nostalgia for our own land, but only, of course, because it was no land at all.*
A VOYAGE I N I NEVER M MADE (II) (II).
I hide behind the door, so that Reality won't see me when it enters. I hide under the table, from where I can jump out and give Possibility a scare. Thus I cast off, like the two arms of an embrace, the two huge tediums that squeeze me the tedium of being able to live only the Real, and the tedium of being able to conceive only the Possible.
In this way I triumph over all reality. You say my triumphs are castles of sand?... And what divine substance constitutes the castles which are not of sand?
How do you know that my kind of voyaging doesn't rejuvenate me in some obscure way?
Child of absurdity, I relive my early years, playing with ideas of things as with toy soldiers, which in my infant hands did things that went against the very notion of a soldier.
Drunk on errors, for a little while I stray and quit feeling myself live.
A VOYAGE I N I NEVER M M ADE ADE (III) (III).
Shipwrecks? No, I never suffered any. But I have the impression that I shipwrecked all my voyages, and that my salvation lay in interspaces of unconsciousness.
Hazy dreams, blurry lights, confused landscapes that's all that remains in my soul from all the travelling I did.
I have the impression that I've known hours of every colour, loves of every flavour, yearnings of every size. Throughout my life I lived to excess, and I was never enough for myself, not even in my dreams.