Цитаты из книги «Книга непокоя», страница 15

To speak is to show too much consideration for others.

I see without wanting to see, helplessly. I attentively watch the non-spectacle. I don’t feel my soul, just peace. External things, all of them distinct and now perfectly still, even if they’re moving, are to me as the world must have been to Christ when, looking down at everything, Satan tempted him. They are nothing, and I can understand why Christ wasn’t tempted. They are nothing, and I can’t understand why clever old Satan thought they would be tempting.

I’m alone and calm. It’s like the moment when I could theoretically convert to a religion. But although I’m no longer attracted to anything down here, I’m also not attracted to anything up above. I feel free, as if I’d ceased to exist and were conscious of that fact.

I advance slowly, lifelessly, and my vision is no longer mine, it’s no longer anything: it’s merely the vision of a human animal that inexorably inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality, and all the other illusions that form the civilization in which I feel and perceive.

Where are the living?

I see that the mist which has completely quit the sky (except for the quasi-blue that still lingers in the blueness) has indeed penetrated into my soul, and has likewise penetrated to the depths of things where they have contact with my soul. I’ve lost the vision of what I was seeing. My eyes see, but I am blind. I’ve begun to perceive things with the banality of knowledge. What I see is no longer Reality, it’s just Life.

…Yes, the life to which I also belong, and which also belongs to me; and no longer Reality, which belongs only to God or to itself, which contains neither mystery nor truth, and which – since it is real or pretends to be real – exists somewhere invariably, free from having to be temporal or eternal, an absolute image, the external equivalent to the idea of a soul.

How I would love right now to be able to see all this as somebody whose only relation to it was visual – to view everything as an adult traveller who has just arrived at the surface of life! To not have learned from birth to attach predetermined meanings to all these things. To be able to see them in their natural self-expression, irrespective of the expressions that have been imposed on them. To be able to recognize the fishwife in her human reality, independent of her being called a fishwife and my knowing that she exists and sells fish. To see the policeman as God sees him. To notice everything for the first time, not as apocalyptic revelations of life’s Mystery, but as direct manifestations of Reality.

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

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...

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

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.