Chiaroscuro: From the Book of Disquiet (A Script)

Nothing, nothing.
Just the night—
The silence of emptiness—
the space that exists between me and me—
a thing mislaid by some god.

We are death.
This thing we think of as life is only the sleep of real life, the death of what we truly are.
The dead are born, they do not die...
When we think we are alive, we are dead, we live even while we lie dying.

Oh, that I should die--feelings first!

We must learn to sublimate the pure from the contagion of the vulgar.

We must know, immediately and instinctively, how to abstract from every object and event only what is suitable dream material and to leave for dead in the External World any reality it contains...

Harboring no ambitions, passions, desires, hopes, impulses or feelings of restlessness.

The very fact of completing or achieving anything, be it an empire or a sentence, contains what is worst about all real things: our knowledge that they will perish.

To belong to something—that’s banal. Creed, ideal, lover or profession: nothing but prison cells and shackles.

To be, is to be free.

Touch nothing!

Abdicate from life, so as not to abdicate from one’s self.

Do not think with your feelings, feel with your thoughts!

Find for every feeling the most serene mode of expression; reduce love to a mere shadow of a dream of love...

Make of desire something vain and inoffensive, the delicate private smile of a soul to itself...

Lull hatred to sleep like a captive snake and order fear to preserve agony only in its eyes and in the eyes of our soul.

Let pain instruct you. The pain of not understanding the mystery of life, the pain of being unloved, the pain of others' injustice to us, the pain of life crushing us, suffocating and imprisoning us, the pain of toothache, of pinching shoes--who can say which pain (is) worse?... Everything is nothing, and our pain is no exception.

If my heart could think, I think it would stop beating.

A cup of coffee, a cigarette, the penetrating aroma of its smoke, myself sitting in a shadowy room with eyes half-closed...

I want no more from life than my dreams and this... It doesn't seem much? I don't know. What do I know about what is a little and what is a lot?

Summer evening out there. How I would love to be someone else.

I open the window... Everything outside is so gentle, yet it pierces me with an indefinable pain, a vague feeling of discontent.

And one last thing pierces me, tears at me, leaves my soul in tatters. It's that I, at this moment, at this window, looking out at these sad, gentle things, ought to present a beautiful figure, like someone in a picture--

and I don't, I don't even do that.

I'm nobody, nobody.

I am the outskirts of some non-existent town.

I don't know how to feel or think or love.

My life is a tragedy, booed off the stage by the gods after the first act.

I am the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book, a character in a novel as yet unfinished, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me.

I am... the very prose that I write. I shape myself in periods and paragraphs, I punctuate myself... I've become a character in a book, a life already read.

With all this rewriting, I have destroyed myself.

Everything in me is a tendency to be about something else; an impatience of the soul within itself as if with an importunate child, a disquiet that is always growing, always the same.

... For light fleeting moments, I manage to forget the taste of life, to leave life and noise behind and die, feelings first, into an empire of anguished ruins, a grand entrance amidst flags and victorious drums, into a vast final city where I weep for nothing, want for nothing and not even ask not to be myself.

My imaginary world has always been the true world for me. I never knew loves so real, so full of passion and life as I did with the characters I myself created.

I am the very prose that I write. I shape myself in periods and paragraphs, I punctuate myself... I am a character in my book, a life read.


words adapted from Fernando Pessoa's "The Book of Disquiet"