insomniac like me?
It doesn’t matter. The eternal, formless, infinite night
Has only, in this place, the humanity of our two windows,
The quiet heart of our two lights.
In this place and time, strangers to each other, we’re all of life.
At the window in the back room of my apartment,
Feeling the damp of night on the wooden sill,
I lean out toward the infinite, and a bit toward myself.
Not even a rooster disturbs the still definitive silence!
What are you doing, comrade of that lit window?
Am I, in my insomnia, dreaming life?
Round yellow glow of your secret window . . .
Funny: you don’t have electric light.
O kerosene lamps of my lost childhood!
25 NOVEMBER 1931
MAGNIFICAT
When will this inner night—the universe—end
And I—my soul—have my day?
When will I wake up from being awake?
I don’t know. The sun shines on high
And cannot be looked at.
The stars coldly blink
And cannot be counted.
The heart beats aloofly
And cannot be heard.
When will this drama without theater
—Or this theater without drama—end
So that I can go home?
Where? How? When?
O cat staring at me with eyes of life, Who lurks in your
depths?
It’s Him! It’s him!
Like Joshua he’ll order the sun to stop, and I’ll wake up,
And it will be day.
Smile, my soul, in your slumber!
Smile, my soul: it will be day!
7 NOVEMBER 1933
ORIGINAL SIN
Who will write the story of what he could have been?
That, if someone writes it,
Will be the true history of humanity.
What exists is the real world—not us, just the world.
We are, in reality, what doesn’t exist.
I am who I failed to be.
We are all who we supposed ourselves.
Our reality is what we never attained.
What happened to that truth we had—the dream at the
window of childhood?
What happened to our certainty—the plans at the desk that
followed?
Sitting sideways in a chair after dinner, with my head
Resting against my folded hands, which are resting
Against the high sill of the balcony window, I ponder.
What happened to my reality, that all I have is life?
What happened to me, that I’m just who exists?
How many Caesars I’ve been!
In my soul, and with some truth;
In my imagination, and with some justice;
In my intellect, and with some warrant—
My God! My God! My God!—
How many Caesars I’ve been!
How many Caesars I’ve been!
How many Caesars I’ve been!
THE WORLD, 7 DECEMBER 1933
Lisbon with its houses
Of various colors,
Lisbon with its houses
Of various colors,
Lisbon with its houses
Of various colors . . .
By virtue of being different, this is monotonous,
Just as, by virtue of feeling, I do nothing but
think.
At night, lying down but awake
In the useless lucidity of not being able to sleep,
I try to imagine something
But something else always appears (since I’m
sleepy
And, being sleepy, a bit dreamy).
I try to extend the range of my imagination
To fantastic, sprawling palm groves,
But all I see
On what seems to be the inside of my eyelids
Is Lisbon with its houses
Of various colors.
I smile because here, lying down, it’s something else.
By virtue of being monotonous, it’s different.
And, by virtue of being I, I fall asleep and forget
I exist.
What remains, without me, whom I’ve forgotten since I’m
asleep,
Is Lisbon with its houses
Of various colors.
11 MAY 1934
What happiness
In the building across the street from me and my dreams!
It’s inhabited by people I don’t know, whom I’ve seen but
not seen.
They’re happy, because they’re not me.
The children who play on the high balconies
Live forever, without doubt,
Among flowerpots.
The voices rising from inside the homes
Always sing, without doubt.
Yes, they must sing.
When there’s feasting out here, there’s feasting in there,
Which is bound to be the case where everything’s in
agreement:
Man with Nature, because the city is Nature.
What tremendous happiness not to be me!
But don’t others feel the same way?
What others? There are no others.
What others feel is a home with shut windows,
And when they’re opened
It’s for their children to play on the railed balcony,
Among the pots with I don’t know what sort of flowers.
Other people never feel.
We’re the ones who feel,
Yes, all of us,
Even I, who am now feeling nothing.
Nothing? Well . . .
A slight pain that’s nothing . . .
16 JUNE 1934
I got off the train
And said good-bye to the man I’d met.
We’d been together for eighteen hours
And had a pleasant conversation,
Fellowship in the journey,
And I was sorry to get off, sorry to leave
This chance friend whose name I never learned.
I felt my eyes water with tears . . .
Every farewell is a death.
Yes, every farewell is a death.
In the train that we call life
We are all chance events in one another’s lives,
And we all feel sorry when it’s time to get off.
All that is human moves me, because I’m a man.
All that is human moves me not because I have an affinity
With human ideas or human doctrines
But because of my infinite fellowship with humanity itself.
The maid who hated to go,
Crying with nostalgia
For the house where she’d been mistreated . . .
All of this, inside my heart, is death and the world’s sadness.
All of this lives, because it dies, inside my heart.
And my heart is a little larger than the entire universe.
4 JULY 1934
How long it’s been since I could write
A long poem!
It’s been years . . .
I’ve lost that capacity for rhythmic development
In which idea and form
Move forward together
In a unity of body and soul . . .
I’ve lost everything that once gave me
Some sense of an inner certainty . . .
What do I have left?
The sun, which is there without me having summoned it . . .
The day, which requires no effort on my part . . .
A breeze, or the caress of a breeze,
Making me conscious of the air . . .
And the domestic egoism of wanting nothing else.
But ah, my “Triumphal Ode,”
With its rectilinear movement!
A
h, my “Maritime Ode,”
With its development in strophe, antistrophe and epode!
And my plans, all my plans,
Which were my greatest odes of all!
And that final, supreme, impossible ode!
9 AUGUST 1934
The stillness of midnight begins to descend
On the various floors of accumulated life
Which make up this apartment building.
The piano on the fourth floor has quieted.
I hear no more steps on the third.
On the ground floor the radio is silent.
Everything’s going to sleep . . .
I’m alone with the entire universe.
I don’t even feel like going to the window.
If I looked out, what stars I’d see!
How much vaster are the lofty silences!
How unmetropolitan the sky!
Instead, secluded in my desire
Not to be secluded,
I anxiously listen to the sounds from the street.
An automobile—zoom! . . .
Doubled steps in conversation speak to me.
The clank of a brusquely shut gate pains me.
Everything’s going to sleep . . .
Only I remain awake, solemnly listening,
Waiting
For something before going to sleep.
Something . . .
9 AUGUST 1934
I took off the mask and looked in the mirror.
I was the same child I was years ago.
I hadn’t changed at all . . .
That’s the advantage of knowing how to remove your mask.
You’re still the child,
The past that lives on,
The child.
I took off the mask, and I put it back on.
It’s better this way.
This way I’m the mask.
And I return to normality as to a streetcar terminus.
11 AUGUST 1934
I, I myself . . .
I, full of all the weariness
The world can produce . . .
I . . .
Everything, finally, since everything is me,
Including even the stars, it seems,
Came out of my pocket to dazzle children.
What children I don’t know . . .
I . . .
Imperfect? Inscrutable? Divine?
I don’t know.
I . . .
Did I have a past? Of course.
Do I have a present? Of course.
Will I have a future? Of course,
Even if it doesn’t last long.
But I, I . . .
I am I,
I remain I,
I . . .
4 JANUARY 1935
HOMECOMING
It’s been years since my last sonnet,
But I’ll try to write one anyhow.
Sonnets belong to childhood, and now
My childhood is just a black dot,
Which throws me off the useless, unmoving
Journey of the train that’s me.
And the sonnet’s like someone inhabiting
(For two days now) my mind’s constant musing.
Thank God I still remember that
It takes fourteen lines of equal length,
So people will know where they’re at . . .
But where people are, or where I am,
I don’t know and couldn’t care less,
And whatever I do know can be damned.
3 FEBRUARY 1935
Yes, everything’s just fine.
It’s all perfectly fine.
Except for one thing: it’s all screwed up.
I know my building is painted gray,
I know what the number of the building is,
I don’t know but can find out its assessed value
In the tax offices that exist for that purpose.
I know, I know . . .
But I also know there are people who live here,
And the Public Revenue Office couldn’t exempt
My next-door neighbor from the death of her son.
And the Bureau of What-Have-You couldn’t prevent
The husband of the lady upstairs from running off with her
sister.
But everything, of course, is just fine . . .
And except for the fact it’s all screwed up, it really is just fine.
5 MARCH 1935
I’m dizzy.
Dizzy from too much sleeping or too much thinking
Or too much of both.
All I know is I’m dizzy,
And I’m not sure if I should get up from my chair
Or how I would get up from it.
I’m dizzy—let’s leave it at that.
What life
None.
It all happened in the cracks,
It was all approximations,
All a function of the abnormal and the absurd,
All essentially nothing . . .
That’s why I’m dizzy.
Now
Every morning I wake up
Dizzy . . .
Yes, literally dizzy . . .
Unsure of my own name,
Unsure of where I am,
Unsure of what I’ve been,
Unsure of everything.
But if that’s how it is, that’s how it is.
So I remain in the chair.
I’m dizzy.
That’s right, I’m dizzy.
I remain seated
And dizzy.
Yes, dizzy.
Dizzy . . .
Dizzy . . .
12 SEPTEMBER 1935
POEM IN A STRAIGHT LINE
I’ve never known anyone who took a beating.
All my acquaintances have been champions at everything.
Whereas I, so often shabby, so often disgusting, so often
despicable,
I, so often and undeniably a sponger,
Inexcusably filthy,
I, who so often have been too lazy to take a bath,
I, who so often have been ridiculous and absurd,
Who have tripped in public on the rugs of etiquette,
Who have been grotesque, petty, obsequious and arrogant,
Who have been humiliated and said nothing,
Who, when I’ve spoken up, have been even more ridiculous,
I, who have been the laughingstock of chambermaids,
Who have felt porters winking behind my back,
Who have been a financial disgrace, borrowing money I never
paid back,
Who, when punches were about to fly, ducked
Out of punching range—
I, who have anguished over the pettiest things,
Am convinced there’s no one in the world as pathetic as me.
No one I know has ever done anything ridiculous.
No one who talks to me has ever been humiliated.
They’ve been princes in life, every last one of them . . .
If only I could hear some other human voice
Confess not to a sin but to an infamy,
Tell not about an act of violence but of cowardice!
No, all the people I listen to, if they talk to me, are paragons.
Who in this wide world would admit to me that he was ever
despicable?
O princes, my brothers,
I’ve had it up to here with demigods!
Where in the world are there people?
Am I the only one on earth who’s ever wrong and despicable?
They may not have been loved by women,
They may have been cheated on—but ridiculous, never!
And I, who have been ridiculous without being cheated on—
How can I speak to my betters without stammering?
I, who have been despicable, utterly despicable,
Despicable in the basest and meanest sense of the word .
. .
LÀ-BAS, JE NE SAIS OÙ...
The day before a journey, rrrrrring . . .
I don’t need such a shrill reminder!
I want to enjoy the repose of the station that’s my soul
Before I see the iron arrival of the definitive train
Approaching in my direction,
Before I feel the actual departure in the throat of my stomach,
Before I climb aboard, with feet
That have never learned to control their emotion when it’s
time to depart.
Right now, as I smoke in the way station of today,
I feel like still relishing a bit of the old life.
A useless life that’s best left behind, that’s a prison?
What of it? All the universe is a prison, and a prisoner is a
prisoner whatever size his cell.
My cigarette tastes like impending nausea. The train has
already left the other station . . .
Good-bye, good-bye everyone who didn’t come to see me off,
Good-bye my abstract and impossible family!
Good-bye to today! Good-bye, way station of today!
Good-bye, life, good-bye!
To remain like a labeled package someone forgot,