The Book of Disquiet

All of this comforts me with sadness. Perhaps one day, towards the end of the future, someone will write a poem about me. A breath of music or of a dream, of something that would make me almost feel, something that would make me not think.

I took a long time getting ready to exist. Sometimes I have the warm tears of those who don't have and never had a mother; and the eyes that burn with these dead tears burn inside my heart. I don't remember my mother, she died when I was one. My distracted and callous sensibility comes from the lack of that warmth and from the useless longing after kisses I don't remember. Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me! Who would I be now if I'd recieved that affection that comes from the womb and is placed, through kisses, on a baby's face? Whoever held me as a child against her face couldn't hold me against her heart.

My skin and the skin of the pillowcase are like two people touching in the shadows. Even the ear on which I'm lying mathematically engraves itself on my brain. my dreams, they are so gentle that I keep dreaming them as I speak.

They all have, like me, their future in their past. He's not drunk, he's dreaming. He's attentive to what doesn't exist. Perhaps he still hopes. My eyes returned to the man's back, the window through which i saw these thoughts. I had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. This man's back is sleeping, His entire person, walking ahead of me at the very same speed, is sleeping. I look at the other people walking down this street, and I embrace each and every one of them with the same cold, absurd tenderness that came to me from the back of the unconscious man I'm following. Most people think with their feelings, whereas I feel with my thoughts.

I'm a well of gestures that haven't even all been traced in my mind, of words I haven't even thought to form on my lips, of dreams I forgot to dream to the end. Let's not forge to hate those who enjoy, just because they enjoy, and despise those who are happy, because we didn't know how to be happy like them.

I love it because I hate it. I like to look at it because I hate to feel it.