on writing and avoiding writing

• book of disquiet -

I have enough money to buy food and drink, I have somewhere to live and enough free time in which toe dream, write - and sleep - what more can I ask of the gods or hope for from Fate?

I had great ambitions and extravagant dreams, but so did the errand boy and the seamstress, for everyone has dreams; the only difference is whether or not we have the strength to fulfil them or a destiny that will fulfil them through us.

When it comes to dreams, I’m no different from the errand boy and the seamstress. The only thing that distinguishes me from them is that I can write. Yes, that’s an activity, a real fact about myself that distinguishes me from them. But in my soul I’m just the same.

pg 38 of 340: To all appearances, the monotony of ordinary lives is horrific. I’m having lunch in this ordinary restaurant and I look over at the cook behind the counter and at the old waiter right next to me, serving me as he has served others here for, I believe, the past thirty years. What are these men’s lives like? For forty years the cook has spent nearly all of every day in a kitchen; he has a few breaks; he sleeps relatively little; sometimes he goes back to his village whence he returns unhesitatingly and without regret; he slowly accumulates his slowly earned money, which he does not ever propose spending; he would fall ill if he had to abandon (for ever) his kitchen for the land he bought in Galicia; he’s lived in Lisbon for forty years and he’s never even been to the Rotunda, or to the theatre, and only once to the Coliseu. He got married, how or why I don’t know, has four sons and one daughter and, as he leans out over the counter towards my table, his smile conveys a great, solemn, contented happiness. He isn’t pretending, nor does he have any reason to. If he seems happy it’s because he really is.

… I look again, with real terror, at the panorama of those lives and, just as I’m about to feel horror, sorrow and revulsion for them, discover that the people who feel no horror or sorrow or revulsion are the very people who have the most right to, the people living those lives. That is the central error of the literary imagination: the idea that other people are like us and must therefore feel like us.

… On the other hand, the traveller who has covered the globe can find nothing new for 5,000 miles around, because he’s always seeing new things; there’s novely and there’s the boredom of the eternally new and the latter brings about the death of the former.