the book of disquiet

as an artistic modality i prefer prose to verse for two reasons. the first, my own personal reason, is that i really have no choice because i can’t write verse. the second is common to all and is not, i firmly believe, a shadow or disguised version of the first. its worthwhile going into the difference between verse and prose in detail because its related to the intimate sense of all value in art.

i consider verse an intermediate thing, a passage from music to prose. like music, verse is limited by rhythmic laws that, even if they are not the rigid laws of metrics, exist nevertheless as decorum and constraint - automatic precepts that oppress and punish. in prose we speak freely. we can include musical rhythms and still think. we can include poetic rhythms and still be outside them. an occasional poetic rhythm does not disrupt prose. an occasional prose rhythm makes verse stumble.

all art is contained in prose - in part because the whole world is contained in language. in part because words set free contain all possibilities for expression and thought. in prose we give everything by transposition : the colours and and forms painting can only give directly, in themselves, without any intimate dimension; the rhythm that music cannot give except directly, in itself, without formal body, without the second body that is an idea; without the structure the architect has to form from hard, given, external things that we erect out of rhythm, indecision, duration, and fluidity; without the reality, which the sculptor must leave in the world, without any aura or trans-substantiation; without, finally poetry in which the poet, like an initiate in a secret society, is subject, albeit voluntarily subject, to an order, and a ritual.

i really believe that in a perfectly civilized world there would be no other art but prose. we would leave sunsets to the sunsets themselves, taking care, perhaps in our art to understand them verbally by transmitting them in the intelligible music of colour. we would not sculpt bodies, which would then keep, by being seen and touched, their mobile relief and their soft warmth. we would build houses only to live in them, which is after all, what they are really for. poetry would exist so children could grow towards prose, poetry certainly does have something infantile to it, something mnemonic, auxiliary, primordial.

even the minor arts, or those we can call minor, are reflected secretly in prose. there is the prose that dances, that sings, that declaims itself. there are verbal rhythms that are danced, in which the idea sinuously strips itself bare in a translucent and perfect sensuality. and there is also in prose convulsive subtlety in which a great actor, the word, rhythmically transforms the untouchable mystery of the universe into its corporeal substance.

p.7-8

you who hear me and who barely listen, you do not know what this tragedy is : to lose both father and mother, not to achieve glory or happiness, not to have a friend or a lover - it’s possible to withstand all that. what we cannot withstand is to dream a beautiful thing and not be able to attain it in actions or words. the awareness of the perfect work the abundance of the obtained work - how smooth it is to sleep in the shade of this tree in the calm summer.

p.277

listen to me and feel sorry for yourself. listen to all this and tell me later if dreams aren’t worth more than life. work never produces results. effort never gets you anywhere. only abstention is noble and grand, because it recognizes that achievement is always inferior and that the completed work is always the grotesque shadow of the dreamed work.

p.276