Authors: Josep Pla
The day after finishing my degree I entered the world of journalism, and this notorious profession is what finally sank me. In fact, I forgot to tell you that I have always been naturally intuitive and found it relatively easy to understand what people want, before, as they say, the words reach their lips. The advantages brought by intuition are only apparent, for the ease with which they come is the downfall of men and the root of all immorality. Intuitions respect nothing, neither the interests nor potential of the person so endowed, but they are intoxicating and send your head into a spin. Nothing can beat them if you want to weave your way through life on a wing and a prayer. Journalism, with its vapid, albeit necessary, prattle, industrializes your intuitions, schematically catalogues your world and provides the words at any given moment to create the impression that you are in the swim of things. In the long term, this facility is so energy-sapping you find it hard to walk on your own two feet and not deny that everything is insane. This profession that is vital in giving everyone a feeling of freedom is a ruthless machine for flattening people, an obvious example of the implacable cruelty
of the laws of nature. I took to it like a fish to water and got soaked. My standoffish temperament made me particularly appreciate the way journalists have of washing their hands: their naturalness. Moreover, the reports they filed sum up life and reality, and then every evening, general disappointment descends over one’s desk. Initially, I found that repellent. Then, I began to be thick-skinned. By the end of the year I saw that everything that happens in this world has the importance a clearly written, simple, lively column can lend it. The cycle had gone full circle; as far as I was concerned, reality had ceased to be a reason to be affable and accommodating. Nothing made any difference, and the profession, in effect, had merely refined my instinctive, antisocial sarcasm.
“I had made positive gains. Several years had gone by. I had learned to pretend, to swim underwater, to not commit myself, to play foul and fair and elegantly. Without ever being forced to make unpleasant concessions, my temperament shed its tedious solitude, and my savoir faire enabled me to enjoy relationships without suffering tyranny or friction. I grasped that one cannot be a perfect egotist without being infinitely tactful and clever. I am ashamed to admit this but I managed to perform imperceptibly and, to my mind, with sophistication, on that farcical terrain. I became so immersed in this play-acting I thought it was a more profound, more natural state than reality itself. I was partly right. The most serious questions incorporate innumerable excessive, improper features. The mistake, however, is to believe that everything is improper. In the end, all I can repeat is that sentence from the first chapter of
Tristram Shandy
– ‘Pray My Dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?’ that I find more enlightening than any sublime canto from the
Divine Comedy
. In literature, I have only ever been interested in writing that delineates contrasts, and I’ve always found characters with less than two faces to be absurd. I reckoned
that idealistic literature could at best interest captains of cavalry, artists, and bank managers. That’s absurd too, I know. Absurd and disgusting. But I had formed such a wretchedly low opinion of myself I refused to believe that the angelical nature of men isn’t combined with arrant ruthlessness. Did I deceive myself? Who can say? In any case I find no reason to think I am any different from anyone else.
I observed the process and was startled to see how my world became distorted and how the grandest things fell apart before my eyes. I believe everyone must experience a similar sequence of sensations and ideas that at some point has helped form a clear self-image. The fact remains, however, that this process is continuous for the very few. When they look themselves in the face, men are frightened, don’t want to know, put their hands up, then turn their backs and try to forget. Nothing is more childish and destructive than the truth. Some unfortunate folk, on the other hand, seem to have been born to be ingenuous. When you are exposed to a surfeit of commonplaces, your mouth tastes sour and your hands shake feverishly at the way life can become so distorted. You are intoxicated by the simultaneous, contradictory paths life offers. You feel the indescribable emotion aroused by continuous dissatisfaction. If you bolt down this path, it seems all sweetness and light at first, you make interesting discoveries at each step and that suggests you are making progress. But the path only leads to the mineral indifference that such immensity provokes. And finally, if you don’t meet a redeeming soul, you shrink back into your shell and feel loathing for the
bête humaine
and everything moving around you. And if you then use your powers of reason, you can choose a minimalist path through life, one that has the added advantage of providing the epitaph for your future tombstone: ‘He didn’t desire, so as not to suffer; he didn’t love, so as to die.’
When I left for Paris, I was unspeakably worried by such things. My ideas
were much clearer than now, because they were less rounded out. Why did I leave? Leafing through a diary I was writing at the time, I came across a very childish comment I committed to paper a few months after arriving in France; it illuminates very little, to be sure, but it does have the merit of supplying a vaguely philosophical justification for my gloomy style of life.
What is it, I wondered then, that allows a man to say that he is happy at a specific moment in time? Every era must be alike, and, despite cars, engines, electricity, wireless telegrams, and other astonishing inventions, man today is, more or less, the man he was a thousand years ago. The world is always home to similar amounts of pleasure and pain, of stupidity, cruelty, and tenderness. If you are lucky enough to fall on your feet, in just the right place, then you enjoy a life of plenty, even though people are gouging their eyes out a few feet away. Other folk, on the contrary, are destined to struggle to survive – even if they eke out an existence amid quills, charming sighs, and ethereal melodies – because they can’t find their rightful place. I find myself in this second category, I suppose.
Some of my friends imagine my psychological state is trying and unpleasant. That’s true, and it’s because I am a man who has been displaced. I could have enjoyed robust health, could have lived like a countryman with all that word implies. The name I bear has been rooted for centuries in a piece of red, sunny soil in the Vallès. The rural legacy of my forbears informs everything I do, my life, my thinking. I seem to have a countryman’s liking for what is direct and slightly vague, for reserve, sarcasm, and common sense as well as the occasional need to strike out. I see the turbid ways of men and women in a grotesque light; I focus on their frantic pettiness because I carry in my blood an ancestral admiration of natural phenomena, of the sun and the moon, harvests and stars, eating and drinking. I can’t stand instinctive beings, children, women, artists, or magical people: priests, princes, or
great men. I hate orators, especially those who exalt to the point of apparent adoration the stage for mild, conformist human behavior, onto which they then latch themselves like the greediest of parasites.
Circumstances in life have forced me to move around and take a dip in the whirlpools of society. I did so reluctantly, I have adapted poorly and nobody has taught me anything – despite the huge scope of human vanity – the dead couldn’t have taught me infinitely better. That’s why I appear to be someone who has grown prickly, who feels on edge and at a loss everywhere. In the world where I live, I try to act like everyone else, but I must do so poorly, because people see through me and say I am a cheat.
Once I’d realized that I was experiencing this sense of dislocation, I organized my life so it was relatively bearable. I created a series of defense mechanisms to avoid being tyrannized by that
idola tribus
mentioned by Lord Bacon. I saw that social life in my country was incredibly hard and that people spent their lives torturing others. I decided to leave for a while and have now lived among distant, unpredictable people for many a year. Within that profound solitude I’ve experienced some tolerable periods, to the extent that I can say that though I don’t much like our times they do offer the occasional delight.
My comments end here, and the more I reflect on them the more I can see how those last words precisely echo my state of mind at the time. No doubt about it: I was happy. I loved the city – Paris – because it was large enough to give me an ineffable feeling of solitude. The monotony of that life lulled me. I watched the masquerade parade by and longed for nothing: I was too close to things to want any of it. I waited on nobody and nobody waited on me. No man knew me, no woman either, and nobody felt charitable enough – hey,
hey, can’t you shush – to enjoy my charms. I experienced freedom with lithe feline energy. Spring had just begun, the light wasn’t too bright and it drizzled endlessly. I so liked the weather I sometimes didn’t get up. The monotonous rain slowly numbed me, my body lost its boyish tendency to go on the attack; my imagination didn’t tempt me or demand things. The spring equinox was still cold, though I could feel the warm sap rising, and it seemed to draw me close to the essence of life and time went by in my hotel room on that lonely street with lime trees about to blossom and a faint, liquid light in my windows, within a warm, gentle haze.
This was the situation when I met Olga Johansen. I was thirty and my character was fully formed. My egotism was a fully crystallized, driving force. Olga was a gorgeous woman and younger than me; she was twenty-five, tall, blond, and buxom, with a subtle, silken firmness. It was the feeling of moral and material cleanliness that she radiated, rather than her golden flesh, that made her a pure delight. She was such a joy that she lived surrounded by a collection of wretched, adoring individuals. There’s nothing like exercising one’s vanity before people we appreciate. Olga had an entourage of sullen angels who looked at her with the eyes of beheaded calves.
Once we’d been introduced I was strangely surprised by the air of orderly pleasure and refined luxury emanating from her. Even so, when we first conversed, I made fun of the most hallowed and holy things. Initially, as I always saw her with that motley crowd, I thought she must be frivolous and incapable of lingering over any real pleasure or pain. I later realized that, even though she liked to soak up other people’s woes and catalogue strong feelings, she
was
able to focus calmly on a single thing, and that her fondness for listening to the woes of others was the sign of a soothing temperament. Perhaps she was the right woman for Martial’s epigram: ‘I don’t want her
too easy or too difficult. I prefer them midpoint between the two extremes. I don’t want one who tortures or one who satiates.’ That summed up Olga: a soothing balm.
I don’t want to take up your time while I strain to recreate my states of mind then, because you were a benign witness to them. I thought that what people called love was simply a botched idealization of one of the most implacable, obscure drives of the human species. I believed there was only one thing that justified and explained marriage: the purely physical comfort and well-being the state of matrimony sometimes brings. From the spiritual point of view, that is, I decided it could resolve nothing in terms of helping one to escape from oneself. At best, the path of marriage is tantamount to a continuous liberating confessional, can numb and chloroform the pain brought on by consciousness, and for some can heal the scars of a life of failure. I saw Olga as the source of comfort in this world. That’s why I was so easily and imperceptibly suffused by her ineffable gentleness and concluded that marrying her would be a good deal. We launched into a copious correspondence, full of childish nonsense. For her part, Olga strung together things one might call decorous romanticism. I threw in the commonplaces of a cynical wit. Her letters were so sloppy they made me blush. Mine were incredibly uninspired. Olga’s
billets doux
were generally tedious. Mine were a mess, and if a chink of light ever broke through, it only exposed something idiotic …
She’d say: ‘You are a much better person than you think.’
I’d reply: ‘You are much worse than you say.’
We debated such questions enthusiastically for six months perhaps. Finally we both hinted simultaneously that we were probably wasting our time. Meanwhile, however, the likelihood of marriage had gained ground. Olga never asked for anything and this gave me a clear sense of how small
scale I was. Don’t think for one minute that I found this unpleasant. Conversely, it would be wrong to say my character had changed. All in all, there is no real difference between freedom and being dominated by someone we feel we need. By her side I felt frail, anarchic, and insignificant and walked as if I were being led by the hand. Olga, for her part, gave everything and never haggled. She protested when I said she did things out of charity and when I threw her healing powers in her face. She replied that she was a woman like any other and did it out of love … I laughed and sometimes frightened myself. I couldn’t say if I have ever been completely sincere. However, if ever I was, it must have been when I tried to list the troublesome consequences marriage might bring if she became disillusioned for any reason. I remember how she burst into tears when we talked of such things, and became very nervous. I persisted. To shut me up she’d say that if what I was predicting actually happened, we could simply separate without making a fuss. Sometimes, man’s fate is so naturally absurd that anguish comes very politely. The fact is we decided to marry and did marry – probably with great enthusiasm.
Various tensions immediately surfaced. A number of respectable traits lurked under Olga’s rampant, often silly sentimentality. My hardened cynicism hid an appalling void. Olga was very familiar with my character, but she believed she could turn me into a proper, decent person by dint of her warmth and charm. I had entered matrimony with a clear head and didn’t expect it held anything special for me: at most I hoped to find the orderly pleasure, the benign sense of luxuriousness that Olga created. And that happened: Olga revealed a capacity for amazing self-denial in the smallest things. I lived two months of unforgettable delights.