Sentimental Education

For those who choose to make dreams their life, and to make a religion and politics out of cultivating sensations like plants in a hothouse, the sign that they’ve successfully taken the first step is when they feel the tiniest things in an extraordinary and extravagant way. That’s all there is to the first step. To know how to sip a cup of tea with the extreme voluptuousness that the normal man experiences only when overcome by joy at seeing his ambition suddenly fulfilled or himself suddenly cured of a terrible nostalgia, or when he’s in the final, carnal acts of love; to be able to achieve in the vision of a sunset or in the contemplation of a decorative detail that intensity of feeling which generally can’t occur through sight or hearing but only by way of the carnal senses – touch, taste and smell – when they sculpt the object of sensation on our consciousness; to be able to convert our interior vision, the hearing in our dreams, and all imagined senses and the senses of the imagination into tangible receptors like the five senses that receive the outside world: these are some of the sensations (and similar examples can be imagined) that the trained cultivator of his own feelings is able to experience with a convulsive fervour, and I mention them so as to give a rough but concrete idea of what I’m trying to convey. Arriving at this degree of sensation, however, causes the lover of sensations to feel griefs – both from the outside and from inside himself – with the same conscious intensity. It is when he realizes, and because he realizes, that to feel in the extreme can mean not only extreme pleasure but also acute suffering that the dreamer is led to take the second step in his self-ascension.

I’ll leave aside the step that he might or might not take and that, if he can and does take it, will determine certain of his attitudes and affect the general way he proceeds – I mean the step of completely isolating himself from the real world, which of course he can take only if he’s rich. For I suppose it’s clear by reading between the lines that the dreamer, depending on his relative possibility of isolation and self-dedication, should with greater or lesser intensity concentrate on his work of pathologically stimulating his sensitivity to things and dreams. The man who must actively live and associate with people – and even in this case it’s possible to reduce intimacy with others to a minimum (intimacy with people, and not mere contact, is what’s detrimental) – will have to freeze the entire surface of his social self, so that every fraternal and friendly gesture he receives will slide off and not enter or make a lasting impression. This seems hard to do but isn’t. People are easy to drive away: all we have to do is not go near them. Anyway, I’ll pass over this point and return to what I was explaining.

The creation of an automatically heightened and complex awareness of the simplest and commonest sensations leads not only to a vast increase in the enjoyment we get from feeling but also, as I’ve said, to a tremendous upsurge in the amount of pain we experience. The second step for the dreamer should therefore be to avoid pain. He shouldn’t avoid it like the Stoics or the early Epicureans, by abandoning the nest, for that will harden him against pleasure as well as against pain. He should, instead, seek pleasure in pain, and then learn how to feel pain falsely – to feel some kind of pleasure, that is, whenever he feels pain. There are various paths for reaching this goal. One is to hyperanalyse our pain (but only after we’ve first trained ourselves to react to pleasure by exclusively feeling it, with no analysis). This is an easier technique than it seems, at least for superior souls. To analyse pain and to get in the habit of submitting all pains to analysis, until we do it automatically, by instinct, will endow every pain imaginable with the pleasure of analysing it. Once our ability and instinct to analyse grow large enough, our practice of it will absorb everything, and there will be nothing left of pain but an indefinite substance for analysis.

Another method, more subtle and more difficult, is to develop the habit of incarnating the pain in an ideal figure. First we must create another I, charged with suffering – in and for us – everything we suffer. Next we need to create an inner sadism, completely masochistic, that enjoys its suffering as if it were someone else’s. This method, which on first reading seems impossible, isn’t easy, but it is eminently attainable, presenting no special difficulties for those who are well versed in lying to themselves. Once this is achieved, pain and suffering acquire an absolutely tantalizing flavour of blood and disease, an incredibly exotic pungency of decadent gratification! The feeling of pain resembles the anguished, troubled height of convulsions, and suffering – the long and slow kind – has the intimate yellow which colours the vague bliss of a profoundly felt convalescence. And an exquisite exhaustion tinged with disquiet and melancholy evokes the complex sensation of anguish that our pleasures arouse, in the thought that they will vanish, as well as the melancholy pre-weariness we feel in our sensual delights, when we think of the weariness they’ll bring.

There is a third method for subtilizing pains into pleasures and for making doubts and worries into a soft bed. It consists in intensely concentrating on our anxieties and sufferings, making them so fiercely felt that by their very excess they bring the pleasure of excess, while by their violence they suggest the pleasure that hurts for being so pleasurable and the gratification that smacks of blood for having wounded us. This can only happen, of course, in souls dedicated to pleasure by habit and by education. And when, as in me – refiner that I am of fallacious refinements, an architect dedicated to building myself out of sensations subtilized through the intellect, through abdication from life, through analysis and through pain itself –, all three methods are employed simultaneously, when every felt pain (felt so quickly there’s no time for the soul to plan any defence) is automatically analysed to the core, ruthlessly foisted on an extraneous I, and buried in me to the utmost height of pain, then I truly feel like a victor and a hero. Then life stops for me, and art grovels at my feet.

Everything I’ve been describing is just the second step that the dreamer must take to reach his dream.

Who besides me has been able to take the third step, which leads to the sumptuous threshold of the Temple? This is the step which is indeed hard to take, for it requires an inward effort vastly greater than any effort we make in life, but it also rewards us to the heights and depths of our soul in a way that life never could. This step is – once everything else has been completely and simultaneously carried out, the three subtle methods having been applied to exhaustion – to immediately pass the sensation through pure intelligence, filtering it through a higher analysis that shapes it into a literary form with its own substance and character. Then I have completely fixed the sensation. Then I have made the unreal real and have given the unattainable an eternal pedestal. Then, within myself, I have been crowned Emperor.

Don’t imagine that I write to publish, or merely to write, or to produce art. I write because this is the final goal, the supreme refinement, the organically illogical refinement, ..... of my cultivation of the states of soul. If I take one of my sensations and unravel it so as to use it to weave the inner reality I call ‘The Forest of Estrangement’ or ‘A Voyage I Never Made’, you can be sure I don’t do it for the sake of a lucid and shimmering prose, nor even for the sake of the pleasure I get from that prose – though I’m quite glad to have it as an additional final touch, like a splendidly falling curtain over my dreamed stage settings – but to give complete exteriority to what is interior, thereby enabling me to realize the unrealizable, to conjoin the contradictory and, having exteriorized my dream, to give it its most powerful expression as pure dream. Yes, this is my role as a stagnator of life, chiseller of inaccuracies, sick pageboy of my soul and Queen, reading to her at twilight not the poems from the book of my Life that lies open on my knees, but the poems that I invent and pretend to read, and that she pretends to hear, while somewhere and somehow the Evening is softening – over this metaphor raised up in me into Absolute Reality – the last hazy light of a mysterious spiritual day.