Authors: Clarice Lispector
Living makes me so nervous, so on the edge of. I take sedatives just because I’m alive: the sedative partially kills me and dulls the too-sharp steel of my blade of life. I stop shaking a bit. And reach a more contemplative stage.
AUTHOR: I think Angela’s pinnacle, one of her climaxes, is this “mystical” instant. Only Angela will someday know if it was mystical or mystifying. Anyway, from what it seems, Angela connected to the existence of a reality of life to which it is uncommon to adhere because everyday life often kills transcendence. Reality is fragmentary. Only the reality of the ultrasonic and ultralight of the infinite is whole.
Perhaps the “union of Angela with Everything!” is no more than a great self-knowledge and a great acceptance.
ANGELA: I’m still half-submerged in mystical sensations. I drank a bit too much of that strong beverage, I got a little drunk. I’ll say nothing about what happened to me, since, instead of mysticism, they might say it’s mystification. At the same time that I was receiving the God, I was turned inside-out and also felt that besides God I myself had made belief blossom within me coming from my medieval darkness. And I, trembling flower.
I don’t like to explain myself. I prefer the penumbra of not-knowing.
I live in provisional ecstasies. I live from the debris of a shipwreck that the sea rejects upon the sand.
AUTHOR: Everything Angela doesn’t understand she calls God. She worships the Unknown.
This ecstasy of illumination makes me suspicious. Is it spirit taking full possession of itself to its very fringes? Or is it a woman’s body brought to the point of crisis and then of mirages outside of her but that represent a “throwing away” for a few instants of the notion of lowness and sin? freed of the body for finally having acknowledged it, she, free of the heavy burden of sensuality, accepted the idea of the intimate union of two bodies — free, the great abundance of the universe is loosed, universe that has its voice in the absolute and expansive silence, silence brought to us by the air we breathe.
This illumination of Angela’s cannot make itself known in words. As the word “scent” tries to express poorly what we call “scent.” There are no words pure in themselves. They always come mixed with: “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”
I’m starting to think that Angela’s state of grace might be real because the “illumination” happened right after a feeling of complete abandonment and suffering. Saint Catherine of Genoa said that “when God wishes to penetrate a soul, He first abandons it completely.”
She reached an ecstasy upon losing the illusory multiplicity of worldly things and starting to feel everything as a whole. It is something that is nourished in the roots planted in the darkness of the soul and it rises until it reaches a “consciousness” that in fact is supernatural light and miracle.
What Angela does not know illuminates her and dominates her more than what she does know. It’s not a knowledge that has consequences. In fact she doesn’t even know what to do with what she knows.
ANGELA: Today I felt something absolutely terrible. I felt that I am not understood by God.
AUTHOR: He who emphasizes the ritual of faith can lose the point of faith.
Sometimes those who don’t believe are more likely to receive like a shining miracle the manna falling from nowhere. This “nowhere” is the air. And the air is what others call God. I call God as He wishes to be called. Like this: I open my mouth and as a means of calling Him let a sound escape me. This sound is simple. And it involves the vital breath. The sound limits itself to being only this: Ah . . .
Ah . . . the absolute and good and shrewd indifference . . . Ah . . . and it’s toward this Ah that we as in a breath go with our Ah to meet Him.
It’s a matter of the vital breath.
Meditation is an addiction, you acquire the taste.
And the result of meditation is Ah, which makes gods of us. That’s fine but now tell me what’s the point of being Gods or Humans?
It seems to please us to be able to say Ah. So I end up shot through by the voice of God and here I say like one lightly exhaling: Ah . . .
We were born to enjoy this Ah, could being be enough for me? I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m talking about.
The plant needs water, light-heat-soil-air to justify being, and could it be that the Ah justifies us?
There is someone waiting behind our left shoulder to touch us and to make us say Ah . . .
When I say I love you, I am loving me in you.
I’m not relative I’m infinite that’s why in each being I reflect myself in each being I encounter myself.
The most perfect thing that exists in the universe is the air. The air is the God accessible to us. When I speak of things I’m not reducing life to the material, rather I am humanizing the inert. All of this is as I once said, I play fair. I’m not hiding any cards. And if I have any style, let it come and turn up because I do not seek it.
Every birth presumes a rupture.
I was invited to watch a childbirth but I’m not strong enough to watch the dramatic birth of the dawn in the mountains when the sun is aflame.
Every birth is a cruelty. Things that wish to sleep should be left asleep.
My wickedness comes from the poor accommodation of my soul in my body. It is squeezed, it lacks inner space.
It’s what didn’t ever let itself be folded into four paws by the pain of existence, that pain which every once in a while we must obey in order to keep living our nice middle-class lives.
I ask God: why others? And He answers me: why you? to all of our questions God responds with a greater question and that is how we broaden ourselves in spasms for a child within us to be born. But — but peace on earth and tranquil light in the air. God who is the nothing-everything sparkles in a gentle glow of an eternal present, let us therefore sleep until next week.
And I? Could it be I won’t become my own character? Could it be I invent myself? All I know about myself is that I’m the product of a father and a mother. That’s all I know about creation and life.
We want to penetrate the kingdom of God through sins because if not for sin there wouldn’t be forgiveness and we wouldn’t manage to reach Him.
I took refuge in madness because reason was not enough for me.
I wait for what’s happening. This is my only future and past.
Comfort is an abundance.
One day the comfort in God and no matter how paltry it was we learn this from being in the warm shelter of our birth.
To be useless is freedom. To have meaning would belittle us, we are gratuitously just for the pleasure of being.
And from the future we will consciously wait for the lack of meaning, a freedom in speaking, in feeling Ah . . .
Happiness is nothing more than feeling an Ah with relief, then let us raise our glasses and modestly toast an Ah to God.
Though it’s hard for me to finish it hurts so much to say goodbye doesn’t it? Well because in me it hurts Ah.
Why God?
Why not sit smoking and dying of hunger Ah it’s because you want to be able to say Ah.
Do we exist simply to be relieved?
I pay attention only to pay attention: deep down I don’t want to know.
I don’t want anything.
God is abstract. That is our tragedy.
I am like the cicadas that explode from so much singing. When shall I explode? What do I sing? Do I sing the splendor of dying? Do I sing of my love that is so alive that it convulses? Do I sing the sorcery in the air? Do I sing the molecules of the air?
I’m frightened by my own power which however is limboed: could I kill myself in my desperation for despair? No. I refuse to kill myself. I want to live until I become an old and meditative being, comatose from a deep even indescribable and unreachable lucidity of the senile semi-coma. This senile semi-coma resembles a numb almost-sleep of the upper layers of consciousness. In that state — I imagine based on the gazes I have seen in the gray, immobile old — in that state one can respond to questions and even conversations: the ultimate aims of the living man are easy to execute.
What’s difficult and ultimately attainable is the half-unconscious and present lethargy — without past or future: like for a morphine addict. It’s a state of unavoidable truth without words. This state is milky and bluish with flickering ruby-red splinterings.
I write to you so that beyond the intimate surface on which we live you might come to know my prolonged howl of a wolf in the mountains.
I distilled myself entirely: I’m clean like rainwater.
Quint-essence.
Transfiguration.
Let the author beware of popularity, otherwise he will be defeated by success. There is a time when you must take a picture of yourself. Hunger is always the same as the first hunger. The need renews itself empty and entire.
AUTHOR: When something happens I don’t make the most of it. And then an illogical longing comes. But that’s because the present time, like the light of a star, only later does it reach me in light years. While it’s happening I can’t make out what’s going on. It seems to me that I am only sensitive and alert when remembering. I almost live, therefore, in the past because I can’t recognize the type of richness of the present moment.
The forgetting of things is my escape valve. I forget a lot out of necessity. I’m even trying and succeeding in forgetting me, me minutes before, I forget my future. I’m naked.
ANGELA: When I ask myself if the future worries me, I reply astonished or fake: the future? but what future? the future doesn’t exit. Am I complicated? No, I am simple as Bach!
I fear the instant which is always unique. Today, walking into the house, I let out a profound sigh as though arriving from a long and difficult journey. Disappeared people. Where are they now? When someone finds out call Rádio Tupi. Where is the disappeared Francisco Paulo Mendes? Is he dead? He abandoned me, he thought I was really important . . . And the walls of China? Before I see Christ, I want to see them. I want a ten-year guarantee. I’m afraid of having a tragic end. I’m hungry. And so I eat three petals of a yellow rose.
Ah, the intimate life I have with myself isn’t enough for me because bats and vampires cry out my name: Angela! Angela! Angela! And I cross measureless spaces to reach the era in which I live, I who came from afar. There are secret things that I know how to do. For example: remain seated feeling Time. Am I in the present? Or am I in the past? And what if I were in the future? How glorious. Or am I the fragment of a thing, therefore without time. The meaning of time elapsing is missing plot and suspense and mystery and climax.
I remember the future. Harmony is foreseeing an instant-now the next musical phrase. The train of darkness connects commerce to commerce. Conclave and sponsorship. Oh! the wonder of mornings. I’ll live until Saturday. And I won’t be run over. How nice. The world in focus. Does next year exist? State of emergency?
AUTHOR: I am the prophet of yesterday.
The joy of life is.
ANGELA: Two-twenty a.m. isn’t a time for anything especially on Saturday.
I shiver thinking in parentheses, oh my God, careful: I’m going to speak of the year 3000 — help! And the year 40,000? I’m scared.
In the year 40,000 I’m so dead. Even more than you. Careful, be very careful, sir. Help, oh inclement blue sky. I said as calmly as I could: please-help-me. It’s getting dark. And I without food or drink. I got hysterical, sorry. Am I by chance inside out? No, God save me. I want to be right-side out, ok? But it’s so hard.
AUTHOR: You — I say to anyone — you’re to blame for the ants that will gnaw my mouth ruined by the mechanism of life. Angela doesn’t die death because she’s already dying in life: that’s how she escapes a fateful end by having a sample of total death in her day-to-day life.
And suddenly — suddenly! a demonic and rebellious avalanche gushes inside me: because I wonder if it’s worth it for Angela to die. Do I kill her? does she kill herself? I pull back my reins though the horse complains. Because I just thought better of it. And I’ll only figure it out after Angela takes a position regarding death.
Life is so raw and naked that a living dog is worth more than a dead man. I’m so shaken by this stupid discovery that I light a candle in memory of that buried man. He was so perfect that he died.
I always wanted to reach a state of peace and non-struggle. I thought that was the ideal state. But it so happens that — that am I really me without my struggle? No, I don’t know how to have peace.
My question is the size of the Universe. And the only response that fills in my question is the Universe itself.
But something scares me: that if I search I won’t find.
I discovered a power: the power of being in a locked room: I imprison myself and become concrete. Though I continue being an abstraction. It’s not contradictory to make oneself concrete and abstract: I become concrete on a level that is not that on which the world is planned. I obtain myself in the concretely possible that exists within abstraction.
I want to justify death.
Could it be that, after we die, we sometimes wake up startled?
There is a mystery in a cup of water: watching the calm water I seem to read into it the substance of life. Like a fortune-teller before her sparkling crystal ball. This story still hasn’t happened. It will happen in the future. The future is already with me and it won’t make me out-of-date. Or will it?