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Authors: Clarice Lispector
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world. It’s forgiveness itself. Forgiveness is an attribute of living matter.
Forgiveness is an attribute of living matter.
—You see, my love, see how out of fear I’m already organizing, see how I still can’t deal with these primary laboratory elements without immediately wanting to organize hope. Because for now the metamorphosis of me into myself makes no sense. It’s a metamorphosis in which I lose everything I had, and what I had was me — I only have what I am. And what am I now? I am: standing in front of a fright. I am: what I saw. I don’t understand and I am afraid to understand, the matter of the world frightens me, with its planets and roaches.
I, who used to live on words of charity or pride or anything. But what an abyss between the word and what it was trying to do, what an abyss between the word love and the love that doesn’t even have a human meaning — because — because love is living matter. Is love living matter?
What was it that happened to me yesterday? and now? I’m confused, I crossed deserts and deserts, but did I get stuck by some detail? trapped as beneath a rock.
No, wait, wait: with relief I must remember that I left that room yesterday, I left it, I’m free! and still have a chance to recover. If I want to.
But do I?
What I saw is not organizable. But if I really want to, right now, I could still translate what I found out into terms closer to ours, to human terms, and could still let those hours yesterday pass unnoticed. If I still want to I could, within our language, wonder some other way what happened to me.
And, if I put it that way, I can still find an answer that would let me recover. Recovery would be knowing that: G. H. was a woman who lived well, lived well, lived well, lived on the uppermost layer of the sands of the world, and the sands had never caved in beneath her feet: the coordination was such that, as the sands moved, her feet moved along with them, and so everything stayed firm and compact. G. H. lived on the top floor of a superstructure, and, though built in the air, it was a solid building, she herself in the air, as bees weave life in the air. And that had been happening for centuries, with the necessary or occasional changes, and it worked. It worked — at least nothing spoke and nobody spoke, nobody said no; so it worked.
But, precisely this slow accumulation of centuries automatically piling atop each other was what, without anybody noticing, was making the construction in the air very heavy: it was getting saturated with itself: getting more compact, instead of getting more fragile. The accumulation of living in a superstructure was getting increasingly heavy to stay up in the air.
Like a building in which everyone sleeps calmly at night, unaware that the foundations are sagging and that, in an instant unsuggested by the peacefulness, the beams will give way because their cohesive strength is slowly pulling them apart one millimeter per century. And then, when it’s least expected — in an instant as repetitively common as lifting a drink to a smiling mouth during a dance — then, yesterday, on a day as full of sunlight as the days at the height of summer, with men working and kitchens giving off smoke and a jackhammer shattering stones and children laughing and a priest trying to stop, but stop what? yesterday, without warning, there was the loud sound of something solid that suddenly crumbles.
In the collapse, tons fell upon tons. And when I, G. H. even on my suitcases, I, one of the people, opened my eyes, I was — not atop debris, for even the debris had already been swallowed by the sands — I was on a calm plain, kilometers and kilometers below what had been a great city. Things had gone back to being what they were.
The world had reclaimed its own reality, and, as after a catastrophe, my civilization had ended: I was nothing more than a historical fact. Everything in me had been reclaimed by the beginning of time and by my own
Forgiveness is an attribute of living matter.
—You see, my love, see how out of fear I’m already organizing, see how I still can’t deal with these primary laboratory elements without immediately wanting to organize hope. Because for now the metamorphosis of me into myself makes no sense. It’s a metamorphosis in which I lose everything I had, and what I had was me — I only have what I am. And what am I now? I am: standing in front of a fright. I am: what I saw. I don’t understand and I am afraid to understand, the matter of the world frightens me, with its planets and roaches.
I, who used to live on words of charity or pride or anything. But what an abyss between the word and what it was trying to do, what an abyss between the word love and the love that doesn’t even have a human meaning — because — because love is living matter. Is love living matter?
What was it that happened to me yesterday? and now? I’m confused, I crossed deserts and deserts, but did I get stuck by some detail? trapped as beneath a rock.
No, wait, wait: with relief I must remember that I left that room yesterday, I left it, I’m free! and still have a chance to recover. If I want to.
But do I?
What I saw is not organizable. But if I really want to, right now, I could still translate what I found out into terms closer to ours, to human terms, and could still let those hours yesterday pass unnoticed. If I still want to I could, within our language, wonder some other way what happened to me.
And, if I put it that way, I can still find an answer that would let me recover. Recovery would be knowing that: G. H. was a woman who lived well, lived well, lived well, lived on the uppermost layer of the sands of the world, and the sands had never caved in beneath her feet: the coordination was such that, as the sands moved, her feet moved along with them, and so everything stayed firm and compact. G. H. lived on the top floor of a superstructure, and, though built in the air, it was a solid building, she herself in the air, as bees weave life in the air. And that had been happening for centuries, with the necessary or occasional changes, and it worked. It worked — at least nothing spoke and nobody spoke, nobody said no; so it worked.
But, precisely this slow accumulation of centuries automatically piling atop each other was what, without anybody noticing, was making the construction in the air very heavy: it was getting saturated with itself: getting more compact, instead of getting more fragile. The accumulation of living in a superstructure was getting increasingly heavy to stay up in the air.
Like a building in which everyone sleeps calmly at night, unaware that the foundations are sagging and that, in an instant unsuggested by the peacefulness, the beams will give way because their cohesive strength is slowly pulling them apart one millimeter per century. And then, when it’s least expected — in an instant as repetitively common as lifting a drink to a smiling mouth during a dance — then, yesterday, on a day as full of sunlight as the days at the height of summer, with men working and kitchens giving off smoke and a jackhammer shattering stones and children laughing and a priest trying to stop, but stop what? yesterday, without warning, there was the loud sound of something solid that suddenly crumbles.
In the collapse, tons fell upon tons. And when I, G. H. even on my suitcases, I, one of the people, opened my eyes, I was — not atop debris, for even the debris had already been swallowed by the sands — I was on a calm plain, kilometers and kilometers below what had been a great city. Things had gone back to being what they were.
The world had reclaimed its own reality, and, as after a catastrophe, my civilization had ended: I was nothing more than a historical fact. Everything in me had been reclaimed by the beginning of time and by my own
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