Read Online The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Clarice Lispector
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beginning. I had moved onto the first foreground, I was in the silence of the winds and in the age of tin and copper — in the first age of life.
— Listen, faced with the living cockroach, the worst discovery was that the world is not human, and that we are not human.
No, don’t get scared! certainly what had saved me until that moment from the sentimentalized life from which I’d been living, is that the inhuman part is the best part of us, it’s the thing, the thing-part of us. That’s the only reason that, as a false person, I had never before burrowed beneath the sentimental and utilitarian construction: my human feelings were utilitarian, but I hadn’t burrowed under because the thing-part, matter of the God, was too powerful and was waiting to reclaim me. The great neutral punishment of general life is that it can suddenly undermine a single life; if it isn’t given its own power, then it bursts as a dam bursts — and arrives pure, unadulterated: purely neutral. That was the great danger: when that neutral part of things doesn’t sate a personal life, life arrives purely neutral.
But why exactly in me had the first silence suddenly reappeared? As if a calm woman had simply been called and calmly set aside her embroidery on a chair, stood up, and wordlessly — abandoning her life, renouncing embroidery, love and an already-made soul — wordlessly that woman composedly got down on all fours, started to crawl and drag herself along with calm and sparkling eyes: because the earlier life had called her and she went.
But why me? But why not me. If it hadn’t been me, I wouldn’t know, and since it was me, I knew — that’s all. What was it that called me: madness or reality?
Life was taking revenge on me, and its revenge was no more than coming back, nothing more. In every case of madness something came back. The possessed are not possessed by what is coming but by what is coming back. Sometimes life comes back. If everything broke in me as the force passed through, that’s not because its function is to break: it just finally needed to come through since it had already become too copious to be contained or diverted — along its way it buried everything. And afterward, as after a flood, floating upon the waters was a wardrobe, a person, a stray window, three suitcases. And that seemed like hell to me, that destruction of layers and layers of human archeology.
Hell, because the world held no more human meaning for me, and man no longer had human meaning for me. And without that humanization and without the sentimentalization of the world — I am terrified.
Without a cry I looked at the roach.
Seen up close, a roach is an object of great luxury. A bride in black jewels. It is rare, it seems to be one-of-a-kind. In trapping it halfway down its body with the wardrobe door, I had isolated the only known specimen. Only half of its body was visible. The rest, which couldn’t be seen, could be huge, and was divided among thousands of houses, behind things and wardrobes. Yet I didn’t want the part allotted me. Behind the surface of houses — those murky jewels crawling along?
I was feeling unclean as the Bible speaks of the unclean. Why was the Bible so concerned with the unclean, and made a list of unclean and forbidden animals? why, if those animals, just like the rest, had been created too? And why was the unclean forbidden? I had committed the forbidden act of touching the unclean.
I had committed the forbidden act of touching the unclean.
And so unclean was I, in that my sudden indirect knowledge of myself, that I opened my mouth to ask for help. They say everything, in the Bible, they say everything — but if I understand what they say, they themselves will call me mad. People just like me have said it, yet to understand them would be my downfall.
“But thou shalt not eat of the impure: which are the eagle, and the griffin, and the falcon.” And neither the owl, nor the swan, nor the bat,
— Listen, faced with the living cockroach, the worst discovery was that the world is not human, and that we are not human.
No, don’t get scared! certainly what had saved me until that moment from the sentimentalized life from which I’d been living, is that the inhuman part is the best part of us, it’s the thing, the thing-part of us. That’s the only reason that, as a false person, I had never before burrowed beneath the sentimental and utilitarian construction: my human feelings were utilitarian, but I hadn’t burrowed under because the thing-part, matter of the God, was too powerful and was waiting to reclaim me. The great neutral punishment of general life is that it can suddenly undermine a single life; if it isn’t given its own power, then it bursts as a dam bursts — and arrives pure, unadulterated: purely neutral. That was the great danger: when that neutral part of things doesn’t sate a personal life, life arrives purely neutral.
But why exactly in me had the first silence suddenly reappeared? As if a calm woman had simply been called and calmly set aside her embroidery on a chair, stood up, and wordlessly — abandoning her life, renouncing embroidery, love and an already-made soul — wordlessly that woman composedly got down on all fours, started to crawl and drag herself along with calm and sparkling eyes: because the earlier life had called her and she went.
But why me? But why not me. If it hadn’t been me, I wouldn’t know, and since it was me, I knew — that’s all. What was it that called me: madness or reality?
Life was taking revenge on me, and its revenge was no more than coming back, nothing more. In every case of madness something came back. The possessed are not possessed by what is coming but by what is coming back. Sometimes life comes back. If everything broke in me as the force passed through, that’s not because its function is to break: it just finally needed to come through since it had already become too copious to be contained or diverted — along its way it buried everything. And afterward, as after a flood, floating upon the waters was a wardrobe, a person, a stray window, three suitcases. And that seemed like hell to me, that destruction of layers and layers of human archeology.
Hell, because the world held no more human meaning for me, and man no longer had human meaning for me. And without that humanization and without the sentimentalization of the world — I am terrified.
Without a cry I looked at the roach.
Seen up close, a roach is an object of great luxury. A bride in black jewels. It is rare, it seems to be one-of-a-kind. In trapping it halfway down its body with the wardrobe door, I had isolated the only known specimen. Only half of its body was visible. The rest, which couldn’t be seen, could be huge, and was divided among thousands of houses, behind things and wardrobes. Yet I didn’t want the part allotted me. Behind the surface of houses — those murky jewels crawling along?
I was feeling unclean as the Bible speaks of the unclean. Why was the Bible so concerned with the unclean, and made a list of unclean and forbidden animals? why, if those animals, just like the rest, had been created too? And why was the unclean forbidden? I had committed the forbidden act of touching the unclean.
I had committed the forbidden act of touching the unclean.
And so unclean was I, in that my sudden indirect knowledge of myself, that I opened my mouth to ask for help. They say everything, in the Bible, they say everything — but if I understand what they say, they themselves will call me mad. People just like me have said it, yet to understand them would be my downfall.
“But thou shalt not eat of the impure: which are the eagle, and the griffin, and the falcon.” And neither the owl, nor the swan, nor the bat,
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