Read Online The Stream of Life by Clarice Lispector - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Clarice Lispector
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discordance that I can understand. It's pure it. My being becomes completely soaked and slightly intoxicated. What I'm telling you is very important. And I work while I'm asleep: because it's then that I move in the mystery.
It's Sunday morning. On this Sunday of sun and Jupiter I'm alone at home. Suddenly, I've split in two and doubled over, as with an intense labor pain—and I saw that the girl in me was dying. I shall never forget this bloody Sunday. To heal will take time. And here I am, hard and silent and heroic. Without a little girl inside me. All lives are heroic lives.
Creation escapes me. And I don't even want to know so much. I'm satisfied that my heart beats in my chest. I'm satisfied with the impersonal vitality of the it.
Right now I feel my heart beating wildly in my chest. It's a vindication because during the last few sentences I was thinking only on the surface of myself. So the core of existence comes forth to bathe and erase all traces of thought. The sea erases the wave marks in the sand. Oh God, how happy I'm being. What destroys happiness is fear.
I'm still afraid. But my heart is beating. Inexplicable love makes the heart beat faster. The only guarantee is that I was born. You are a way of my being me, and I a way of you being you: hence the limits of my possibility.
I'm in a joy that one can die from. Sweet exhaustion in talking to you. But there's hope. My hope is to feel voracious toward the future. One day you said you loved me. I pretend to believe and live, from yesterday to today, in happy love. But to remember with yearning is like saying good-bye again.
A fantastic world surrounds me and is me. I hear the wild song of a bird and I crush butterflies between my fingers. I'm a fruit gnawed by a worm. And I await the orgasmic apocalypse. A dissonant swarm of insects surrounds me, light of a burning lamp that I am. I exceed myself then in order to be. I'm in a trance. I penetrate the surrounding air. What fever: I can't stop living. In this dense jungle of words that wrap themselves thickly around what I feel and think and experience and that transform all that I am into something of my own that nonetheless remains entirely separate from me. I watch myself think. What I ask myself is this: who is it in me that remains outside even of thinking? I'm writing you all of this since it's a challenge I'm forced to accept with humility. I'm startled by my ghosts, by what is mythical and fantastic—life is supernatural. And I walk on a loose rope to the end of my dream. Visceras tortured by voluptuousness guide me, fury of the impulses. Before organizing myself, I have to disorganize myself internally. To experience the first, fleeting primary state of freedom. Of the freedom to make mistakes, to fall and get up again.
But if I wait for understanding to accept things—the act of surrender will never take place. I have to take the plunge all at once, the plunge that embraces comprehension and above all incomprehension. And who am I to dare to think? What I have to do is give myself over. How do I do that? I know, though, that only in walking does one learn how to walk and then—miracle—one walks.
I, who manufacture the future like a diligent spider. And the best of myself is when I know nothing and manufacture I don't know what.
Behold, suddenly I see that I know nothing. Is the blade of my knife growing dull? It seems to me the most likely thing is that I don't understand because what I see now is so hard: and I'm cunningly entering into contact with a reality that is new to me and doesn't yet have thoughts corresponding to it, and much less a word that names it. It's one more sensation behind thought.
How can I explain this to you? I'm going to try. It's that I'm perceiving a slanted reality. One seen through an oblique slice. Only now have I intuited the obliqueness of life. Before I saw only through straight and parallel slices. I didn't notice the artful, slanted trace. Now I divine that
It's Sunday morning. On this Sunday of sun and Jupiter I'm alone at home. Suddenly, I've split in two and doubled over, as with an intense labor pain—and I saw that the girl in me was dying. I shall never forget this bloody Sunday. To heal will take time. And here I am, hard and silent and heroic. Without a little girl inside me. All lives are heroic lives.
Creation escapes me. And I don't even want to know so much. I'm satisfied that my heart beats in my chest. I'm satisfied with the impersonal vitality of the it.
Right now I feel my heart beating wildly in my chest. It's a vindication because during the last few sentences I was thinking only on the surface of myself. So the core of existence comes forth to bathe and erase all traces of thought. The sea erases the wave marks in the sand. Oh God, how happy I'm being. What destroys happiness is fear.
I'm still afraid. But my heart is beating. Inexplicable love makes the heart beat faster. The only guarantee is that I was born. You are a way of my being me, and I a way of you being you: hence the limits of my possibility.
I'm in a joy that one can die from. Sweet exhaustion in talking to you. But there's hope. My hope is to feel voracious toward the future. One day you said you loved me. I pretend to believe and live, from yesterday to today, in happy love. But to remember with yearning is like saying good-bye again.
A fantastic world surrounds me and is me. I hear the wild song of a bird and I crush butterflies between my fingers. I'm a fruit gnawed by a worm. And I await the orgasmic apocalypse. A dissonant swarm of insects surrounds me, light of a burning lamp that I am. I exceed myself then in order to be. I'm in a trance. I penetrate the surrounding air. What fever: I can't stop living. In this dense jungle of words that wrap themselves thickly around what I feel and think and experience and that transform all that I am into something of my own that nonetheless remains entirely separate from me. I watch myself think. What I ask myself is this: who is it in me that remains outside even of thinking? I'm writing you all of this since it's a challenge I'm forced to accept with humility. I'm startled by my ghosts, by what is mythical and fantastic—life is supernatural. And I walk on a loose rope to the end of my dream. Visceras tortured by voluptuousness guide me, fury of the impulses. Before organizing myself, I have to disorganize myself internally. To experience the first, fleeting primary state of freedom. Of the freedom to make mistakes, to fall and get up again.
But if I wait for understanding to accept things—the act of surrender will never take place. I have to take the plunge all at once, the plunge that embraces comprehension and above all incomprehension. And who am I to dare to think? What I have to do is give myself over. How do I do that? I know, though, that only in walking does one learn how to walk and then—miracle—one walks.
I, who manufacture the future like a diligent spider. And the best of myself is when I know nothing and manufacture I don't know what.
Behold, suddenly I see that I know nothing. Is the blade of my knife growing dull? It seems to me the most likely thing is that I don't understand because what I see now is so hard: and I'm cunningly entering into contact with a reality that is new to me and doesn't yet have thoughts corresponding to it, and much less a word that names it. It's one more sensation behind thought.
How can I explain this to you? I'm going to try. It's that I'm perceiving a slanted reality. One seen through an oblique slice. Only now have I intuited the obliqueness of life. Before I saw only through straight and parallel slices. I didn't notice the artful, slanted trace. Now I divine that
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