Read Online The Stream of Life by Clarice Lispector - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Clarice Lispector
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life
is something else. That living is not just unrolling crude sentiments—it's something more magical and more graceful, something that for all that does not lose its fine animal vigor. I've put my heavy paw on that unexpectedly slanted life, thus snuffing out the oblique and the fortuitous that is at the same time the subtly fateful. I've understood the fatality of chance and in this there's no contradiction.
Oblique life is very intimate. I won't say anything more about that intimacy so that I don't harm thought-feeling with dry words. So that I leave that obliqueness in its unbridled independence.
And I also know a way of life that is soft pride, grace of movement, light and continuous frustration, that has a skill at aloofness that comes from a long and ancient path. Like a tiny sign of revolt an irony light and eccentric. There's a side of life that's like drinking coffee on a terrace in winter cold bundled up in wool.
I know a way of life that's a light shadow unfurled to the wind and flapping lightly on the ground: a life that's floating shadow, levitation and dreams in broad daylight: I live the richness of the earth.
Yes. Life is very oriental. Only a few people chosen by the fate of chance have tasted of the elusive and delicate freedom of life. It's like knowing how to arrange flowers in a vase: an almost useless skill. That fugitive freedom of life should never be forgotten: it must be present, like an aroma.
To live this life is more an indirect remembering of it than a direct living. It seems like a gentle convalescence from something that could have been absolutely terrible. Convalescence from a frigid pleasure. Only for those who are initiated does life become delicately real. And it's in the now-instant: one devours the fruit at its peak. Could it be that I don't know what I'm talking about anymore and that everything has escaped me without my knowing it? Yes, I do know—but very carefully because otherwise it will slip through my fingers. I feed myself delicately on the trivial day-to-day and drink coffee on the terrace at the threshold of this twilight that seems sickly but only because it's sweet and sensitive.
Oblique life? I know full well that there's a slight discordance between things, they almost clash, there's a discordance between beings who lose each other between words that say virtually nothing more. But we almost understand each other in that casual discordance, in that almost that's the only way of bearing life at its fullest, since a blunt face-to-face encounter with it would frighten us, would stun its delicate spiderweb threads. We look at each other sideways so as not to compromise what we sense as being infinitely other in that life I'm telling you of.
And I live to one side—a place where the direct light doesn't scorch me. And I speak in a whisper so that ears are forced to stay on the ready and to hear me.
But I know still another life. I know and want it and I devour it ferociously. It's a life of magic violence. It's mysterious and bewitching. In it snakes coil around each other while the stars tremble. Drops of water fall in the phosphorescent darkness of the cave. In this darkness the flowers grow entangled in an enchanted and moist garden. And I am the sorceress of this mute bacchanal. I feel I'm defeated by my own corruptibility. And I see that I'm intrinsically evil. It's only out of pure goodness that I'm good. Defeated by myself. That I take myself along the paths of the salamander, genius that governs the fire and lives within it. And I give myself as an offering to the dead. I perform incantations during the solstice, specter of an exorcized dragon.
But I don't know how to capture what takes place except by living each thing that now and at the instant happens to me and it's not important what. I let the horse gallop free, fiery from pure, noble joy. I, who run nervously and only reality delimits me. And when the day comes to an end I hear the crickets and I
is something else. That living is not just unrolling crude sentiments—it's something more magical and more graceful, something that for all that does not lose its fine animal vigor. I've put my heavy paw on that unexpectedly slanted life, thus snuffing out the oblique and the fortuitous that is at the same time the subtly fateful. I've understood the fatality of chance and in this there's no contradiction.
Oblique life is very intimate. I won't say anything more about that intimacy so that I don't harm thought-feeling with dry words. So that I leave that obliqueness in its unbridled independence.
And I also know a way of life that is soft pride, grace of movement, light and continuous frustration, that has a skill at aloofness that comes from a long and ancient path. Like a tiny sign of revolt an irony light and eccentric. There's a side of life that's like drinking coffee on a terrace in winter cold bundled up in wool.
I know a way of life that's a light shadow unfurled to the wind and flapping lightly on the ground: a life that's floating shadow, levitation and dreams in broad daylight: I live the richness of the earth.
Yes. Life is very oriental. Only a few people chosen by the fate of chance have tasted of the elusive and delicate freedom of life. It's like knowing how to arrange flowers in a vase: an almost useless skill. That fugitive freedom of life should never be forgotten: it must be present, like an aroma.
To live this life is more an indirect remembering of it than a direct living. It seems like a gentle convalescence from something that could have been absolutely terrible. Convalescence from a frigid pleasure. Only for those who are initiated does life become delicately real. And it's in the now-instant: one devours the fruit at its peak. Could it be that I don't know what I'm talking about anymore and that everything has escaped me without my knowing it? Yes, I do know—but very carefully because otherwise it will slip through my fingers. I feed myself delicately on the trivial day-to-day and drink coffee on the terrace at the threshold of this twilight that seems sickly but only because it's sweet and sensitive.
Oblique life? I know full well that there's a slight discordance between things, they almost clash, there's a discordance between beings who lose each other between words that say virtually nothing more. But we almost understand each other in that casual discordance, in that almost that's the only way of bearing life at its fullest, since a blunt face-to-face encounter with it would frighten us, would stun its delicate spiderweb threads. We look at each other sideways so as not to compromise what we sense as being infinitely other in that life I'm telling you of.
And I live to one side—a place where the direct light doesn't scorch me. And I speak in a whisper so that ears are forced to stay on the ready and to hear me.
But I know still another life. I know and want it and I devour it ferociously. It's a life of magic violence. It's mysterious and bewitching. In it snakes coil around each other while the stars tremble. Drops of water fall in the phosphorescent darkness of the cave. In this darkness the flowers grow entangled in an enchanted and moist garden. And I am the sorceress of this mute bacchanal. I feel I'm defeated by my own corruptibility. And I see that I'm intrinsically evil. It's only out of pure goodness that I'm good. Defeated by myself. That I take myself along the paths of the salamander, genius that governs the fire and lives within it. And I give myself as an offering to the dead. I perform incantations during the solstice, specter of an exorcized dragon.
But I don't know how to capture what takes place except by living each thing that now and at the instant happens to me and it's not important what. I let the horse gallop free, fiery from pure, noble joy. I, who run nervously and only reality delimits me. And when the day comes to an end I hear the crickets and I
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