Is this book a fantasy, in a way? While some writers might fantasize about a man coming along who will shower a woman in diamonds and install her in a penthouse, Clarice Lispector, the great mystic, spins a fantasy of having an explicit reason for doing the most difficult labor a person is capable of: the work of becoming an actual human being in this world. Here, the motive to do the work is to win the love of a man. (But a man is not just some guy; he represents one of the elemental forces of the universe — the masculine force that sets the difficult task in motion, of impelling the feminine force, which would otherwise sit, roundly, alone. What woman has not felt that unfortunate thing, that some man, not yet won, was “like the border between the past and whatever was to come”? Yet in a way, isn’t Ulisses asking Lóri to find the masculine force within herself, before coming to him? Or to find it in herself so she doesn’t come to him seeking it, then get bored of what she’s found, like any woman who goes from man to man, never satisfied because she’s mistaken about what she is looking for, really? Yes. Any woman wanting any sort of lasting happiness has to realize that she can — and must — be the impelling force that moves herself through the world.)
The end point of all this spiritual labor isn’t a lasting happiness. Then what is the prize of the work of becoming human (work that those worthy of our love make us twist ourselves up in order to achieve — or else never achieve, which they will never cease to remind us of)? Is the prize simply a few private moments between ourselves and the universe, which are so magnificent — moments of true grace — such as Lóri encounters on the way to her man? Or is the prize of all that spiritual effort just hearing, and being able to honestly say, I love you? Is it a marriage in which one’s spouse is going to be working on a long essay, leaving one alone a lot? Or is the prize being interrupted midsentence by the person one loves, in bed? The struggle toward love is presented as an apprenticeship — but an apprenticeship in what? An ordinary kind of marriage? And after an apprenticeship, we supposedly become masters — but of what? Loving? Living?
No, never masters, for the master understands her craft — whether it’s an art form, or the craft of life, or of love — while the apprentice does not. As Lispector writes, “not-understanding” would always be better than “understanding,” for not-understanding “had no frontiers and led to the infinite, to the God.” Lóri, Ulisses, we, Clarice, remain apprentices, always — apprentices in everything — because apprentices feel more, think more, struggle more, and win more than the master, who has already arrived, ever can.
SHEILA HETI
An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures Page 13