And miracles too can be sought and had, for continuity has interstices that don't make it discontinuous, the miracle is the note that lies between two musical notes, the number that lies between the number one and the number two. It's just a question of seeking and having. Faith ... is knowing that you can go consume the miracle. Hunger, that is what faith is in and of itself—and needing is my guarantee that it will always be given to me. Necessity is my guide.
No. I didn't need to have the courage to eat the cockroach mass. For I lacked the saint's humility: I had given the act of eating it a sense of "maximum." But life is divided into qualities and species, and the law is that cockroaches will be loved and eaten only by other cockroaches; and that a woman, at the moment of her love for a man, that woman is experiencing her own species. I realized that I had just done the equivalent of experiencing the cockroach mass ... for the law is that I should live with person-matter and not cockroach-matter.
I realized that by putting the cockroach mass in my mouth, I was not bereaving myself as saints bereave themselves, but rather I was again seeking accretion. Accretion is easier to love.
And now I am taking your hand in to my own. I am the one who is giving you my hand.
I need your hand now, not so I won't be afraid but so you won't. I know belief in all this will, in the beginning, be a great solitude for you. But the moment will arrive when you will give me your hand, no longer in solitude, but as I do now: in love. Just like me, you won't be afraid to add yourself to God's extreme energetic sweetness. Solitude is simply having human destiny.
And solitude is not needing. Not needing leaves a person alone, all alone. Oh, needing doesn't isolate a person, things need things: it's enough to see a chick walking to see that its destiny will be what lack will make of it, its destiny is to join, like drops of mercury cling to other drops of mercury, even though, like all drops of mercury, it has a complete and rounded existence in itself.
Oh, my love, don't be afraid of that lacking: it is our greater destiny. Love is so much more fateful than I thought, love is as ingrained as is lack itself, and we are guaranteed by necessity that it is continually renewed. Love is now, is always. All that is missing is the coup-de-grâce— which is called passion.
All that is missing is the coup-de-grâce—which is called passion.
What I am now feeling is a happiness. Through the live cockroach I am coming to understand that I too am that which lives. To live is a very high stage, it is something I have just now attained. It is so high an unstable equilibrium that I know I won't be able to stay aware of it for long— the grace of passion is short.
Perhaps to be human like us is merely a special sensitization that we call "having humanity." Oh, I also fear losing this sensitization. Till now I had called my sensitivity to life "life" itself. But to live is something else.
To live is a gross, radiating indifference. To be alive is unreachable by the most delicate of sensibilities. To be alive is inhuman—the deepest meditation is one that is so empty that a smile is exhaled as though it came from some matter. And I shall be even more delicate, and more permanent in my state. Am I speaking of death? am I speaking of after death? I don't know. I sense that "nonhuman" is a great reality, and that that doesn't mean "inhuman": to the contrary, the nonhuman is the radiating center of a neutral love in radio waves.
If my life is transformed into it-itself, what I now call sensibility will not exist—it will be called indifference. But I am still unable to learn that way of being. It is as if hundreds of thousands of years from now we finally won't be what we feel and think anymore: we shall have something that more closely resembles an "attitude" than an idea. We shall be living matter manifesting itself directly, unmindful of words, going beyond always-grotesque thinking.
And I won't travel "from thought to thought" but from attitude to attitude. We shall be inhuman—as humankind's greatest conquest. To be is to be beyond the human. To be a human being doesn't do it, to be human has been a constraint. The unknown awaits us, but I sense that that unknown is a totalization and will be the true humanization we long for. Am I speaking of death? no, of life. It isn't a state of felicity, it is a state of contact.
Oh, don't think that all this doesn't make me sick, in fact I find it so boring that it makes me impatient. But it resembles paradise, where I can't even imagine what I'd do, for I can only imagine myself thinking and feeling, two attributes of one's being, and I can't imagine myself just being and ignoring the rest. Just to be—that would leave me with an enormous need of something to do.
At the same time, I was a little bit doubtful.
The fact is that, just as earlier I had become terrified before by my entrance into what could develop into despair, I now suspected that I was again transcending things . . .
Could I be enlarging the thing too much precisely to go beyond the cockroach and the piece of iron and the piece of glass?
I don't think so.
For I wasn't reducing hope to a simple result of construction and counterfeiting, nor was I denying the existence of something to hope for. Nor was I removing the promise: I was merely sensing, with enormous effort, that hope and promise are fulfilled at every instant. And that was terrifying, I have always feared being stricken by realization, I had always thought of realization as a final resting point—and I hadn't foreseen a situation where necessity is ever being born.
And also since I was afraid, because I couldn't stand simple glory, that I would make it one more accretion. But I know—I know—that there is an experiencing of glory in which life has the purest taste of nothingness and that in glory I feel it to be empty. When living is realized, the question will be asked: but was that all there was to it? And the answer: that isn't all there is, it is exactly what there is to it.
Only I still have to be careful not to make more of it than that, for if I do it won't be that anymore. Essence is a piercing insipidity. I'll have to "purify myself" much more just not to want the accretion of events. Before, self-purification implied cruelty for me, against what I called beauty and against what I called "me," without knowing that "me" was an accretion to myself.
But now, through my most difficult fright I am finally moving toward the opposite path. I am moving toward the destruction of what I have constructed, I am moving toward depersonalization.
I am anxious for the world, I have strong, definite desires, tonight I'll go dancing and eating, I won't wear my blue dress, I'll wear my black-and-white one instead. But at the same time, I don't need anything. I don't even need a tree to exist. I now know a modality that dispenses with everything—and also with love, with nature, with objects. A mode that dispenses with me. Even though, as regards my desires, my passions, my contact with a tree—they may keep on being for me like a mouth eating.
Depersonalization like the deposing of useless individuality—the loss of everything that can be lost, while still being. To take away from yourself little by little, with an effort so attentive that no pain is felt, to take away from yourself like one who gets free of her own skin, her own characteristics. Everything that characterizes me is just the way I am most easily viewed by others and end up being superficially recognizable to myself. Just as there was the moment when I saw that the cockroach was the cockroach of all cockroaches, so too I want from me to encounter the woman of all women in myself.
Depersonalization as the great objectification of oneself. The greatest externalization one can attain. Whoever is touched by depersonalization will recognize the other in any guise: the first step in relation to the other is to find in oneself the man of all men. Every woman is the woman of all women, every man is the man of all men, and every one of them could appear wherever humankind is judged. But only in immanence, because only a few people reach the point of recognizing themselves in us. And then, in the simple presence of their existence, revealing our own.
What is lived of—and since it has no name only silence enunciates it—is what I approach through the great
amplitude of ceasing to be myself. Not because I may then discover the name and make the impalpable concrete—but because I determine the impalpable to be impalpable, and then the breath builds again like in the flame of a candle.
The gradual deheroization of oneself is the true labor that is performed under merely apparent labor, life is a secret mission. Real life is so secret that not even I, who am dying of it, have been given the password, I am dying without knowing of what. And the secret is such that only if the mission is finally carried out do I, all of a sudden, see that I was born entrusted with it—all of life is a secret mission.
The deheroization of myself is undermining the ground beneath my edifice, doing so despite me like an unknown calling. Until it is finally revealed to me that life in me does not bear my name.
And I also have no name, and that is my name. And because I depersonalize to the point of not having a name, I shall answer every time someone says: me.
Deheroization is the grand failure of a life. Not everyone can fail because it is such hard work, one must first climb painfully up to get to the height to fall from —I can only achieve the depersonality of silence if I have first built an entire voice. My cultures were necessary to me so that I could climb up to have a point to come down from. It is precisely through the foundering of the voice that one hears for the first time one's own silence and that of others and of things, and accepts it as the possible language. Only then is my nature accepted, accepted with its wonderous torture in which pain isn't something that happens to us but what we are. And our condition is accepted as the only one possible since it is what exists and none other. And since the experience of it is our passion. The human condition is Christ's passion.
Oh, but to reach silence, what a huge effort of voice. My voice is the way I go to seek reality; reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought, but I was and am fatefully impelled to have to know what thought thinks. Reality precedes the voice that seeks it, but like the earth precedes the tree, but like the world precedes the man, but like the sea precedes the view of the sea, life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.
I have to the extent that I determine—and that is the splendor of having a language. But I have much more to the extent that I am unable to determine. Reality is raw material, language the way I seek it—and how I don't find it. But it is from seeking and not finding that what I have not known is born, and I instantly recognize it. Language is my human endeavor. I have fatefully to go seeking and fatefully I return with empty hands. But—I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can be given me only through the failure of my language. Only when the construct falters do I reach what it could not accomplish.
And it is useless to try to take a shortcut and start right in, knowing already that the voice says little, starting already with depersonalization. For the trajectory exists, and the trajectory is more than just a way of proceeding. We ourselves are the trajectory. In living one can never arrive ahead of time. The via crucis isn't a wrong way, it is the only way, you get there only through it and with it. Insistence is our effort, desistance is the prize. One gets the prize when she has experienced the power of building and, in spite of the taste of power, prefers desistance. Desistance has to be a choice. To desist is a life's most sacred choice. To desist is the true human moment. And it alone is the glory proper to my condition.
Desistance is a revelation.
Desistance is a revelation.
I desist, and I shall have been the human person — it is only for the worst part of my condition that it is taken up as my destiny. Existing demands of me the huge sacrifice of having no power, I desist and, behold, the world fits in my weak hand. I desist and to my human poverty there opens the only joy that is given me to have, human joy. I know this and I tremble—living leaves me so much in wonder, living keeps me from going to sleep.
I reach the height from which I can fall, I choose, I tremble, and I desist, and finally, devoting myself to my fall, depersonalized, without a voice of my own, in the last analysis without myself—behold that everything I don't have is mine. I desist and the less I am, the more alive, the more I lose my name, the more I am called, my only secret mission is my condition, I desist and the more I am ignorant of the password the more I carry out the secret, the less I know the more the sweetness of the abyss is my destiny. And then I adore.
With my hands quietly folded in my lap, I was experiencing a sense of tender, timid happiness. It was almost a nothingness, like when the breeze makes a blade of grass quiver. It was almost nothing, but I could see the tiny movement of my timidity. I don't know, but I was approaching something with anguished idolatry and with the delicacy of one who fears. I was approaching the strongest thing that had yet happened to me.
Stronger than hope, stronger than love?
I was appoaching what I think was . . . confidence. Perhaps that's its name. Or it doesn't matter: you could give another one just as well.
I felt that my face was smiling in sweat. Or perhaps it wasn't smiling, I don't know. I was confident.
In myself? in the world? in God? in the cockroach? I don't know. Perhaps having confidence doesn't involve having it in something or someone. Perhaps I now knew that I would never be equal to life myself, but that my life was equal to life. I would never reach my root, but my root did exist. I had timidly let myself be transfixed by a sweetness that abashed me without constraining me.
Oh God, I felt baptized by the world. I had put cockroach matter into my mouth; I had finally performed the lowest of all acts.
Not the greatest of all acts as I had thought before, not heroism and sainthood. But in the final analysis, the lowest of all acts was what I had always needed. I had always been incapable of the lowest of acts. And like that lowest of acts, I had deheroized myself. I, who had lived of the middle of the road, had finally taken the first step at its start.
Finally, finally, my husk had really broken, and I was, without limit. By not being, I was. To the edge of what I wasn't, I was. What I am not, I am. Everything will be within me, if I am not; for "I" is merely one of the world's instantaneous spasms. My life doesn't have a merely human sense, it is much greater—it is so much greater that, in relation to human sense, it is senseless. Of the general organization that was greater than I, I had till now perceived only the fragments. But now I was much less than human . . . and I would realize my specifically human destiny only if I gave myself over, just as I was doing, to what was not me, to what was still inhuman.
And giving myself over with the confidence of belonging to the unknown. For I can pray only to what I do not know. And I can love only the unknown evidence of things and can add myself only to what I do not know. Only that is a real giving of oneself.
And such a giving of myself is the only surpassing that doesn't exclude me. I was now so much greater that I no longer saw myself. As great as a landscape in the distance. I was in the distance. More perceptible in my last mountains and in my remotest rivers: simultaneous now-ness did not frighten me anymore, and in the most ultimate extremity of myself I could finally smile without smiling in the least. I finally extended beyond my own sensibility.
The world interdepended with me—that was the confidence I had reached: the world interdepended with me, and I am not understanding what I say, never! never again shall I understand what I say. For how will I be able to speak without the word lying for me? how will I be able to speak except timidly, like this: life is itself for me. Life is itself for me, and I don't understand what I am saying. And, therefore, I adore . . .
About the Author
Clarice Lispector, one of the most significant writers in twentieth-century Brazilian literature, died in 1977. Her works range from literary essays to novelistic fiction and children's literature. Lispector is best known in Latin America and Europe; only recently have some of her works been translated from Portuguese into English. Other English transl
ations include Family Ties, The Apple in the Dark and The Hour of the Star. The University of Minnesota Press will soon publish a translation of her book Agua Viva.
Ronald Sousa, a faculty member at the University of Minnesota since 1974, is professor of Spanish and Portuguese and previously served as department chairman of comparative literature. He has also worked at the University of Texas and the University of California, Berkeley. Sousa received his masters degree (1968) and doctorate (1973) in comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of The Rediscoverers: Major Figures in the Portuguese Literature of National Regeneration and editor of Problems of Enlightenment in Portugal. Sousa contributes to Ideologies and Literature, Luso-Brazilian Review and Bulletin of Hispanic Studies.
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