Authors: Clarice Lispector
It’s so good to have someone to ask for things. It doesn’t even bother me much if my requests aren’t totally satisfied. I ask God to make me prettier — and isn’t it true that my eye shines as my lips seem fuller and sweeter? I ask God for everything I want and need. That’s what I can do. Whether my prayers are answered — that’s not up to me, that’s already the matter-magic that either gives itself to me or withholds itself. Stubborn, I pray. I don’t have the power. I have the prayer.
AUTHOR: I’m so in contact with God that I don’t even need to pray. It’s natural that Angela resembles me a bit. I’ve even infected her with the mysterious belief I have.
I am afraid to be who I am.
There is a total silence within me. I get scared. How to explain that this silence is what I call the Unknown. I’m afraid of It. Not because It could childishly punish me (punishment is something people do). The fear comes from what surpasses me. And that also is me. Because my greatness is great.
I don’t live dangerously in facts. I live in extreme danger when alone I fall into deep meditation. That is when I dangerously become free even of God. And free even of me. At the edge of a precipice dumbstruck on the dry height of a cliff. And as a living thing beside me — only the cactus with its crown of thorns of a nature that forsook me. I am alone from myself.
I constantly got lost inside me. I need the patience of a saint. I am a man who chose silence. I had to love a pure being.
Ah, melancholy of having been created. I’d rather have stayed in the immanescence of nature. Ah, divine wisdom that makes me move without knowing what legs are for.
Does God know He exists?
I think God doesn’t know He exists. I’m almost certain He doesn’t. And hence His powerful strength.
I cried a lot today and my eyes got swollen and red. But it was worth it. I don’t even wonder why I cried.
The worst part is that I’m vice versa and zigzag. I’m inconclusive. But I have to love myself the way I involuntarily am. I only take responsibility for what’s voluntary in me and that is very little.
I do not understand, therefore I believe. I believe “in what.”
Do you know what God is? God is time. I’m barely a part of this itinerary heading toward Nothing. I wonder with an already rather morbid insistence why was I born. I swear it’s not worth the bother for anyone to be me. As for Angela, she keeps up with fashion. For example: people talk a lot these days about “human condition,” “existence,” “aura.” Why the devil doesn’t she instead of wanting to dominate objects dedicate herself to figuring out if an insect is male or female? Women have that problem, keeping up with fashion. I don’t know what the fashion is now but I know it’s time for sex and violence. I myself only watch horror films. There’s a cold war that’s finishing me off.
Time is the indefinable. I quickly put myself in time, before dying. Life is very quick, when you see it, you’ve reached the end. And to top it off we’re required to love God.
There’s a narrow passage inside me, so narrow its walls wound me all over, but that passage leads to the breadth of God. I don’t always have the strength to cross this bloody desert, even knowing that, if I force myself to hurt all over between the walls, even knowing that I’ll come out into the open light of a day trembling with gentle sunshine.
ANGELA: I went trembling to encounter myself — and found a silly woman flailing between the walls of existence. I smash the floodgates and create myself anew. And then I can meet I, on equal footing.
Did I consecrate myself to God?
AUTHOR: I, vigilant as a lit candle. Watching over the mysteries of Angela.
Angela doesn’t know how to define. That’s why for her the world is much vaster than mine. Not that I know how to define but I’m aware of the limits and limiting yourself makes a possible definition easier.
Angela has a gift that I find very moving: the gift of error. Her whole life is a big mistake. The way she realizes that something inside her is wrong, and very gravely wrong is her anxiety, her permanent suspicion. She lives askance. Another way she feels that there’s a fundamental error in her life is through her humility and her innocence. The wicked are the ones who must be forgiven. The innocent have forgiveness within themselves.
I do not approve of myself because I can hardly stand to live with myself. I do almost the impossible to be exempt. Exempt from myself. I’m almost reaching that state of blessedness.
ANGELA: Today I bought a long dress with tones of emerald-green, scarlet-red, loud-white, severe-black, king-blue, insane-yellow.
God is like listening to music: He fills the being.
AUTHOR: She doesn’t seem to have what one might call “elevated feelings.” She’s selfish and covetous. She won’t let anyone go partly out of love, partly because she doesn’t know how to break things off — but partly because of the nearly luxurious material comfort people give her. She’s happy in the diamonds she receives from time to time.
She’s not immobile: her active imperfections give her great mobility. It’s in sin itself that Angela encounters her God. She’s frivolous. Everything she touches turns frivolous. But when I tell her that, she answers with a text she copied from
Reader’s Digest
: “Joseph Haydn, criticized for the lightness of his music, smiled: I cannot make it otherwise; I write according to the thoughts I feel. When I think upon God, my heart is so full of joy that the notes dance and leap, as it were, from my pen; and since God has given me a cheerful heart, it will be pardoned me that I serve Him with a cheerful spirit.”
I’ve discovered why I breathed life into Angela’s flesh, it was to have someone to hate. I hate her. She represents my terrible faith that is reborn every single morning. And it’s frustrating to have faith. I hate this creature who simply seems to believe. I’m sick of her empty God that she fills up with nervous ecstasies. When did the hate in me start to happen and live? And I get all dizzy with the effluvia of a sentiment I ignored in myself for as long as I can remember.
Could it be that I want Angela Pralini in order to develop a feeling that is ardent and sleepless, the feeling of hatred I now need to exercise because she taught me to hate? Are we forever attached? I want her. I know that one day I’ll leave her, but my fear is that I won’t forget her and shall ever bear that dark stain on my soul. This soul that’s always surprised by the novelty of feeling.
For I bathe entirely in that devouring darkness, I want to know the depth of my hatred. I want to know every feeling. Must a person have experienced this cursed power in order to be a complete person? I don’t know, but it’s demonic.
I’m making a shameful confession: it’s good to hate her. My soul, a potential murderer, knows therefore the rich darknesses of blood, and what I know makes me feel the worst of myself. And, yes, the murderous soul is rich. I sometimes wonder if she wants me to kill her to bring me to the summit of my hatred. It’s better to forget her because otherwise my own blood begins to hurt me and I’ll be filled with a black revolt without at least knowing what I’m revolting against, that’s a lie I know quite well what I’m revolting against. But it’s something that can’t be said.
I get tense thinking of the kind of relaxation in which Angela lives. I can’t reach her — now she escapes me, now she’s close at hand — and when I think she’s within my reach, she rebels, intrinsic.
Time is not measurable.
Angela makes no plans. And she scares herself because she’s always a novelty. Sometimes she takes refuge in an impenetrable nest. For example: just now I lost sight of her and don’t know where she lives (hidden within me in a dark corner of mine?). And I no longer know what she’s going to say. I trust in her unpredictable drive.
Angela Pralini is sometimes unfettered and slightly sharp like the voices of singing boys performing Bach cantatas, or a chorus of monks. Angela is my vocal exercise.
Angela, I don’t know how to tell you and begin, without hurting you. But I can’t stand you anymore. I’m going to invent another woman quickly. One who won’t be magical like you, one in whom I can go about walking the earth and eating meat. I want a real woman. I’m tired of lying.
I’m going to invent a whole woman, who’s organized and logical, who has a propensity like that of a surgeon. Or even a lawyer. And who in bed is limpid and without sin. I’m going to live with her. I’d feel more secure than I do with Angela. What wears me out is that she’s impossible to domesticate. There’s a false balance of contrary forces. She’s afraid — with good reason — of living moment to moment, crippled in spirit. What can I do if she’s anarchical?
Except imitate her since she’s stronger than I: I am the product of a thought, she is not a product: she is all herself. She shattered my system. She’s my ancestor and such my pre-history that she manages to be inhuman, though she writes with false order.
Angela is my aphrodisiac.
Angela doesn’t seem to me to have subtleties. She scandalizes me a bit. Because she’s freer than I.
Our extreme misery.
Wanting to understand is one of the worst things that could happen to me. But through Angela’s innocence I’m learning not to know all by myself.
I’m exhausted by Angela. And especially by me. I need to be alone from myself, so much so that I don’t even rely on God. And so I’ll leave a page blank or the rest of the book — I’ll come back when I can.
I’m back. Because the pungency of Angela Pralini called me. Before her — as before a “masterpiece” — I feel an almost intolerable tightening in the chest, a desire to flee the emotion. That’s what I feel with Fellini’s movies.
What our imagination creates resembles the process God has for creating.
ANGELA: I take refuge in madness because the boring middle ground of the state of ordinary things is no longer left for me. I want to see new things — and I’ll only manage to do that if I lose my fear of madness.
Life is little by little. Today I take half a step, the day after tomorrow I’ll take another half-step. Such impatience. I want to swallow life down in a single gulp and then maybe something like dying. But my own blood is slow.
I want to show myself the dirtiest and lowest part of me — and only then can I forgive myself. I want to be forgiven for being so full of sensuality that it is an animal cry inside me, a taste of the harsh voice of the wolf desiring its prey, me! I who aspire to the great disorder of vile desires and the darkness that possesses me in the apocalyptic orgasm of my existence. My existence is the victim of a fatality. That is: I am, oh poor me human and weak and needy and begging. I want your smile, I want your velvet caress, I want the body-to-body struggle, both so intimate, so gullible lost children.
I cry out for absolution! Oh mighty God, forgive me my life of errors and the worst habits of feeling, forgive me for existing in the pleasure so luxuriant and sensual of the absorption of the miasmas of the body-to-body. I want an abyss for you and to receive you like a queen of Sheba. Are my desires base? poor me, for I have an unhappy and unsatisfied body. Oh God of the desperate, find me, you have the power to distinguish my small noble part that barely glitters amidst the gravel, find me! Now! Right away! Ah . . . Ah . . . Ah . . . you found me . . . How my soul flies, liberated just a moment ago by the encounter with myself! God FOUND me. HALLELUJAH! Hallelujah! And I found God in my deepest unconsciousness, in the sort of coma in which I live I managed to stammer the vision of the God — in myself! I, also chosen by divine pity. What glory. Ah, but what glory.
And death no longer has power over me because I AM NO LONGER AFRAID! I swim and sparkle in states of vibrating divine fruition. Now I understand: I used to try to open a path in the darkness, knowing only how to beg. But only when I became naked did the doors of heaven and perception open wide to let me pass. I who am such a spark. And so I join myself to You and punish myself no longer. I bubble so nice and calm, poor me. This is how it happened: when I saw that I could no longer bear the weight of myself, I went to bed and all coiled up as much as possible in the fetal position, this: reduced to zero, having therefore to surrender to whatever came to me, since I no longer knew the answer to what I was asking, I burning with a kind of inner fever. Then — having to surrender myself to the Nothing — the miracle happened: I could taste like food in my mouth the flavor of Everything. This flavor spread like light and the sensation of taste throughout my entire body, and I surrendered to God, with the delirium of a soul drinking water.
Ah, how wide is eternity. For that is what I saw: the serene wideness of eternity, the taste of the eternal. Then the body once all weak and trembling found the vigor of a newborn in its first splastic cry in the world of light. And all of me became strong and roused, like a haughty stalk of blond wheat. Thus, standing like the stalk of wheat because that’s how it was, with natural nobility, I could face the grandeur of the God. Standing like a stalk of wheat, I burst into You and freed myself from having a distinct soul. I was the general soul of the world. I was no longer alone: I had found myself in the intimate and dazzling company of God. Whiteness. Infinite transparency. And my body radiated in circles of light. Of the light that receives me. And I, naked as a newborn, returned to God. And this return of the prodigal son that I was anointed me all over, anointed the fragile and strong stalk of wheat that I was. And God was the detector of lost souls. And I who once couldn’t stand the sensation of the abundance of myself, thinking fearfully that this encounter was too grandiose and would annihilate me. Poor me: I addressed myself like a slave adorned with garlands to please myself as a slave — and discovered the simplicity and the nudity of a queen, who, because she has everything, needs nothing more. Bless me, God: I extend to You a mouth lacerated by the fever of a long thirst, I extend to You my four paws torn and bleeding from trying to cling to You. Come and fill me completely with Your great gentle light, Amen, I owner of nothing, at last, warmed at last by the breath of an infantile sleep, by the rosy health of the soul, which emanates from me to myself and ennobles my way of existing, I, holy vestal, drugged by the essence of eternity, I protected by the luck of extreme penury that, because I could no longer stand it, becomes richness. I no longer need to ask: God gives. I who breathed in my own nourishing warm breath like a child tucked under sheets and sheltered from fear. Something touched my shoulder and called me and I didn’t recognize that it was God and I was afraid of the great solitude and the great silence that open in the soul when it is going to receive them. I was afraid of my own simple grandeur of a human person. I already had and experienced a bit of all kinds of tortured baseness and human ambitions — I am now almost free of the “sin” of the soul. I can finally give myself to the luxury of being free of myself and start to feel a certain Olympic peace.