Free Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector Page B

yourself
walking.
    I, who manufacture the future like a diligent spider. And
the best of me is when I know nothing and manufacture whatever.
    Because I suddenly see that I know nothing. Is the blade
of my knife getting blunt? I think it’s more likely that I don’t understand
because what I’m seeing now is difficult: I’m stealthily entering into contact
with a reality that is new to me and still doesn’t have corresponding thoughts,
and much less any word that signifies it. It’s more of a feeling beyond
thought.
    How can I explain it to you? I’ll try. It’s that I’m
perceiving a crooked reality. Seen through an oblique cut. Only now have I
sensed the oblique of life. I used to only see through straight and parallel
cuts. I didn’t notice the sly crooked line. Now I sense that life is other. That
living is not only unwinding rough feelings—it’s something more bewitching and
gracile, without losing its fine animal vigor for that. Upon this unusually
crooked life I have placed my heavy paw, causing existence to wither in its most
oblique and fortuitous and yet at the same time subtly fatal aspects. I
understood the inevitability of happenstance and that is no contradiction.
    The oblique life is very intimate. I shall say no more
about this intimacy so as not to harm thinking-feeling with dry words. To leave
the obliqueness in its own uninhibited independence.
    And I also know a way of life that is gentle pride, grace
in movements, slight and continuous frustration, with a skill in avoidance that
comes from a long and ancient history. As a sign of revolt only a weightless and
eccentric irony. There’s a side to life that is like drinking coffee on a
terrace in the coldness of winter and wrapped in wool.
    I also know a way of life that is slight shadow unfurled
in the wind and swaying slightly over the ground: life that is floating shadow,
levitation and dreams in the open day: I live the richness of the earth.
    Yes. Life is very oriental. Only a few people chosen by
the inevitability of chance have tasted the aloof and delicate freedom of life.
It’s like knowing how to arrange flowers in a vase: almost useless knowledge.
That fleeting freedom of life must never be forgotten: it should be present like
a fragrance.
    To live this life is more an indirect remembering than a
direct living.
    It resembles a gentle convalescence from something that
nonetheless could have been absolutely terrible. Convalescence from a frigid
pleasure. Only for the initiates life then becomes fragilely truthful. And is in
the instant-now: you eat the fruit during its ripeness. Could I no longer know
what I’m talking about and is everything escaping me without my noticing? I do
know—but cautiously because I’m a hair’s breadth from not knowing. I feed
myself delicately with trivial daily life and drink coffee on the terrace on the
threshold of this dusk that looks sickly only because it’s sweet and
sensitive.
    Oblique life? I am well aware that there is a slight
detachment between things, they almost collide, there is a detachment among the
beings that lose one other amongst words that almost don’t say anything more.
But we almost understand one other in this light discord, in this almost that is
the only way to stand full life, since a sudden face-to-face encounter with it
would frighten us, scare off its delicate spider’s web threads. We are askance
in order not to jeopardise what we foresee is infinitely other in this life of
which I speak to you.
    And I live to the side—a place where the central light
doesn’t burn me. And I speak quietly so that ears have to pay attention and hear
me.
    But I also know of yet another life. I know and
want it and devour it ferociously. It’s a life of magical violence. It’s
mysterious and bewitching. In it snakes entwine while the stars tremble. Drops
of water drip in the phosphorescent darkness of the cave. In that dark the
flowers intertwine in a humid fairy garden. And I am the