Free The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector

nor the stork, and any kind of raven.
    I was finding out that the unclean animal of the Bible is forbidden because the unclean is the root — for there are created things that never decorated themselves, and preserved themselves exactly as they were the moment they were created, and only they continued to be the still wholly complete root. And because they are the root one cannot eat them, the fruit of good and of evil — eating the living matter would banish me from a paradise of adornments, and leave me to wander forever with a shepherd’s staff in the desert. Many were they who wandered with a staff in the desert.
    Worse — it would lead me to see that the desert too is alive and has moistness, and to see that everything is alive and made of the same.
    To build a possible soul — a soul whose head does not devour its own tail — the law commands us to keep only to what is disguisedly alive. And the law commands that, whoever eats of the unclean, must do so unawares. Since whoever eats of the unclean knowing that it is unclean — will also know that the unclean is not unclean. Is that it?
    “And everything that crawls and has wings shall be impure, and not be eaten.”
    I opened my mouth astonished: it was to ask for a help. Why? why didn’t I want to become as unclean as the roach? what ideal was fastening me to the sentiment of an idea? why shouldn’t I become unclean, exactly as I was discovering my whole self to be? What was I afraid of? becoming unclean with what?
    Becoming unclean with joy.
    Since now I understand that what I’d begun to feel was already joy, which I still hadn’t recognized or understood. In my mute plea for help, what I was struggling against was a vague first joy that I didn’t want to perceive in myself because, even vague, it was already horrible: it was a joy without redemption, I don’t know how to explain it to you, but it was a joy without the hope.
    — Ah, don’t take your hand from mine, I promise myself that perhaps by the end of this impossible story I’ll perhaps understand, oh, perhaps on the path of hell I’ll come to find what we need — but don’t take away your hand, even though I already know that finding has to be along the path of whatever we are, if I manage not to sink definitively into whatever we are.
    See, my love, I’m already losing the courage to find whatever I’ll have to find, I’m losing the courage to hand myself over to the path and I’m already promising us that in that hell I’ll find hope.
    — Perhaps it’s not the old hope. Perhaps it can’t even be called hope.
    I was struggling because I didn’t want an unknown joy. It would be as forbidden for my future salvation as the forbidden creature that was called unclean — and I was opening and closing my mouth in torture to ask for help, since then it hadn’t occurred to me to invent this hand I now invented to hold my own. In my fear yesterday I was alone, and I wanted to ask for help against my first dehumanization.
    Dehumanization is as painful as losing everything, as losing everything, my love. I was opening and closing my mouth to ask for help but I couldn’t and didn’t know how to articulate it.
    Because I had nothing more to articulate. My agony was like wanting to speak before dying. I knew I was forever bidding farewell to something, something was going to die, and I wanted to articulate the word that at least summed up whatever was dying.
    I finally managed to at least articulate a thought: “I’m asking for help.”
    It occurred to me then that I didn’t have anything to ask for help against. I had nothing to ask.
    Suddenly that was it. I was understanding that “asking” was still the last remains of an appealable world that, more and more, was becoming remote. And if I kept wanting to ask it was in order to still cling to the last remains of my old civilization, to cling on so as not to let myself be dragged off by whatever was now demanding me. And to which — in