Free A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector Page A

even know how to handle.
    The main thing I want to reach is to surprise myself with what I write. To be assaulted: to tremble before what was never said by me. To fly low in order not to forget the ground. To fly high and wildly in order to let loose my great wings. Up until now I feel like I’ve never really taken flight. This book, I suspect, won’t let me fly either despite my desire to. Because nothing will be decided in this matter, in this matter all that counts is what happens when it comes from the nothing. But the worst thing is that the thought in the word has already been spent. Each loose word is a thought stuck to it like flesh to a nail.
    ANGELA: I am what’s beyond thought. I write in the state of drowsiness, only a slight contact with what I’m living within myself and also an inter-relational life. I act like a sleepwalker. The next day I don’t recognize what I wrote. I only recognize my own handwriting. And I find a certain charm in the freedom of phrases, not worrying much about an apparent disconnection. Phrases have no interference from time. They could happen in the next century just as they could have happened in the last, with small superficial variations.
    Could my individuality be dead?
    AUTHOR: Everything goes by in a daydream: real life is a dream. I don’t need to “understand” myself. That I can vaguely feel, is enough for me. When I think without any thought — I call that meditation. And it’s so profound that I can’t quite reach and words disappear, manifestations. I meditate, and what emerges from that meditation has nothing to do with meditation: an idea comes that seems totally disconnected from the meditation. It seems it’s only useful to live interrogatively since every interrogation tossed into the air has a corresponding reply formed in the darkness of my being, that part of me which is dark and vital, without it I’d be empty. Whenever I do something deliberately nothing comes out, therefore I get distracted almost deliberately. I pretend I don’t want something, I end up believing I don’t want it and only then does the thing come.
    Things happen indirectly. They come sideways. I’d swear it’s from the left side. (I get on better with my left side.) Which is battered like a look of sensitive melancholic tenderness. It’s the encounter between purity and purity and so we feel we’re allowed it, I don’t know what else to say. So — I don’t say it or maybe it would be better for me to say it. To be a being allowed to yourself is the glory of existing. To be able to say to yourself with shame and awkwardly: it’s you, too, you I love, a bit. I allow myself. Then I reach the ultra-sonorous. The one speaking, it seems to be me, but I’m not. It’s a “she” that speaks in me.
    Sometimes I’m dense like Beethoven, other times I’m Debussy, strange and light melody. All accompanied by a breathing, three movements and pouring out from four wonders. My dream is accompanied by a breathing and by three instants from which seven wonders pour. I walk atop and along the sound of a single prolonged note. The translucent green morning with the chirping of hundreds of little birds still has something of the dark night’s nightmare: a dog barks in the harsh morning off in the distance.
    As I was saying: it was God who invented me. And so too do I — as in the Greek Olympiads the athletes who ran passed forward the burning torch — so too do I use my breath and invent Angela Pralini and make her a woman. A beautiful woman.
    Angela and I are my interior dialogue: I talk to myself. Angela is from my dark interior: she however comes to light. The tenebrous darkness from which I emerge. Pullulating darkness, lava of a humid volcano burning intensely. Darkness full of worms and butterflies, rats and stars.
    I think in hieroglyphs (mine). And in order to live I must constantly interpret myself and each time the key to the hieroglyph, I’m sure that the dream — thing