Free A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector Page B

(mine) (worthless), not carried through — is the key to the same.
    I write in words that hide others — the true ones. Because the true words cannot be named. Even if I don’t know which are the “true words,” I am always alluding to them. My spectacular and ongoing failure proves that the opposite exists: success. Even if success is not granted me, I’m satisfied to know it exists.
    Occasionally I myself am writing this book.
    So I’ll talk about the problems of writing. About the vortex which is placing oneself in a creative state. I feel that I have a triple star.
    I, the author of this book, am being possessed by a thousand demons writing inside me. This need to flow, ah, never, never to stop flowing. If that source that exists within each of us stops it’s horrible. The source is of mysteries, hidden mysteries and if it stops that is because death is coming. I’m trying in this book a bit crazy, a bit ostentatious, a bit dancing naked in the streets, a bit the clown, a bit the fool at the court of the king. I, the king of sleep, I only know how to sleep and eat, I learned nothing else. As for the rest, ladies and gentlemen, I hold my tongue. I just won’t tell you the secret of life because I still haven’t learned it. But one day I shall be the secret of life. Each of us is the secret of life and the one is the other and the other is the one.
    I must not forget the Franciscan modesty of the sweetness of a little bird. Speak marvelous things ah ye who wish to write life long or short as it may be. It is a cursed profession that gives no rest. I don’t know if it’s the dream that makes me write or if the dream is the result of a dream that comes from writing. Are we full or hollow? Who art thou who readest me? Art thou my secret or am I thy secret?
    With a poor life (and what is a rich life?), with life poor I escape from it through the imaginary. But my imaginary doesn’t happen through actions but through the feeling-thinking that is actually a dream. I imagine marvelous words and I receive from them their dazzle. The word “topaz” transports me to the deepest part of my dream: topaz fascinates me in its luminous abyss of real stone. Once I dreamed there was a reality: it happened when I pondered the mute enigma of the dreamt reality that exists in topaz.
    In the act of writing I attain here and now the most secret dream, the one I can’t remember when I wake up. In what I write the only thing that interests me is finding my timbre. My timbre of life.
    I love Angela Pralini because she allows me to sleep while she speaks. I who sleep for a certain preparative experience of death. A beginner’s course because death is so incommensurable that I shall be lost within it. No — to speak sincerely — I can’t allow the world to exist after my death. My regrets to those I leave behind alive and watching television, regrets because humanity and the human condition are guilty without absolution for my death.
    ANGELA: At night the dead walk the paths of the old cemetery and no one hears their cymbals. A clarinet goes out of tune sharp and mute. I tremble in my bed with a chill that shakes me and doesn’t. I don’t scream. No. But I am barely alive. I’m nothing but a stifled breath. I think low and slow-moving: if I am alive it’s because I shall die. The clarinet plays again. And now I’m going to turn out the light and sleep.
    AUTHOR: (While Angela sleeps.) All the words written here can be summed up by an ever-present state I call “I am being.”
    ANGELA: Not long ago I saw a slice of watermelon on the table. And, there on the naked table, it looked like a madman’s laugh (I don’t know how else to put it). If I weren’t resigned to living in a world that forces me to be sensible, how I would scream in fright at the happy prehistoric monstrosities of the earth. Only an infant isn’t shocked: he too is a happy monstrosity repeated since the beginning of the history of man. Only afterwards does