Free The Stream of Life by Clarice Lispector

become full and unintelligible. Then comes dawn with its paunch full of thousands of tiny, clamoring birds. And each thing that happens to me I live here, taking note of it. Because I want to feel in my inquiring hands the living and trembling nerve of what is today.
    I achieve a state behind thought. I refuse to divide it into words—and what I cannot and do not want to express keeps being the most secret of my secrets. I know that I'm afraid of the moments when I don't use thought and it's a momentary state, difficult to reach that, all secret, no longer uses the words with which thoughts are formed. Is not using words to lose ones identity? is it to become lost in the essential, destructive shadows?
    I lose the identity of the world within me and I exist without guarantees. I achieve the achievable but I live the unachievable and the meaning of me and of the world and of you is not obvious. It's fantastic, and I struggle with myself during those moments with immense delicacy. Is God a form of being? is He the abstraction that materializes itself in the nature of what exists? My roots are in the divine shadows. Somnolent roots. Wavering in the darknesses.
    And, that's why I sense we shall soon separate. My astonishing truth is that I was always alone, separate from you, and I didn't know it. Now I know; I'm alone. I and my freedom, which I don't know how to use. Huge responsibility of solitude. Those who are not lost do not know freedom and do not love it. As for me, I take up my solitude. Which sometimes becomes rapturous, like looking at fireworks. I'm alone and I have to live a certain intimate glory which, in solitude, can turn into pain. And the pain, silence. I keep its name secret. I need secrets to live.
    Does each one of us have—at some moment lost in life—a mission to carry out? Still I refuse to take on any mission. I carry out nothing: I just live.
    It's so curious and hard now to substitute for the paintbrush that strangely familiar but always remote thing, the word. Extreme and intimate beauty is contained within it. But it's unreachable—and when it's within reach, behold, it's illusory because it continues being unreachable. From my painting and from these jammed-together words there arises a silence that is also like the eyes' substratum. There's a thing that always escapes me. When it doesn't escape I gain a certainty: life is other. It's a mode of underlying.
    Is it possible that at the instant I die I will force life by trying to live longer than I can? But I am today.
    I'm well aware that I'm writing you in disorder. But that's how I live. I work only with losts and founds.
    But writing is frustrating for me: in writing, I deal with the impossible. With the enigma of nature. And of God. Anyone who doesn't know what God is will never be able to know. In the past, people discovered God. Now it's something that's just known.
    Does my life have no plot? I'm unexpectedly fragmentary. I'm little by little. My story is to live. And I'm not afraid of failure. Let failure annihilate me, I want the glory of falling. My lame angel who becomes disdainful, my angel who has fallen from Heaven to Hell where he lives relishing evil.
    This isn't a story because I don't know stories as such, but only know how to keep on speaking and doing: it's a story of instants that flash by, like fugitive tracks seen from a train window.
    This afternoon we will meet. And I won't say a word about what I'm writing you and that it contains what I am and that I'm giving it to you as a gift even if you don't read it. You'll never read what I write. And when I've recorded my secret of being—I'll throw it away, as though into the sea. I'm writing you because you're not accepting what I am. When I destroy my recordings of instants, will I return to my nothingness from which I took an everything? I have to pay the price. The price of someone who has a past that only renews itself with passion in the strange present. When I think of