A Breath of Life: Pulsations (New Directions Books)

by Clarice Lispector

I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them. Suddenly things no longer need to make sense. I’m satisfied with being. Are you? Certainly you are. The meaninglessness of things makes me smile complacently. Everything surely must go on being what it is.

Could there be a number that is nothing? that is less than zero? that begins where there is no beginning because it always was?

But at the same time everything is so fleeting. I always was and just as quickly was no longer. The day runs along aimlessly outside and there are abysses of silence within me.

I am happy at the wrong moment. Unhappy when everyone’s dancing.

That’s how I savor every loathsome minute. And I cultivate too the empty silence of the eternity of our species. I want to live many minutes within a single minute.

Today is today. I’m stunned and at the same time suspicious that I’ve been given so much. And tomorrow I shall once again have a today. There is something painful and pungent about living the today.

write almost completely free of my body. As if levitating. My spirit is empty because of so much happiness. I’m feeling an intimate freedom comparable only to riding a horse through the fields without any destination.

I’m free of destiny. Perhaps my destiny is to reach freedom? there’s no wrinkle on my soul spreading out in delicate froth. No longer am I being assailed. And it’s delightful.

I lost sight of myself so long ago that I’m hesitant to try to find myself. I’m afraid to begin. Existing sometimes gives me heart palpitations. I’m so afraid to be me. I’m so dangerous. They gave me a name and alienated me from myself.

I live in the living flesh, that’s why I make such an effort to give thick skin to my characters. But I can’t stand it and make them cry for no reason.

wonder: why does God demand our love? possible answer: so that we might love ourselves and in loving ourselves, forgive ourselves. And how we need forgiveness. Because life itself already comes muddled with error.

It’s a mixture in a strange crucible but that allows me in the end, to breathe. And sometimes to pant. And sometimes to gasp. Yes. But sometimes there is also the deep breath that finds the cold delicateness of my spirit, bound to my body for now.

When you have finished this book cry a hallelujah for me. When you close the last page of this frustrated and dauntless and playful book of life then forget me.

To create her I must plow the land. Is there some breakdown in the computer system of my ship while it crosses spaces in search of a woman?

As for me I reduce everything to a tumult of words. We are all sentenced to death. While I write I might die. One day I shall die amidst random facts.

and I too obey the obstinacy of life. My life wants me to be a writer and so I write. It’s not by choice: it’s an intimate command.

Angela doesn’t know she’s a character. Besides I too might be the character of myself. Could it be Angela feels that she’s a character? Because, as for me, I sometimes feel that I am someone’s character.

I feel as though I’ve already secretly achieved what I wanted and I still don’t know what I achieved. Could that be the somewhat dubious and elusive thing vaguely called “experience”?

I know nothing. The future — as Angela would say — weighs down on me by the ton. I’m lost on this Sunday that’s neither hot nor cold, having already taken refuge in a movie theater.

Today I swept the terrace where I keep my plants. How good it is to handle the things of this world:

But I am a star. I feel that I am a star. Shattered. I am a shard of glass on the ground.

Life with a capital letter can give me nothing because I’m going to confess that I too must have turned down a dead-end alley just like the others.

I struggle not against people who buy and sell apartments and cars and try to get married and have children but I struggle with extreme anxiety for a novelty of spirit. Whenever I feel almost a little illuminated I see that I am having a novelty of spirit.

When I’m alone for a long time, I suddenly don’t recognize myself and I frighten myself and get chills all over.

Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself? I’m not a dreamer. I only daydream to attain reality.

I can do without reality because I can have everything through thought. Reality doesn’t surprise me. But that’s not true: I suddenly feel such a hunger for the “thing to really happen” that I cry out and bite into reality with my lacerating teeth.

From now on I’m going to write in this diary, on days when there’s nothing else to do, phrases almost on the edge of meaninglessness but that sound like words of love. Saying meaningless words is my great freedom.

I almost don’t know what I feel, if in fact I feel at all. Whatever doesn’t exist comes to exist when it receives a name. I write to bring things into existence and to exist myself.

But the dog that exists in me barks and there is an outburst of the fatal thing.