The Hour of the Star

by Clarice Lispector

to all those who reached the most alarmingly unsuspected regions within me, all those prophets of the present and who have foretold me to myself until in that instant I exploded into: I. This I that is all of you since I can’t stand being just me, I need others in order to get by, fool that I am, I all askew,

And — and don’t forget that the structure of the atom cannot be seen but is nonetheless known. I know about lots of things I’ve never seen. And so do you. You can’t show proof of the truest thing of all, all you can do is believe. Weep and believe.

She was only vaguely beginning to know the kind of absence she had of herself inside her. If she were an expressive creature she would say: the world is outside me, I am outside me.

There was something slightly idiotic about her, but she wasn’t an idiot. She didn’t know she was unhappy. That’s because she believed. In what? In you, but you don’t have to believe in anyone or anything — you just have to believe. That sometimes gave her the state of grace. She’d never lost faith.

She thought she’d incur serious punishment and even risk dying if she took too much pleasure in life. So she protected herself from death by living less, consuming so little of her life that she’d never run out. This savings gave her a little security since you can’t fall farther than the ground.

But she lived in such sameness that at night she couldn’t remember what happened that morning. She vaguely thought from far off and without words this: since I am, the thing to do is to be.

She never complained about anything, she knew that’s just how things are and — who organized the land of men? Surely someday she’d deserve the heaven of the crooked where you only get in if you’re warped. Anyway it’s not about getting into heaven, she’s crooked right here on earth.

What do I know? No idea. Yes, it’s true, I sometimes think that I’m not me, I seem to belong to a distant galaxy because I’m so strange to myself. Is this me? I am frightened to encounter myself.

She felt inside her a hope more violent than any despair she had ever felt. If she was no longer herself that meant a loss that counted as a gain.

(But who am I to rebuke the guilty? The worst part is that I have to forgive them. We must reach such a nothing that we indifferently love or don’t love the criminal who kills us. But I’m not sure of myself: I have to ask, though I don’t know who can answer, if I really have to love the one who slays me and ask who amongst you slays me. And my life stronger than myself, replies that it wants revenge at all costs and replies that I must struggle like someone drowning, even if I die in the end. If that’s the way it is, so be it.)