The Passion According to G.H.

by Clarice Lispector

All the other stories I read of Clarice’s at that time had the same basic power, and pointed in the same direction. Their elegance made them perfect objects: each was a dangerous adventure, a miracle of composition. While reading them, the aesthetic experience itself spurred me to think about the experience of being.

I’m searching, I’m searching. I’m trying to understand. Trying to give what I’ve lived to somebody else and I don’t know to whom, but I don’t want to keep what I lived. I don’t know what to do with what I lived, I’m afraid of that profound disorder. I don’t trust what happened to me. Did something happen to me that I, because I didn’t know how to live it, lived as something else?

If I confirm my self and consider myself truthful, I’ll be lost because I won’t know where to inlay my new way of being — if I go ahead with my fragmentary visions, the whole world will have to be transformed in order for me to fit within it.

I lost something that was essential to me, and that no longer is. I no longer need it, as if I’d lost a third leg that up till then made it impossible for me to walk but that turned me into a stable tripod. I lost that third leg. And I went back to being a person I never was. I went back to having something I never had: just two legs. I know I can only walk with two legs. But I feel the useless absence of that third leg and it scares me, it was the leg that made me something findable by myself, and without even having to look for myself.

cowardice is the newest thing to happen to me, it’s my greatest adventure, this cowardice of mine is a field so wide that only the great courage leads me to accept it —

Until now finding myself was already having an idea of a person and fitting myself into it: I’d incarnate myself into this organized person, and didn’t even feel the great effort of construction that is living. The idea I had of what a person is came from my third leg, the one that pinned me to the ground. But, and now? will I be freer?

How could I explain that my greatest fear is precisely of: being? and yet there is no other way. How can I explain that my greatest fear is living whatever comes? how to explain that I can’t stand seeing, just because life isn’t what I thought but something else — as if I knew what! Why is seeing such disorganization?

Maybe disappointment is the fear of no longer belonging to a system. So I could put it like this: he is very happy because he was finally disappointed. What I used to be, was no good for me. But it was from that not-good that I’d organized the best thing of all: hope. From my own flaw I had created a future good. Am I afraid now that my new way of being doesn’t make sense? But why not let myself be carried away by whatever happens? I would have to take the holy risk of chance. And I will substitute fate for probability.

getting lost means finding things without any idea of what to do with what you’re finding. The two legs walking, without the third that holds you back. And I want to be held back.

I don’t know what to do with the terrifying freedom that could destroy me.

But I also don’t know what form to give what happened to me. And without giving it a form, nothing can exist for me. And — and if it’s really true that nothing existed?! maybe nothing happened to me?

What Happened?

All sudden understanding is finally the revelation of an acute incomprehension. Each moment of finding is a getting lost.

Until I create the truth of what happened to me. Ah, it will be more like scratching than writing, since I’m attempting a reproduction more than an expression.

Because a world fully alive has the power of a Hell. Because a world fully alive has the power of a Hell.

Chapert end andbeging

That morning, before entering the maid’s room, what was I? I was what others had always seen me be, and that was how I knew myself. I don’t know how to say what I was. But at least I want to remember: what was I doing?

I’m going to begin my exercise in courage, courage isn’t being alive, knowing that you’re alive is courage —

I exude the calm that comes from reaching the point of being G. H. even on my suitcases. Also for my so-called inner life I’d unconsciously adopted my reputation: I treat myself as others treat me, I am whatever others see of me. When I was alone, there was no break, only slightly less of what I was in company, and that had always been my nature and my health.

But the water never boiled. I didn’t need violence, I bubbled just enough that the water never boiled or spilled. No, I wasn’t acquainted with violence. I had been born without a mission, neither did my nature impose one; and I was always delicate

enough not to impose upon myself a role. I didn’t impose a role upon myself but I did organize myself to be comprehensible for myself, I wouldn’t have been able to stand not finding myself in the phone book.

was not: “Who am I,” but “Who is...

I didn’t need the climax or the revolution or anything more than the pre-love, which is so much happier than love.

Perhaps this attitude or lack of attitude also came from never having had a husband or children, never needing, as they say, to break into or out of anything: I was continuously free.

And as for men and women, what was I? I’ve always had an extremely warm admiration for masculine habits and ways, and I had an unurgent pleasure in being feminine, being feminine was also a gift. All I had was the easiness of gifts, and not the fright of vocations — is that it?

milieu

All an experienced man needed was one glance to know that I was a woman of generosity and grace, and one who isn’t a bother, and one who doesn’t eat away at a man: a woman who smiles and laughs. I respect other people’s pleasure, and delicately I consume my own pleasure, tedium nourishes me and delicately consumes me, the sweet tedium of a honeymoon.

This her, G. H. in the leather of her suitcases, was I: is it I — still? No. I immediately figure that the hardest thing my vanity will have to face is the judgment of myself: I’ll have every appearance of a failure, and only I will know if that was the failure I needed.

arranging. I always liked to arrange things. I guess it’s my only real vocation. By putting things in order, I create and understand at the same time.

I was seeing something that would only make sense later — I mean, something that only later would profoundly not make sense. Only later would I understand: what seems like a lack of meaning — that’s the meaning. Every moment of “lack of meaning” is precisely the frightening certainty that that’s exactly what it means, and that not only can I not reach it, I don’t want to because I have no guarantees. The lack of meaning would only overwhelm me later. Could realizing the lack of meaning have always been my negative way of sensing the

Brain hurt

Or maybe about whether some neighbor had seen me commit that forbidden act, which above all didn’t match the polite woman I am, which made me smile.

For around six months — the amount of time that maid had been with me — I hadn’t gone in there, and my astonishment came from coming into an entirely clean room. I’d expected to find darknesses, I’d been prepared to throw open the window and clean out the dank darkness with fresh air. I hadn’t expected the maid, without a word to me, to have arranged the room in her own way, stripping it of its storage function as brazenly as if she owned it.

she’d managed to exclude me from my own house, as if she’d shut the door and left me a stranger to my own dwelling. The recollection of her face escaped me, it had to be a temporary lapse.

Abruptly, this time with real discomfort, I finally let a sensation come to me which for six months, out of negligence and lack of interest, I hadn’t let myself feel: the silent hatred of that woman.

And her clothes? It wasn’t surprising that I’d used her as if she had no presence:

was prepared to clean dirty things but dealing with that absence disoriented me.

The room’s inaudible sound was like a needle sweeping across a record after the music has stopped. A neutral hissing of thing was what made up the substance of its silence. Charcoal and fingernail coming together, charcoal and fingernail, calm and compact rage of that woman who represented a silence as though representing a foreign country, the African queen. And she’d been lodging there inside my house, the foreigner, the indifferent enemy. I wondered if Janair had really despised me — or if I, who hadn’t even looked at her, had been the one who despised her.

It was just that discovering sudden life in the nakedness of the room had startled me as if I’d discovered that the dead room was in fact mighty.

That was when the cockroach began to emerge.

That was when the cockroach began to emerge. First the heralding quiver of its antennae. Then, behind those dry stands, the reluctant body started to emerge. Until nearly all of it reached the opening of the wardrobe door. It was brown, it was hesitant as if of enormous weight. It was now almost entirely visible. I quickly lowered my eyes. On hiding my eyes, I was hiding from the roach

To have killed —was so much greater than I was, it was appropriate to that limitless room. To have killed opened the dryness of the sands of the room to dampness, finally, finally, as if I’d dug and dug with hard and eager fingers until I found within myself a thread of drinkable life that was the thread of death.

Life, my love, is a great seduction in which all that exists seduces. That room that was deserted and for that reason primally alive. I had reached the nothing, and the nothing was living and moist.

Without a cry I looked at the roach. Seen up close, a roach is an object of great luxury.

I finally managed to at least articulate a thought: “I’m asking for help.” It occurred to me then that I didn’t have anything to ask for help against. I had nothing to ask. Suddenly

That was how I started taking my first steps into the nothing. My first hesitant steps toward Life, and abandoning my life. My foot stepped into the air, and I entered paradise or hell: the nucleus.

Even that, since what I was seeing predated humanity. Since

what I was seeing predated humanity. No, there was no salt in those eyes. I was sure that the roach’s eyes were saltless. For salt I had always been ready, salt was the transcendence that I used to experience a taste, and to flee what I was calling “nothing.” For salt I was ready, for salt I had built my entire self. But what my mouth wouldn’t know how to understand — was the saltless. What all of me didn’t know — was the neutral.

And the neutral was the life that I used to call the nothing. The ...

Only I couldn’t bear just sitting there and being, and so I wanted to do. Doing would be transcending, transcending is an exit.

Ah, at least I had already entered the roach’s nature to the point that I no longer wanted to do anything for it. I was freeing myself from my morality, and that was a catastrophe without crash and without tragedy.

I, who called love my hope for love.

A cloud covered the sun for an instant, and suddenly I was seeing the same room without sun. Not dark but just without light. So I noticed that the room existed by itself, that it wasn’t the heat of the sun, it could also be cold and calm as the moon.