The Passion According to G.H.

by Clarice Lispector

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?

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

Or is not wanting to be vain the worst form of vanity? No, I think I need to look without bothering about the color of my eyes, I need to be exempt from myself in order to see.

existence of mine that was merely deep, was probably what gave me the assurance of a person who always has in the kitchen a kettle on a low flame: whatever happened, I would always have boiling water.

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. Being continuously free was also helped by my easy nature: I eat and drink and sleep easily. And, of course, my freedom also came from being financially independent.

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?

Since all that was probably what made me generous and pretty. 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.

Nothing, nothing, only that my nerves were now awake — my nerves that had been calm or simply arranged? had my silence been a silence or a high mute voice?

The accumulation of living in a superstructure was getting increasingly heavy to stay up in the air.

Listen, faced with the living cockroach, the worst discovery was that the world is not human, and that we are not human.

The time to live, my love, was being so right now that I leaned my mouth on the matter of life. The time to live is a slow uninterrupted creaking of doors continuously opening wide. Two gates were opening and had never stopped opening. But they were continuously opening onto — onto the nothing?

For the present has no hope, and the present has no future: the future will be exactly once again present.

want the present without dressing it up with a future that redeems it, not even with a hope — until now what hope wanted in me was just to conjure away the present.

I want to find the redemption in today, in right now, in the reality that is being, and not in the promise, I want to find joy in this instant

And not just alive — the way that primarily monstrous roach was just alive — but organizedly alive like a person.

If I don’t understand myself, I’ll die from the same thing I live from.

The danger of meditating is accidentally beginning to think, and thinking is no longer meditating, thinking leads to an objective. The least dangerous thing, in meditation, is “seeing,” which dispenses with thinking words.

. To be human ought not be an ideal for man who is inevitably human, being human must be the way that I, living thing, obeying freely the path of whatever is alive, am human. And I don’t even need to care for my soul, it will inevitably care for me, and I don’t have to make a soul for myself: all I have to do is choose to live. We are free, and that is hell. But there are so many roaches that they appear a prayer.

am I feeling what I am feeling, or am I feeling what I would like to feel? or am I feeling what I might need to feel?

living life instead of living one’s own life is forbidden.

Hope is a child not yet born, only promised, and that bruises.

is not for us that the cow’s milk flows, but we drink it. The flower was not made for us to look at it or for us to smell its fragrance, and we look at it and smell it. The Milky Way does not exist for us to know of its existence, but we know of it.

Your physical energy was your most delicate energy.

And solitude is not needing. Not needing leaves a man very alone, all alone. Ah,