The Passion According to G.H.

by Clarice Lispector

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.

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.

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

Creating isn’t imagination, it’s taking the great risk of grasping reality.

Becoming unclean with joy. Since now I understand that what I’d begun to feel was already joy, which I still hadn’t recognized or understood. In my mute plea for help, what I was struggling against was a vague first joy that I didn’t want to perceive in myself because, even vague, it was already horrible: it was a joy without redemption, I don’t know how to explain it to you, but it was a joy without the hope.

I was struggling because I didn’t want an unknown joy. It would be as forbidden for my future salvation as the forbidden creature that was called unclean — and I was opening and closing my mouth in torture to ask for help, since then it hadn’t occurred to me to invent this hand I now invented to hold my own. In my fear yesterday I was alone, and I wanted to ask for help against my first dehumanization.

Could I be living, not the truth, but the myth of the truth? Every time I lived the truth it was through an impression of inescapable dream: the inescapable dream is my truth.

Since how could I speak without the word lying for me? how could I speak except timidly like this: life just is for me. Life just is for me, and I don’t understand what I’m saying. And so I adore it.