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“When I reread what I’ve written,” she told him, “I feel like I’m swallowing my own vomit.”
Your words disarmed me. I suddenly even felt uneasy at being so well received. I who didn’t expect to be received at all.
Everything was like the noise of the tram before falling asleep, until you felt a little afraid and drifted off.
The certainty that evil is my calling, thought Joana. What else was that feeling of contained force, ready to burst forth in violence, that longing to apply it with her eyes closed, all of it, with the rash confidence of a wild beast? Wasn’t it in evil alone that you could breathe fearlessly, accepting the air and your lungs? Not even pleasure would give me as much pleasure as evil, she thought surprised. She felt a perfect animal inside her, full of contradictions, of selfishness and vitality.
goodness makes me want to be sick. Goodness was lukewarm and light. It smelled of raw meat kept for too long. Without entirely rotting in spite of everything. It was freshened up from time to time, seasoned a little, enough to keep it a piece of lukewarm, quiet meat.
As if she were watching someone drink water only to discover her own thirst, profound and ancient. Maybe it was just a lack of life: she was living less than she could and imagined that her thirst required floods.
nothing that I am not can interest me, it is impossible to be any more than what you are
My consciousness strays, but it doesn’t matter, I find the greatest serenity in hallucination. It is curious that I can’t say who I am. That is to say, I know it all too well, but I can’t say it. More than anything, I’m afraid to say it, because the moment I try to speak not only do I fail to express what I feel but what I feel slowly becomes what I say.
But above all where does this certainty of being alive come from?
Pity is my way of loving. Of hating and communicating. It is what sustains me against the world, just as one person lives through desire, another through fear. Pity for things that happen without my knowledge.
If I saw myself on earth from up in the stars I’d be alone from myself.
If sin existed, she had sinned. All her life had been an error, she was futile.
“What do you get when you become happy?”
“I’d like to know: once you’re happy what happens? What comes next?”
Otávio made her into something that wasn’t her but himself and which Joana received out of pity for both, because both were incapable of freeing themselves through love, because she had meekly accepted her own fear of suffering, her inability to move beyond the frontier of revolt. Besides: how could she tie herself to a man without allowing him to imprison her? How could she prevent him from developing his four walls over her body and soul? And was there a way to have things without those things possessing her?
She couldn’t soothe herself by saying: this is just a pause, life will come afterwards like a wave of blood, washing over me, moistening my parched wood.
“has it ever occurred to you that a dot, a single dot without dimensions, is the utmost solitude? A dot cannot even count on itself, as often as not it is outside itself.”
Inside her it was as if death didn’t exist, as if love could weld her, as if eternity were renewal.
What you thought came to be thought. Moreover: not everything thought began to exist from that point on
the impossibility of going beyond eternity was eternity; and a feeling in absolute, almost abstract purity was also eternal. What really gave her a sense of eternity was the impossibility of knowing how many human beings would succeed her body, which would one day be far from the present with the speed of a shooting star.
Eternity was not an infinitely great quantity that was worn down, but eternity was succession.
To have a vision, the thing didn’t have to be sad or happy or manifest itself. All it had to do was exist, preferably still and silent, in order to feel the mark in it. For heaven’s sake, the mark of existence . . . But it shouldn’t be sought since everything that existed necessarily existed . . . You see, vision consisted of surprising the symbol of the thing in the thing itself.
Even suffering was good because while the lowest suffering was taking place she also existed—like a separate river.
All yearning is pursuit of pleasure. All remorse, pity, benevolence, is fear of it. All despair and seeking alternative routes are dissatisfaction.
Love so strong that its passion was only curbed by the strength of hatred.
Dear God, at least allow me to communicate with them, satisfy my desire to kiss them. To feel their light on my lips, feel it glow inside my body, leaving it sparkling and transparent, cool and moist like the minutes before dawn. Why do these strange thirsts grip me? The rain and the stars, this cold, dense mixture woke me up, opened the doors of my green, dark wood, of my wood that smells of an abyss where water flows. And made it one with the night.
And instead of this asphyxiating happiness, like too much air, I will clearly feel the impotence of having more than inspiration, of going beyond it, of possessing the thing itself—and really being a star. Where madness, madness leads.
What does it matter what really is? I am in fact kneeling, naked as an animal, next to my bed, my soul despairing as only the body of a virgin can despair.
If the twinkling of the stars pains me, if this distant communication is possible, it is because something almost like a star quivers within me.
I can hardly believe that I have limits, that I am cut out and defined. I feel scattered in the air, thinking inside other beings, living in things beyond myself. When I surprise myself at the mirror I am not frightened because I think I am ugly or beautiful. It is because I discover I am of a different nature. After not having seen myself for a while I almost forget I am human, I forget my past and I am as free from end and awareness as something merely alive. I am also surprised, eyes open at the pale mirror, that there are so many things in me besides what I know, so many things always
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But dreams are more complete than reality, which drowns me in the unconscious. What matters then: to live or to know you are living?—Very
But where is what I want to say, where is what I should say? Inspire me, I have almost everything; I have the outline waiting for the essence; is that it?—What should someone who doesn’t know what to do with herself do? Use herself as body and soul to make the most of body and soul? Or make her strength into an outside force? Or wait for the solution, like a consequence, to be born of herself?
One day, after speaking at last, will I still have something to live on? Or will everything I say fa...
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I find myself brusquely forsaken.
I find myself forsaken, alone, tossed into a dimensionless cubicle, where light and shadow are quiet ghosts.
Without experiencing things I won’t find life, will I? But, even so, in the white, unlimited solitude where I fall, I am still stuck between closed mountains. Stuck, stuck.
Freedom isn’t enough. What I desire doesn’t have a name yet.—I am thus a toy that is wound up and which when done will not find its own, deeper life.
However—the rare instants I sometimes come by of sufficiency, of blind life, of happiness as intense and serene as organ music—don’t these instants prove that I am capable of fulfilling my quest and that this is the longing of my entire being and not just an idea?
I must not forget, I thought, that I have been happy, that I am being happier than one can be. But I forgot, I’ve always forgotten.
They pierced me, crisscrossed inside me, filled my nerves with tremors, my brain with sounds.
I want to die now, cried something inside me freed, more than suffering. Any instant following that one would be lower and emptier. I wanted to rise and only death like an end, would give me the peak without the decline.
She still hadn’t tired of existing and she was enough so much so that at times, enormously happy, she felt sadness cover her like the shadow of a blanket, leaving her as cool and silent as nightfall. She expected nothing. She was in herself, the end itself.
No one knew she was being so unhappy that she needed to go looking for life.
In truth she had always been two, the one that had a slight idea that she was and the one that actually was, profoundly.
She tried in a last-ditch effort to invent something, a thought, to distract herself. Useless. All she knew how to do was live.
Until the absence of herself ended up making her fall into the night and pacified, darkened and cool, she began to die. Then she died gently, as if she were a ghost. Nothing else is known because she died.
Because she had been born for the essential, to live or to die. And everything in betw...
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between was suffering for her
she understands life because she isn’t intelligent enough not to.
For a minute it seemed to her that she had already lived and was at the end. And right afterwards, that everything had been blank until now, like an empty space, and that she could hear far off and muffled the din of life approaching, dense, frothy and violent, its tall waves cutting across the sky, drawing nearer, nearer . . . to submerge her, to submerge her, drown her asphyxiating her . . .
She wanted even more: to be reborn always, to sever everything that she had learned, that she had seen, and inaugurate herself in new terrain where every tiny act had a meaning, where the air was breathed as if for the first time. She had the feeling that life ran thick and slow inside her, bubbling like a hot sheet of lava.
