Near to the Wild Heart

by Clarice Lispector

Now, when happiness or anger happened, she’d run to the clock and watch the seconds in vain.

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.

Nothing happened if she kept waiting for what was going to happen . . .

When I surprise myself in the depths of the mirror I get a fright. 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 silent. Why unspeaking?

But dreams are more complete than reality, which drowns me in the unconscious.

What should someone who doesn’t know what to do with herself do?

Everything I possess is very deep within me.

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 only understood one another when they kissed,

She cried freely, as if it was the solution.

Love came to confirm all of the old things whose existence she only knew of without ever having accepted or felt them.

It was always useless to have been happy or unhappy. And even to have loved. No happiness or unhappiness had been so strong that it had transformed the elements of her matter, giving her a single path, as the truth path must be.

She knew that between them there were “secrets,” that both were irremediably accomplices.

Oh, maybe she was exaggerating, maybe women’s divinity wasn’t specific, but merely resided in the fact of their existence.

There was in all of them a quality of raw material, something that might one day define itself but which was never realized, because its real essence was “becoming.”

All of me swims, floats, crosses what exists with my nerves, I am nothing but a desire, anger, vagueness, as impalpable as energy. Energy? but where is my strength? in imprecision, in imprecision, in imprecision . . . And bringing life to it, not to reality, just the vague impulse forward.

She spoke of love with such simplicity and clarity because doubtless nothing had been revealed to her through it yet. She hadn’t fallen into its shadows, she still hadn’t felt its profound and secret transformations. Otherwise she’d be, like herself, almost ashamed of so much happiness, she’d stay vigilant at its door, protecting from the cold light that which couldn’t be scorched in order to stay alive.

She wished something inevitable would descend over her, she wanted to cede, to submit.

She believed herself to be very powerful and felt unhappy. So powerful that she imagined she had chosen her paths before she had traveled them—and only in thought. So unhappy that, judging herself powerful, she didn’t know what to do with her power and saw each minute lost because she hadn’t guided it to an end.