A Breath of Life

by Clarice Lispector

I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.

Time passes too quickly and life is so short. And so—to avoid being swallowed by the voracity of the hours and the news that makes time rush by—I cultivate a certain tedium. That’s how I savor every loathsome minute.

I must be patient for the fruits will be surprising.

I who write to free myself from the difficult burden of a person being himself.

I wonder: why does God demand our love? possible answer: so that we might love ourselves and in loving ourselves, forgive ourselves. And how we need forgiveness. Because life itself already comes muddled with error.

“at this moment” is a rare thing because only sometimes do I step with both feet on the land of the present: usually one foot slides toward the past, the other slides toward the future. And I end up with nothing.

Now that there are computers for almost every type of search for intellectual solutions—I therefore turn back to my rich interior nothing. And I scream: I feel, I suffer, I am happy, I am moved.

Suffering for a being deepens the heart within the heart.

The drama of Angela is the drama of us all: balancing upon something unstable. For anything can happen and damage the most intimate life of a person. What will have been done to my soul next year? Will that soul have grown? and grown peacefully or through the pain of doubt?

What a desire to do something wrong. The error is exciting. I’m going to sin. I’m going to confess something: sometimes, just for fun, I lie. I’m not at all what you think I am. But I respect the truth: I’m pure of sins.

I think we have to do forbidden things—otherwise we suffocate. But without feeling guilty and instead as an announcement that we are free.

To be a being allowed to yourself is the glory of existing. To be able to say to yourself with shame and awkwardly: it’s you, too, you I love, a bit.

If I weren’t resigned to living in a world that forces me to be sensible, how I would scream in fright at the happy prehistoric monstrosities of the earth. Only an infant isn’t shocked: he too is a happy monstrosity repeated since the beginning of the history of man. Only afterwards does fear come, the pacification of fear, the denial of fear—in a word, civilization.

I want to reach within myself a landscape deep beneath the earth a spring of placid waters running—and my ecstatic soul that can’t be restrained and trembles in the lightest orgasm. Pure contemplation.

Perhaps—perhaps whatever is correct lies precisely in error? If that’s true, how many fruitful “errors” I have lost. That would contradict everything I learned and everything human society taught me. Fearing the error, I degraded myself. To avoid the error, I ventured nothing great. I, standing in the street, cast a shadow on the ground. My shadow is my opposite of the “correct,” my shadow is my error—and that shadow-error belongs to me, only I possess it inside me, I am the only person in the world whose lot it was to be me. So is there an acquired right to be me? And now I want my errors back. I reclaim them.

The life of every person is susceptible to a painful deepening and the life of every person is “unbelievable.” What should those people do? What Angela does: write with no strings attached. Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.

ANGELA: You shouldn’t live in luxury. In luxury we become an object that in turn possesses other objects. You only see the “thing” when you live a monastic life or at least a temperate life. The spirit can live on bread and water.

Angela—of course—has a conscious mind that doesn’t get along well with her subconscious. Is she double? and is her life double? Like this: on the one hand there’s the attraction to intellectualized things, on the other, something that seeks the comforting and mysterious and free darkness, unafraid of danger.

I went trembling to encounter myself—and found a silly woman flailing between the walls of existence. I smash the floodgates and create myself anew. And then I can meet I, on equal footing. Did I consecrate myself to God?

I want to show myself the dirtiest and lowest part of me—and only then can I forgive myself. I want to be forgiven for being so full of sensuality that it is an animal cry inside me, a taste of the harsh voice of the wolf desiring its prey, me! I who aspire to the great disorder of vile desires and the darkness that possesses me in the apocalyptic orgasm of my existence.

I cry out for absolution! Oh mighty God, forgive me my life of errors and the worst habits of feeling, forgive me for existing in the pleasure so luxuriant and sensual of the absorption of the miasmas of the body-to-body.

And death no longer has power over me because I AM NO LONGER AFRAID! I swim and sparkle in states of vibrating divine fruition. Now I understand: I used to try to open a path in the darkness, knowing only how to beg. But only when I became naked did the doors of heaven and perception open wide to let me pass. I who am such a spark. And so I join myself to You and punish myself no longer.

Living makes me so nervous, so on the edge of. I take sedatives just because I’m alive: the sedative partially kills me and dulls the too-sharp steel of my blade of life. I stop shaking a bit. And reach a more contemplative stage.

Anyway, from what it seems, Angela connected to the existence of a reality of life to which it is uncommon to adhere because everyday life often kills transcendence. Reality is fragmentary. Only the reality of the ultrasonic and ultralight of the infinite is whole.

My wickedness comes from the poor accommodation of my soul in my body. It is squeezed, it lacks inner space. It’s what didn’t ever let itself be folded into four paws by the pain of existence, that pain which every once in a while we must obey in order to keep living our nice middle-class lives.

We want to penetrate the kingdom of God through sins because if not for sin there wouldn’t be forgiveness and we wouldn’t manage to reach Him. I took refuge in madness because reason was not enough for me.

I always wanted to reach a state of peace and non-struggle. I thought that was the ideal state. But it so happens that—that am I really me without my struggle? No, I don’t know how to have peace.

I get scared easily. I’m afraid to be alive because whoever has life shall one day die. And the world violates me. The demanding instincts, the cruel soul, the crudeness of those who have no decency, the laws to obey, murder—it all makes me dizzy just as there are people who faint at the sight of blood: the medical student with a pale face and white lips about to dissect his first cadaver. It scares me when in a glance I see the bowels of other people’s spirit. Or when unintentionally I fall deep into myself and see the interminable abyss of eternity, abyss through which I phantasmagoric communicate with God.

We leave an Alpha for an Omega and destroy ourselves and work and play and … For what? We walk toward a vortex—irremediably. Doing nothing might yet be the solution.

Only after “dying” do I see that I lived. I flee from myself. Sometimes I hurry to finish some intimate episode of life, in order to capture it in memories, and, more than having lived, to live. A living that already was. Swallowed by me and now part of my blood.

I deserve a medal for living each day and each night three hundred and sixty-five days tortured by time. Only death settles it.

As for me, I discovered Death. But how?! to die without having understood?? But that’s terrifying! It’s unworthy of the human being not to be able to understand anything of life. Yes. But mysteriously we go through the rituals of life. I give my life in homage to whom or what. I want to dedicate it, like when you dedicate a book. God doesn’t kill anyone. It’s the person who dies.

Except life isn’t the life we think we have and death has another name. There are those who know this because they saw in a glance their own ignorance of what is life and death. Those people live in a state of troubled curiosity while others, thinking that LIFE is their life and death is the end. And they will never be able to divine another truth. Without getting into the theory of antimatter in physics, everything has a front and a back, everything has yes and has no, light and darkness, flesh and spirit, will we end up in that antimatter after we die? How can we explain that every born body has spirit?

I dreamed this: in life we are actors in an absurd play written by an absurd God. We are all participants in this theater: in truth we never shall die when death happens. We only die as actors. Could that be eternity?

I live in the future of the wind. Why does everything seem to say: leave it for next week? I’m here, here waiting. I’m alive right now and the rest can fuck off. And my dog who didn’t do anything. He just is. I too am: is. I with my tattered flag.

AUTHOR: If they ask me if there’s life for the soul after death, I answer, mysteriously as I am well aware, why not the mystery, if the thing really is mysterious—I answer in a hesitant outline: it exists but it’s not for me to know how that soul will live. No one has yet discovered the state of things after death—because it’s impossible to imagine how the God will behave, the same God who inexplicably for us makes a seed sprout. I don’t know how the seed sprouts, I don’t know why this blue sky, I don’t know why this life of mine because all this happens in a way that my human mind cannot fathom. I live without a possible explanation. I who have no synonym.

Once there was a man who walked, walked and walked and stopped and drank cold water from a spring. Then he sat on a rock and rested his staff. That man was I. And God was at peace.