The Passion According to G.H.

by Clarice Lispector

But I’m afraid of newness and I’m afraid of living whatever I don’t understand—I always want to be sure to at least think I understand, I don’t know how to give myself over to disorientation. 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?

I must have lived so imprisoned to feel freer now just because I no longer fear the lack of aesthetics …. I still can’t tell what else I gained. Slowly, perhaps, I’ll figure it out. For now the first timid pleasure I am having is realizing I lost my fear of ugliness. And that loss is such goodness. It is a sweetness.

Until that moment I hadn’t wholly perceived my struggle, that’s how buried I was in it. But now, from the silence into which I had finally fallen, I knew I’d struggled, that I had succumbed and surrendered.