My distracted notes about Clarice Lispector's book. Originally in Portuguese.

“To live this life is more an indirect remembering than a direct living”

Clarice makes an analogy with a gentle convalescence, a convalescence of a “frigid pleasure”. I tried to interpret “frigid pleasure” and reached the conclusion that maybe she was talking about a sexual activity that was not very pleasurable. Because, when you reach the climax, that climax is weak, and your recovery ends up being less violent. That’s my theory. I think of the convalescence analogy because, when you recover from an illness, you are still sick, but every second that passes you are less sick than before and can only measure your recovery by remembering how you felt a while ago in relation to now. Maybe this is the notion of instant-now in this reflection.

“Could I no longer know what I’m talking about and is everything escaping me without my noticing? I do know ─ but cautiously because I’m a hair’s breadth from not knowing.”

This resonates with me. I believe she is referring to her abstraction. She is abstracting so much that we might arrive at the thought that she herself makes no sense of her words. A lie. She is in total control of what she says and is expressing herself exactly as she wishes. However, she is approaching pure incomprehension and, at any moment, could lose expressiveness.

“I just won’t tell you a story now is because in that case it would be prostitution. And I’m not writing to please you. Mainly myself I have to follow the pure line and keep my it uncontaminated. Now I shall write you everything that comes into my mind with the least possible amount of policing. Because I feel attracted to the unknown. But as long as I have myself I won’t be alone. It’s going to start: I’m going to grab the present in every phrase that dies.”

Separate the author from the narrator—though I don’t know if it is wise to do that with Clarice. I don’t know if I am reading the narrator’s thoughts or Clarice’s in this excerpt. I think it is beautiful how she venerates intimacy—there are things she won’t tell anyone because she doesn’t want to please anyone. Her intimacy, her time with herself, seems to me to be what is most valuable to Clarice. She understands her own intimacy when she simply captures the instant-now in a stream of consciousness. She doesn’t write “prettily.” She doesn’t write intelligibly. She writes for herself. She does not prostitute herself.

“Everything gains a kind of halo that is not imaginary: it comes from the splendor of the mathematical irradiation of things and of the memory of people. You start to feel that all that exists breathes and exhales a most fine resplendence of energy. The truth of the world, however, is impalpable.”

The keywords “mathematical,” “everything that exists,” “breathes and exhales energy” make me think that she finally describes the world in a… palpable way. And she needs to warn me: the truth of the world is impalpable. Do not delude yourself.

What I liked is that you don’t need to have a big picture. Things just happen and you go along with them now. Don’t go back. Clarice doesn’t go back. Clarice might resume an analogy, but she will do so in a different way. Her mind is not an organized box where you need to think rationally and understand the temporal sequence of things. Keep reading. Make sense of the words you read now. Be a spontaneous critic.

“As a matter of fact I don’t want to die. I rebel against ‘God’. Let’s not die as a dare? I’m not going to die, you hear, God? I don’t have the courage, you hear? Don’t kill me, you hear? Because it’s a disgrace to be born in order to die without knowing when or where. I’m going to stay very happy, you hear? As a reply, as an insult. I guarantee one thing: we are not guilty. And I have to understand while I’m alive, you hear? because afterwards it will be too late.”

Another important theme: the limit of words. Primary thought. Painting. Was Clarice Lispector a painter? The jungle. Freedom. The materiality of the body and the spirit. Clarice writes in a pure way, without beating around the bush: she doesn’t want to waste time with “missions.” She wants to live. She wants to enjoy the glory of falling.

“Do I not have a plot to my life? for I am unexpectedly fragmentary. I am piecemeal. My story is living. And I have no fear of failure. Let failure annihilate me, I want the glory of falling.”

One shouldn’t mix the author and the work, but I feel like I read Clarice. I became curious about what she thinks of love. I became curious to know how necessary Clarice thought interpersonal interaction is. Her mentality seems to be that the inner world is the meaning of life. I wonder how independent that made her.

Sometimes I think Clarice Lispector doesn’t really write about love. “I am before, I am almost, I am never. And all of this I won when I stopped loving you.”