A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector Read Free Book Online

feel pleasure. After I recovered my contact with myself I impregnated myself and the result was the agitated birth of a pleasure completely different from what they call pleasure.
    AUTHOR: She experiences the different phases of a fact or a thought but in the deepest part of her she is extrasituational and even deeper and more unreachably she exists without words and is only an unsayable, incommunicable, inexorable atmosphere. Free of scientific and philosophical rubbish.
    ANGELA: I like staircases.
    AUTHOR: What charms me about Angela Pralini is her elusiveness.
    ANGELA: The hard wooden rose that I am. But to purify me there is the pungent myosotis urgently but delicately called “forget-me-not.”
    AUTHOR: I created Angela, but now it’s up to me to create a new man, as Robinson Crusoe created his solitude on this earth that is always strange.
    ANGELA: As for me, I offer my face to the wind. I look like I’m bearing news. Joking is one of the most serious things in the world. And I who imagined making music just for fun.
    AUTHOR: Traveling through this book while keeping Angela company is tricky like going on a journey with the pure yolk of an egg cupped in the palm of my hand without making it lose its invisible but real surrounding — invisible, but there’s a skin made of almost nothing encircling the delicate yolk and maintaining it without breaking so it can keep being a round yolk.
    Angela is a yolk, but with a small black droplet in its yellow sun. That means: problem. Besides the problem we have with living Angela adds another: that of compulsive writing. She thinks that to stop writing is to stop living. I control her as much as I can, deleting her merely foolish comments. For example: she’s dying to write about menstruation just to get it off her chest, and I won’t let her.
    ANGELA: I have such a tendency to be happy. These last few days I’ve felt radiant and ecstatic about being alive.
    AUTHOR: Angela, you’re a frightened thing in an ever-new world. This very instant will never be repeated until the end of the centuries.
    ANGELA: I’m a privileged being because I’m unique in the world. I all coiled up with I.
    Dodecaphonic music extracts the I. Ah I can’t go on. I who dance so crazy. Whoever wants me should be the same way.
    Bells chime, Orpheus sings. I don’t understand myself and it’s good. Do you understand me? No, you’re crazy and don’t understand me.
    Bells, bells, bells.
    AUTHOR: Angela is someone who steals away from the big city.
    ANGELA: I felt the pulsing of the vein in my neck, I felt the pulse and the heartbeat and suddenly recognized that I had a body. For the first time from the matter arose the soul. It was the first time that I was one. One and grateful. I possessed myself. The spirit possessed the body, the body throbbed with spirit. As if outside myself, I looked at me and saw me. I was a happy woman. So rich that I no longer even needed to live. I was living for free.
    AUTHOR: Angela lives in an atmosphere of the miraculous. No, there’s no reason to be shocked: the miracle exists: the miracle is a sensation. Sensation of what? of a miracle. A miracle is a disposition like the sunflower slowly turning its abundant corolla toward the sun. The miracle is the final simplicity of existence. The miracle is the splendid sunflower exploding from its stem, corolla and roots — and being just a seed. A seed that contains the future.
    ANGELA: I went around sowing.
    Between the word and the thought my being exists. My thought is pure impalpable insaisissable air. My word is made of earth. My heart is life. My electronic energy is magic of divine origin. My symbol is love. My hatred is atomic energy.
    Everything I just said is worthless, no more than foam.
    Anguished.
    Hungry and cold and humiliated.
    Barefoot I greet you: this is my humility and this nakedness of feet is my daring.
    I don’t want to be only myself. I also want to be what I am not.
    AUTHOR: Is Angela my edge? or