A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector Read Free Book Online Page B

fusion of body and soul.
    I can’t manage to understand on behalf of others. Only in the disorder of my feelings do I understand for myself and what I feel is so incomprehensible that I keep quiet and meditate on the nothing.
    AUTHOR: The difference between a liberated imagination and a libertine imagination — the difference between intimacy and promiscuity. I (who have as a job to earn money the profession of judge: innocent or guilty?) try to neutralize the habit of judging because I can’t stand the divine role of deciding. I free Angela, I don’t judge her — I let her be.
    ANGELA: I just entered myself and frightened already want to leave. I discover that I am beyond voracity. I’m an impulse split down the middle.
    But once in awhile I go to an impersonal hotel, alone, with nothing to do, to be naked and without function. Is thinking having a function?
    When I truly think I empty myself.
    Alone in the hotel room, I eat the food with brutish and uncouth satisfaction. For a moment it is true satisfaction — then it quickly settles in.
    And so I go to my castle. I go to my precious solitude. To retire. I’m all disjointed. But I already start to notice a shine in the air. A sorcery. My room is a smile. In it there are stained-glass windows. The colors are cathedral-red, emerald-green, sun-yellow and deep blue. And my room is that of a sensual monk.
    Here there are evening gales. And sometimes the windows bang—as in ghost stories.
    I’m waiting for rain. When it rains I want it to fall on me, copiously. I’ll open the window of my room and receive naked the water of the sky.
    Gardens and gardens interspersed with musical chords. A bloody iridescence. I see my face through the rain. The stridulating clamor of the piercing wind that sweeps the house as if it were hollow of furniture and people. It’s raining. I feel the good summer shower. I have a hut too — sometimes I won’t stay in the palace, I’ll plunge into my hut. Smelling the forest. And enjoying the solitude.
    The proof that I’m recovering my mental health, is that I get more permissive with every minute: I allow myself more freedom and more experiences. And I accept what happens by chance. I’m anxious for what I have yet to try. Greater psychic space. I’m happily crazier. And my ignorance grows. The difference between the insane and the not-insane person is that the latter doesn’t say or do the things he thinks. Will the police come for me? Come for me because I exist? prison is payment for living your life: a beautiful word, organic, unruly, pleonastic, spermic, durabilic.
    Ah, now I know what I am: I am a scribbler. Help me! fire! fire. Writing can drive a person mad. You must lead a serene life, well appointed, middle class. If you don’t the madness comes. It’s dangerous. You must shut your mouth and say nothing about what you know and what you know is so much, and is so glorious. I know, for example, God. And I receive messages from me to myself.
    I know how to create silence. It’s like this: I turn on the radio really loud — then suddenly turn it off. And that’s how I capture silence. Stellar silence. The silence of the mute moon. It stops everything: I created silence. In silence you can hear noises more. Amidst the hammer blows I was hearing the silence.
    I’m afraid of my freedom. My freedom is red! I want them to put me away. Oh enough with disappointments, I’m so beat up, the back of my neck hurts, my mouth, my ankles, I was flogged on my kidneys — what do I want my body for? what purpose does it serve? just to get beat up? A smack in the face that is swollen and ruddy. I take refuge in roses, in words. Little consolation. I’m inflated. I’m worth nothing.
    I was interrupted by the silence of the night. The spacious silence interrupts me, leaves my body in a bundle of intense and mute attention. I’m on the lookout for nothing. Silence isn’t the void, it’s the completeness.
    I read what I’d written and