A review by dianapharah
Água Viva by Clarice Lispector

hopeful reflective slow-paced

4.0

"I want the inconclusive. I want the profound organic disorder that nevertheless hints at any underlying order. The great potency of potentiality."


"Before I organize myself, I must disorganize myself internally. To experience that first and fleeting primary state of freedom. Of the freedom to err, fall and get up again."


"To create a being out of oneself is very serious. I am creating myself. And walking in complete darkness in search of ourselves is what we do. It hurts. But these are the pains of childbirth: a thing is born that is. Is itself. It is hard as a dry stone. But the core is soft and alive, perishable, perilous it. Life of elementary matter."


"Pain is exacerbated life. The process hurts. Coming-to-be is a slow and slow good pain. It's the wide stretching as far one can go. And your blood thanks you. I breathe, I breathe."


Lispector's prose is simply beautiful. The stream-of-consciousness works best for topics such as these; when you're unearthing yourself from deep within, and you're unsure of what awaits you until it's right there, infiltrating your current instant and forcing you to acknowledge the foreign that isn't so foreign, if unable to be understood then at least to be given room to exist. All of which the written word helps to achieve.

"The more accursed, the nearer toward the God. I deepened myself in myself and found that I want bloody life, and the occult meaning has intensity that has light. It is the secret light of a knowledge of fatality: the cornerstone of the earth. It is more an omen of life than actual life."


"Death is just future to such an extent that there are those who cannot bear it and commit suicide. It's as if life said the following: and there simply was no following. Only the waiting colon."


"I am—despite everything oh despite everything—am being joyful in this very instant because I refuse to be defeated: so I love. As an answer. Impersonal love, itlove, is joy: even the love that doesn't work out, even the love that ends. And my own death and that of those we love must be joyful, I don't yet know how, but they must be. That is living: the joy of the it. And to settle for that not as one defeated but in an allegro con brio."


"And now suddenly after an evening of 'who am I' and of waking at one in the morning still in despair—now suddenly at three in the morning I woke and met myself. I want to meet myself. Calm, joyful, fullness without fulmination. Simply I am I. And you are you. It is vast, and will endure."