Clarice Lispector - Selected Cronicas

Sometimes people wishing to pay me a compliment tell me I am intelligent. And they are surprised when I tell them that being intelligent is not my strong point and that I am no more intelligent than other people. They then accuse me of being modest.

Of course I know about certain things. I was a bright student and intelligence has helped me to cope with certain situations. And like many others, I am capable of reading and understanding books which are generally considered to be difficult.

But often this so-called intelligence of mine is so limited that one would think I was stupid. People who refer to my intelligence are, in fact, confusing intelligence with what I would call a knowing sensibility. Now that is something I really do possess.

And notwithstanding my admiration for sheer intelligence, I find a knowing sensibility much more important when it comes to living with others and trying to understand them. Nearly everyone I know could be described as intelligent. They also happen to be sensitive. They can feel things and be deeply moved. I daresay this is the kind of sensibility I exercise when I write, or in my relationships with friends. I also exercise it when I come into superficial contact with certain people whose aura I can sense immediately.

I daresay this kind of sensibility, which is capable of stirring emotions and making one think even without using the mind, is a gift. And a gift which can be diminished with neglect or perfected if exercised to the full. I have a friend, for example, who is not simply intelligent but also extremely sensitive, an essential quality in her particular profession. As a result, she possesses what I would call a knowing heart , so knowing that it can guide her and others as reliably as radar itself.

I do not understand dreams but there was one dream which seemed to have some meaning even though I could not understand it.

I dreamt that, having closed the door when I went out, I found on my return that it had merged with the walls and that even the outlines had disappeared. Faced with the choice of searching for traces or making another opening, I felt it would be easier to start digging. So I set to work, determined to find a way through. But no sooner had I made a hole than I realized that no one had entered here before. This was the first door that had ever been there. And although this narrow entrance was in the same house, it was as if I were seeing the house for the first time. And my bedroom was like the inside of a cube. I could now see that I had been living inside a cube.

At this point I woke up in a cold sweat. I had been having a nightmare despite the apparent calm surrounding the events in my dream. I cannot explain what those images might have symbolized. But the idea of going through one’s ‘first door’ fascinates and terrifies me to the extent of becoming a nightmare in itself.

When love is too great it becomes futile: it can no longer be put to use and not even the person loved has the capacity for so much love. I became as bemused as any child when I realized that even in love we must be sensible and show restraint. Our emotional life, alas, is extremely bourgeois.

I do not know what happens in other people’s homes. In mine, everybody talks about food. ‘Is that cheese yours?’ ‘No, help yourself.’ ‘Is the cereal good?’ ‘Excellent!’ ‘Mummy, ask the cook to make a prawn cocktail. I can show her.’ ‘When did you learn to make a prawn cocktail?’ ‘I’ve eaten them lots of times and I know how they’re made.’ ‘Today all I want to eat is a plate of pea soup and some sardines.’ ‘This meat is much too salty.’ ‘I don’t feel hungry, but if you buy some peppers, I’ll eat those.’ ‘No, Mummy, eating out in restaurants costs a lot of money. I’d rather eat at home.’ ‘What’s for dinner this evening?’

No, my house is not metaphysical. No one is overfed in this house but everybody likes to eat well. As for me, I spend all my time opening and closing my purse to hand out money for yet more shopping. ‘I’m eating out, Mummy, but keep me some dinner.’ I am a firm believer in keeping the fire lit in preparation for any eventuality. That is what a home is all about. The sacred flame of love should always be lit and the pots kept standing on the stove. Frankly, we enjoy eating. And I can say with some pride that I keep a good kitchen. As well as eating, we discuss what is happening in Brazil and in the world at large, we argue about the clothes we consider suitable for certain occasions. We are a real family.

Pleasure brings so much pain that one almost prefers familiar sorrow to unaccustomed pleasure. True happiness cannot be explained or understood. It is best compared to the beginnings of some irretrievable disaster. This complete fusion is unbearably consoling — as if death were our greatest and final good, only it is not death, it is immeasurable life which comes to resemble the splendour of death. One must absorb happiness little by little — for it is emergent life. And let those lacking in strength cover each nerve with a protective membrane, with the membrane of death, in order to withstand life. That membrane might consist of some formal act of protection, of silence or some words without meaning. For pleasure is not to be toyed with. We are that pleasure.

Whenever I mislay an important document and cannot find it, I ask myself: If it were me and I wanted to keep a document in a safe place, where would I put it? Sometimes this works. But at other times, I am so harassed by the phrase ‘If it were me’, that the search for that document becomes secondary and I begin to think. Or rather, to feel.

And I feel anything but reassured. Try it: if it were you, what would you do? From the outset one feels a certain inhibition: the lie into which we have settled has just been ever so slightly disturbed. Yet I have read biographies of certain people who suddenly started to be their true selves and completely transformed their lives. I think if I were to become truly me, my friends would stop greeting me on the street, for even my appearance would have changed. In what way? I cannot say.

I cannot reveal half the things I would do if it were left to me. I believe I might even end up in jail for certain crimes. And if it were left to me, I should give away everything that is mine and entrust the future to the future.

‘If it were me’ seems to sum up the greatest risk we face in life, a new entrée into the unknown. Yet I cannot help feeling that, after those first mad moments of euphoria, we would finally experience the world. We would certainly experience all the sorrow of this world. And our own sorrow too, that sorrow we have learned to ignore. But sometimes we would also be overcome by sheer ecstasy, by that utter happiness we can barely sense. Wait, I believe I am already experiencing it as I begin to smile and feel that sense of inhibition which comes when one is confronted by something momentous.

When I studied French I would have found it much more enjoyable if my text-book had been like the one I came across recently. It contains a dialogue between a Dog and his little Puppy. The Dog asks: ‘Have you been studying hard?’ The Puppy: ‘Yes, father.’ The Dog: ‘Mathematics?’ The Puppy: ‘No.’ The Dog: ‘Science?’ The Puppy: ‘No.’ The Dog: ‘Geography, philosophy or history?’ The Puppy: ‘No.’ The Dog: ‘What have you been studying then?’ The Puppy: ‘Foreign languages.’ The Dog: ‘And which foreign language have you mastered?’ The Puppy: ‘Miaow.’