Clarice Lispector - Selected Cronicas

What I feel, I do not put into action. What I put into action, I do not think. What I think, I do not feel. I am unaware of what I know. I am not unaware of what I feel. I do not understand myself yet behave as if I had no difficulty in doing so.

And all of a sudden that terrible pain in my left eye, tears streaming down my face, and the world becoming sinister. And distorted; for on closing one eye the other automatically halfcloses. No fewer than four times during the past year some strange object has got into my left eye: on two occasions a speck of dust, once a grain of sand, and on the last occasion an eyelash. All four times I was obliged to consult an optician. On my last visit I asked this man who is entrusted, as it were, with our vision of the world, why it should always be the left eye. A mere coincidence?

The answer was in the negative. He explained that, however normal a person’s eyesight, one eye sees better than the other and is therefore more sensitive. He referred to it as the guiding-eye. And because the latter is more sensitive, it picks up any foreign body in the atmosphere and there it remains.

In other words, our best eye is at the same time more powerful and more delicate: it creates problems which are not imaginary but all too real. As in the case of this unbearable pain when a speck of dust is grazing and irritating one of the most delicate organs of our body. I remained pensive.

Does this only happen to our eyes? Could it be that those who see things more clearly are also those who feel and suffer most? And those who are afflicted with pain as real as that caused by a speck of dust? I remained pensive.

Suddenly I have remembered that a New Year is about to begin. Let us hope that nineteen seventy-four will turn out to be a happy year for all of us.

* Publisher’s note: New Directions’ Selected Crônicas presents about two-thirds of the chronicles contained in A Descoberta do Mundo, and were selected from the complete U.K. edition of Discovering the World (Carcanet Press Ltd., 1992). This introduction by translator Giovanni Pontiero has likewise been adapted.

P.S. — I am united, body and soul, with the students of Brazil in their tragic plight.

* Zapateodo : the tap-dancing peculiar to Spanish flamenco.

* maja : low-class woman (especially in Madrid).

* An old Carnival song associated with the late Carmen Miranda.

PS: Could I ask the kind person who converts my column into Braille for the blind to omit this particular article. I have no desire to offend eyes which cannot see.