An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector (a book to read TXT) 📗

have the same indivisible poignancy as goodness. To whom would she give her death? Which would be like the first fresh warmth of a new season.

Ah how much easier to bear and understand pain than that promise of spring’s frigid and liquid joy. And with such modesty she was awaiting it: the poignancy of goodness.

But never die before really dying: because it was so good to prolong the promise. She wanted to prolong it with such finesse.

Lóri reveled in that finesse, feeding off the better and finer life, since nothing was too good to prepare her for the instant of that new season. She wanted the best oils and perfumes, wanted the best kind of life, wanted the most tender hopes, wanted the best delicate meats and also the heaviest ones to eat, wanted her flesh to break into spirit and her spirit to break into flesh, wanted those fine mixtures — everything that would secretly ready her for those first moments that would come.

Initiated, she foresaw the change of season. And desired the fuller life of an enormous fruit. Inside that fruit that was preparing itself in her, inside that fruit that was succulent, there was room for the lightest of daytime insomnias which was her wisdom of the wakeful animal: a veil of watchfulness, clever enough to do no more than foresee. Ah foreseeing was gentler than the intolerable acuteness of goodness. And she mustn’t forget, in the delicate struggle she was engaged in, that the hardest thing to understand was joy.

She mustn’t forget that the steepest ascent, and most exposed to the elements, was to smile with joy. And that’s why it was what had least fit inside her: the infinite delicacy of joy. So when she’d linger too long inside it and try to possess its airy vastness, tears of exhaustion would well up in her eyes: she was weak when faced with the beauty of what existed and would yet exist.

And she couldn’t manage, in this constant training, to seize the first delight of life.

Would she manage this time to grasp the infinitely sweet delight that was like dying? Ah how she worried she wouldn’t manage to live the best she could, and thus one day be able at last to die the best she could. How she would worry that someone might not understand that she’d die on the way to spring’s giddy bliss. But she wouldn’t rush the arrival of that happiness by one instant — because waiting for it while living was her chaste vigil.

Day and night she wouldn’t let the candle go out— prolonging it in the best of kind of holding out.

The first fresh heat of spring . . . but that was love! Happiness gave her a daughter’s smile. She’d cut her hair and was out and about looking good. Except the waiting almost no longer fit inside her. It was so nice that Lóri was running the risk of overdoing it, of losing her first springtime death, and, in the sweat of too much clammy waiting, dying too early. Out of curiosity dying too early: since she was already wanting to know what the new season was like.

But she’d wait. She’d wait while eating with delicacy and decorum and controlled avidity each tiniest crumb of everything, wanting everything since nothing was too good for her death which was her life so eternal that this very day it already existed and already was.

Through that world she started to wander. She’d met Ulisses, in her search she journeyed far into herself. And then finally the day came when she realized she was no longer on her own, recognized Ulisses, had found her destiny as a woman. And to know that he was chaste, waiting for her, she found natural and accepted. For she, despite desire, didn’t want to rush anything and remained chaste too.

Everyone was fighting for freedom — that’s what she was seeing in the newspapers, and she was happy that injustices were finally no longer being tolerated. In the Sunday paper she saw the lyrics to a song from Czechoslovakia. She copied it out in her best teacher’s handwriting, and gave it to Ulisses. It was called “Distant Voice” and went like this:

Low and far off

It’s the voice I hear. Where from,

So weak and vague?

It imprisons me in words,

I struggle to grasp

The things it asks about

I don’t and I don’t know

How I’ll answer it.

Only the wind knows,

Only the wise sun can see.

Thoughtful birds,

Love is beautiful,

Suggest something to me.

And the rest

Only the wind knows,

Only the sun can see.

Why, in the distance, do rocks arise,

Why does love come?

People don’t care,

Why does everything work out for them?

Why can’t I change the world?

Why don’t I know how to kiss?

I don’t and I don’t know

Maybe someday I’ll understand.

Only the wind knows,

Only the wise sun can see.

Thoughtful birds,

Beautiful love,

Suggest something to me.

And the rest,

Only the wind knows,

Only the sun can see.

The song’s lyrics were by a name that was charming her with its strangeness and she asked Ulisses to pronounce it which he did with ease: Zdenek Rytir. And the music, which she’d never hear, was by Karel Svoboda.

— It’s pretty, Loreley, there’s a pretty and accepting sadness about it.

Then suddenly she’d calmed down. Never, until then, had she felt the sensation of absolute calm. She was now feeling such a great clarity that it was canceling her out as a simple, existing person: it was an empty lucidity, like a perfect mathematical calculation that you don’t need. She was clearly seeing the void. And not even understanding the thing that part of her was understanding. What would she do with this lucidity? She also knew that her clarity could become a human hell. For she knew that — in terms of our daily and permanent resigned accommodation with unreality — clarity of reality was a risk. “And so put out my flame, God, because it is no use to me for my days. Help me once again to consist in a more possible