The passion according to G.H – Clarice Lispector

Posted by Carmen Lobo✔ ⋅ August 26, 2015 ⋅ Leave a comment

GIVE ME YOUR HAND:
I am now going to tell you how I entered the inexpressive that was alwayqs my blind and secret search. How I entered whatever exists between the number one and the number two, how I saw the line of mystery and fire, and which is surreptitios line. A note exists between two notes of music, between two facts exist a fact, between two grains of sand no matter how close together ther exists an interval of space, a sense that exists between senses – in the interstices of primordial matter is the line of mystery and fire that is the breathing od the world, and the continual breathing of the world is what we hear and call silence.

(page 179)

And now I am not taking your hand for myself. I am the one giving you my hand.
Now I need your hand, not so that I won’t be scared, but so that you won’t. I know that believing in all this will be, at first, your gfreat solitude. But the moment will come when you will give me your hand, no longer out of solitude, but as I am doing now: out of love. Like me, you will no longer fear adding your-self to the extreme energetic sweetness of the God. Solitude is having only the human destiny.
And solitude is not needing. Not needing leaves a man very alone, all alone. Ah, needing does not isolate the person, the thing needs the thing: all you have to do is see the chick walking around to see that its destiny will be what needimes makes of it, its destiny is to join as drops of mercury join other drops of mercury, even if, like each drop of mercury, it has in itself an entirely complete an round existence.
Ah, my love, do not be afraid od neediness: it is our greater destiny. Love is so much more fatal than I had thought, love is as inherent as wanting itself, and we are guaranteed by a necessity that shall renew itself continuously. Love already is, it is always. All that is missing is the coup de grâce- which is called passion.

CLARICE LISPECTOR (1920-1977) was Brazilian journalist, translator and author of fiction. Born in Western Ukraine into a Jewish family who suffered greatly during the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, she was still an infant when her family fled the disastrous post-World War I situation for Rio de Janiero. At twenty-three, she became famous for her novel, Near to the Wild Heart, and married a Brazilian diplomat. She spent much of the forties and fifties in Europe and the United States, helping soldiers in a military hospital in Naples during World War II and writing, before leaving her husband and returning to Rio in 1959. Back home, she completed several novels including The Passion According to G.H. and The Hour of the Star before her death in 1977 from ovarian cancer.