Book Specs 📖

• Author: Clarice Lispector (translated by Idra Novey)
• Genre: Plotless fiction
• Pages: 193 pages (Paperback)

One Sentence Synopsis🔖

Rich lady finds a cockroach in the maid’s room and then spirals for the rest of the book about nothingness.

Notes/Thoughts📝

• Out of the 4 series book, this is my least favourite…even for me, it transcended my understanding….that might be the reason I’m so frustrated – the “not” understanding, the wanting to understand, the need to understand, and the pursuit…MAYBE I AM GETTING SOMEWHERE?? I am formally calling this the asymptote of understanding.
• “But don’t try to understand me, just keep me company”. There are several mentions in the book where the protagonist is asking for someone to hold their hand. This speaks to our deep-seated need to feel connected. Why do we need to understand to keep asking questions? Fear of the unknown, fear it all means nothing??? I once dated someone that feared the unknown, but isn’t that life, my guy?
• Loved that the last line of every “chapter”, became the first line of the next “chapter”. Ingenious way to communicate the continuity, overlap and overflow between one thought and the next.
• Similar to A Breath of Life and Agua Viva, there is this general theme of diving deep into our soul and into our essence to find the way. I found The Passion to be more ruinous, more ugly and ruminating. After reading the book I can appreciate the sharp edges and indelible mark that is so “Lispector” and why her phrasing mimicked a cyclical, dizzying tone. Lispector’s ability to create a woozy feeling of wandering anxiety, ecstatic relief, and radiant insight is incredible!!
• Takeaways:
  • live in the continuous moment
  • seek truth not understanding – if you don’t understand, you’re well on your way
  • the “negative” emotions/experiences as well as the “positive ones are all keys – we should be indiscriminate in the experience and focus on the “being”
  • tap into our neediness – love is already there, we just have to call it into our lives. “ask and you shall receive” mentality!!

“Quotes”🗣

“How could I explain that my greatest fear is precisely of: being? and yet there is no other way. How can I explain that my greatest fear is living whatever comes? how to explain that I can’t stand seeing, just because life isn’t what I thought but something else–as if I knew that! Why is seeing such a disorganization?“

“Perhaps what happened to me was an understanding-and for me to be true, I have to keep on being unable to grasp it, keep on not understanding it. All sudden understanding closely resembles an acute incomprehension…each moment of finding is getting lost.”

“And it’s inside myself that I must create that someone who will understand.”

“My heart went gray as hair goes gray.”

“Life, my love, is a great seduction in which all that exists seduces.”

“I want to find the redemption in today, in right now, in the reality that is being, and not in the promise, I want to find joy in the instant…”

“Is love when you don’t give a name to the identity of things?”

“If a person doesn’t look and doesn’t see , does the truth exist anyway?“

“How can I repay you? At least use me too, use me at least like a dark tunnel–and when you’ve crossed my darkness you’ll find yourself on the other side with yourself. You might not find yourself with me, I don’t know if I’ll cross over, but with yourself.”

“My error, however, must be the path of a truth: since only when I err do I step out of what I know and what I understand…The truth must be exactly in what I shall never be able to understand.”

“It’s that, when we loved, I didn’t know that love was happening much more exactly when the thing we were calling love wasn’t there.”

“…being a human is a senitization”

“…am I feeling what I am feeling, or am I feeling what I would like to feel? or am I feeling what I might need to feel?”

“No, I had not even known how to ask the question. Yet the answer had imposed itself upon me since I was born. Because of this continual answer I, the wrong way around, had been forced to seek the corresponding question. So I had got lost in a labyrinth of questions, and asked questions at random, hoping that one of them would occasionally correspond to the answer, and that I could then understand the answer.

“Sometimes–sometimes we ourselves manifest the inexpressive–one does that in art, in bodily love as well–to manifest the inexpressive is to create. In the end we are so so happy! since there is not just one way of entering into contact wth life, there are even negative ways! even painful ones, even almost impossible ones–and all that, all that before dying, all that even while we are awake!“

“…living is a goodness toward others. Living is enough, and that itself ends up in the great goodness. He who lives totally is living for others, he who lives his own largeness is making an offering, even if his life takes place within the incommunicability of a cell.”

“Ah, my love, do not be afraid of 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 grace–which is called passion.”

“Not everyone manages to fail because it is so laborious, one first must climb painfully until finally reaching high enough to be able to fall…”

“We ourselves are the journey. In. the matter of living, one can never arrive beforehand. The via crucis is not a detour, it is the only way, one cannot arrive except along it and with it.”