The condition of my life
I will always be concerned with the condition of my life.
I worry over the likelihoods and state of my life daily, and I’ll do so until the end of my days. Satisfaction is flighty, uncertain and divine. It’s something I’ll know for a brief moment and then pick from its remains, starved for the next encounter. It’s ok, I think, to be greedy in this way, as long as the object of your greed isn’t steeped in anything vile.
Clarice Lispector has a quote in Too Much of Life about the human condition that I can’t find now. Please know that it’s probably terribly brilliant, in that awful way of hers that leaves me trembling. She’s my favorite human ever. I adore her, honestly, but I can’t finish one of her novels to save my life. It’s like the words take a glance at me and decide to wander about the page instead, knowing my gaze hasn’t earned its place yet. So I’m instead slowly moving through this 700 page collection of her crônicas. It’s awful, being seen so carelessly, with no regard to my feelings or how I like to be coy with them. A thrilling read, really. There are certain truths about myself that only Clarice has given voice to, in a much better way than I ever could.
The cars outside are snow capped. The only thing that’s seemed to bring my mother a great amount of joy has been the snow that’s sporadically graced us this past week. I hear the smile in her voice as she forges through the cold, huffing into the phone as she finishes her morning run. I hear the dip into sadness her mind can’t help but succumb to, since joy seems to inevitably remind of us loss, nowadays. Still though. More, more. I want to bite into it. This is the content of my life. We slosh through the snow down here while our loved ones toe their way through the clouds up there, the both of us kicking white fuzzy or grainy substances into the air to watch it dance and descend, to feel its chill settle on our skin. Joy can be paired with loss but I want to own it, still, to know the both of us in this new way.
I thought of all this while washing the dishes after my episode of Evangelion ended. Accordingly, here is the Lispector quote that found me today: “Being an intellectual means, above all, using one’s intellect, which I don’t do: I use intuition, instinct.”
Also, this:
“So what am I then? I am a person with a heart that does sometimes grasp something. I am a person who has tried to put into words an unintelligible, impalpable world. I am, above all, a person whose heart beats with the very lightest of joys when it succeeds in writing a sentence that says something about human or animal life.”
Wonderful, isn’t she?
