Excerpt, Água Viva by Clarice Lispector (trans. Stefan Tobler)

But I don't know how to capture what's happening now except by living everything that happens to me here and now and whatever it may be. I let the free horse run fiery in its pure noble joy. I, who run nervously and only reality delimits me. And when the day reaches its end I hear the crickets and become entirely full and unintelligible. Then come the early hours bulging full of thousands of blaring little birds. And each thing that happens to me I live it here by noting it down. Because I want to feel in my probing hands the living and quivering nerve of the today.

Beyond thought I reach a state. I refuse to divide it up into words--and what I cannot and do not want to express ends up being the most secret of my secrets. I know that I'm scared of the moments in which I don't use thought and that's a momentary state that is difficult to reach, and which, entirely secret, no longer uses the words with which thoughts are produced. Is not using words to lose your identity? is it getting lost in the harmful essential shadows?

I lose the identity of the world inside myself and exist without guarantees. I achieve whatever is achievable but I live the unachievable and the meaning of me and the world and you isn't obvious. It's fantastic, and I handle myself in these moments with immense delicacy. Is God a form of being? the abstraction that materializes in the nature of all that exists? My roots are in the divine shadows. Drowsy roots. Wavering in the dark shadows.


-- Clarice Lispector, Água Viva, trans. Stefan Tobler, New Directions Press, copyrights 1973 (the Heirs of Clarice Lispector) and 2012 (Stefan Tobler, translation, and Benjamin Moser, introduction), p. 64.

"What Did You Learn in School Today?" performed by Pete Seeger, 1964

-- Pete Seeger, "What Did You Learn in School Today?" written by Tom Paxton, performed on the "Tonight in Person" show (BBC), 1964. Accessed via YouTube.