I’m tempted to suggest you skip this introduction and save your energy for Clarice Lispector, but she will give you energy instead of taking yours away. The fruits of her project—both an art and a philosophy (ontological, but also chosen, deliberate, developed)—are strangely restorative. While reading itself is not passive, you can relax, while she is hard at work, asking questions that are inside you, too, so that you yourself don’t have to frame them. Her aspiration is nothing less than to uncover the bizarre mystery of consciousness, to contemplate being while being, to apprehend life while living it. Someone has to do this work. Lispector seems to have recognized that she had a gift for the job and plunged in. I’m not claiming she made art as self-sacrifice. But in some eternal space, the philosophical boiler room of the world, the secret alcove behind a heavy velvet drape, she is yet tarrying in the void, the same void that in you and me is repressed for the sake of appearances. For the sake of “reality.”

So, no. What she ought to do was wrap them up and send them off, without any enjoyment now; wrap them up and, disappointed, send them off; and in astonishment be rid of them. Also because a person must have some consistency, her thinking ought to have some continuity: if she’d spontaneously decided to hand them over to Carlota, she should stick to her decision and give them away. Because no one changed their mind from one moment to the next.

But no one could have guessed what she was thinking. And for those who looked at her once more from the doorway, the birthday girl was only what she appeared to be: seated at the head of the filthy table, her hand clenched on the tablecloth as though grasping a scepter, and with that muteness that was her last word. Fist clenched on the table, never again would she be only what she was thinking. Her appearance had finally surpassed her and, going beyond her, was serenely becoming gigantic. Cordélia stared at her in alarm. The mute and severe fist on the table was telling the unhappy daughter-in-law she irremediably loved perhaps for the last time: You must know. You must know. That life is short. That life is short.

Pale, kicked out of a Church, she looked at the stationary earth from which she’d departed and back to which she’d been delivered. She straightened out her skirts primly. She didn’t look at anyone. Contrite as on that day when in the middle of everyone the entire contents of her purse had spilled onto the ground and everything that was valuable while lying secretly in her purse, once exposed in the dust of the street, revealed the pettiness of a private life of precautions: face powder, receipt, fountain pen, her retrieving from the curb the scaffolding of her life. She rose from her seat stunned as if shaking off a collision. Though no one was paying attention, she smoothed her skirt again, did what she could so no one would notice how weak and disgraced she was, haughtily protecting her broken bones. But the sky was spinning in her empty stomach; the earth, rising and falling before her eyes, remained distant for a few moments, the earth that is always so troublesome. For a moment the woman wanted, in mutely sobbing fatigue, to reach out her hand to the troublesome earth: her hand reached out like that of a crippled beggar. But as if she had swallowed the void, her heart stunned.

And thus I don’t understand the egg. I only understand a broken egg: I crack it on the frying pan. In this indirect way I give myself to the egg’s existence: my sacrifice is reducing myself to my personal life. I turned my pleasure and my pain into my hidden destiny. And having only one’s own life is, for those who have already seen the egg, a sacrifice. Like the ones who, in a convent, sweep the floor and do the laundry, serving without the glory of a higher purpose, my job is to live out my pleasures and my pains. I must have the modesty to live.

I don’t want this house. I want a justice that would have given a chance to something pure and full of helplessness in Mineirinho—that thing that moves mountains and is the same as what made him love a woman “like a madman,” and the same that led him through a doorway so narrow that it slashes into nakedness; it is a thing in us as intense and transparent as a dangerous gram of radium, that thing is a grain of life that if trampled is transformed into something threatening—into trampled love; that thing, which in Mineirinho became a knife, it is the same thing in me that makes me offer another man water, not because I have water, but because, I too, know what thirst is; and I too, who have not lost my way, have experienced perdition. Prior justice, that would not make me ashamed. It was past time for us, with or without irony, to be more divine; if we can guess what God’s benevolence might be it is because we guess at benevolence in ourselves, whatever sees the man before he succumbs to the sickness of crime. I go on, nevertheless, waiting for God to be the father, when I know that one man can be father to another. And I go on living in my weak house. That house, whose protective door I lock so tightly, that house won’t withstand the first gale that will send a locked door flying through the air. But it is standing, and Mineirinho lived rage on my behalf, while I was calm. He was gunned down in his disoriented strength, while a god fabricated at the last second hastily blesses my composed wrongdoing and my stupefied justice: what upholds the walls of my house is the certainty that I shall always vindicate myself, my friends won’t vindicate me, but my enemies who are my accomplices, they will greet me; what upholds me is knowing that I shall always fabricate a god in the image of whatever I need in order to sleep peacefully, and that others will furtively pretend that we are all in the right and that there is nothing to be done. All this, yes, for we are the essential frauds, bastions of some thing. And above all trying not to understand.