Oh, I've heard your heartbeat is up around 160 beats per minute (which makes me think you're running quite the race to get here) and that you've grown to nearly be the size of a lime here near the end of the first trimester.
But I think I'll press on in the hope that you find some of this interesting or useful later in life. (Oh, maybe at 50, which would put us out around 2064 when perhaps you might be reading this on Mars.)
Why Clarice Lispector? Here is a passage from later in the book I showed last time: "The Passion According to G.H." It's a strange meditation in which a woman simply comes upon a cockroach in a room her former maid has vacated. I don't want to give anything away (it is a moving, but slightly creepy story) but in many ways it is a meditation on faith.
Because Brazil is home to one of the largest populations of Catholics and since Lispector is one of the most revered writers in Brazil, it is probably not surprising that this book is a meditation on God, faith and the Eucharist.
By the time you read this, I'm not sure if you will have taken the slightly-cardboard-tasting Host on your tongue. But it is a simple act of a very simple unleavened bread (going back to its roots in Christianity's patriarch: Judaism) that, through a ritual thousands of years old, is transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. An act seen as symbolic in the Protestant faiths; an act seen as transubstantiation in the Catholic faith.
The following passage from the end of Lispector's book is one of the most beautiful reflections on the simplicity and enormity of that act. I imagine Lispector having just returned from receiving communion at the altar. She sits down in the pew of whatever church she is in and has this reflection.
I hope one day you have this experience too:
I give up, and all of a sudden the world fits inside my weak hand. I give up, and onto my human poverty opens the only joy granted me human joy. I know that, and I tremble -- living strikes me so, living deprives me of sleep.
I climb high enough to be able to fall, I choose, I tremble and give up, and finally, dedicating myself to my fall, depersonal, without a voice of my own, finally without me -- then does everything I do not have become mine. I give up and the less I am the more I live, the more I lose my name the more they call me, my only secret mission is my condition, I give up and the less I know the password, the more I fulfill the secret, the less I know the more the sweetness of the abyss is my destiny. And so I adore it.
With my hands quietly clasped on my lap, I was having a feeling of tender timid joy. It was an almost nothing, like when the breeze makes a blade of grass tremble. It was almost nothing, but I could make out the miniscule movement of my timidity. I don't know, but with distressed idolatry I was approaching something, and with the delicateness of one who is afraid. I was approaching the most powerful thing that had ever happened to me.
More powerful than hope, more powerful than love?
I was approaching something I think was -- trust. Perhaps that is the name. Or it doesn't matter: I could also give it another.
I felt that my face in modesty was smiling. Or perhaps it wasn't, I don't know. I was trusting.
Myself? the world? the God? the roach? I don't know. Perhaps trusting is not a matter of what or whom. Perhaps I now knew that I myself would never be equal to life, but that my life was equal to life. I would never reach my root, but my root existed. Timidly, I let myself be pierced by a sweetness that humbled me without restraining me.
Oh God, I was feeling baptized by the world. I had... finally performed the tiniest act.
Not the maximum act, as I had thought before, not heroism and sainthood. But at least the tiniest act that I had always been missing. I had always been incapable of the tiniest act. And with the tiniest act, I had deheroized myself. I, who had lived from the middle of the road, had finally taken the first step along its becoming.
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