THE SECRET MISSION OF LIFE

This is from one of my favourite authors, Clarice Lispector.

I think if I were the translator (from Brazilian Portuguese) I would use the word ‘surrender’ or even the words ‘letting go’ in place of ‘giving up’. Nonetheless, I offer the translation as is, from the 2023 Penguin Classics edition of Too Much of Life, the collected newspaper columns written by Lispector, published every Saturday.

“When it comes to living, you can never arrive early. The Via Crucis is not a detour, it’s the one and only path; we cannot arrive accept through it and with it. Insistence is the effort we have to make, giving up is the prize. It is only reached when we have experienced the power of the voice and, despite having tasted power, prefer to give it up. Giving up has to be a choice. Giving up is the most sacred choice we can make in life. Giving up is the human moment itself. And that alone is the glory of my condition.

Giving up is a revelation.

I give up, and I will have been a human person - it is only at the lowest point of my condition that it becomes my destiny. Existing requires of me the great sacrifice of not being strong enough; I give up, and here in my weak hand fits the entire world. I give up, and from that springs the only happiness available to my human poverty; human happiness. I know and I tremble - living leaves me so overwhelmed, living leaves me unable to sleep. I reach the point of being capable of falling, I choose, I tremble and I give up, and in finally submitting to my fall, unpersoned, with no voice of my own, without myself - everything that I do not have is mine. I give up and the less I am the more I live, the more I lose my name, the more I am called, my secret mission is my condition, I give up and the more I remain ignorant of the password the more I fulfil my secret, the less I know the more the sweetness of the abyss becomes my fate. And then I adore”

Clarice Lispector

Too Much of Life

Page 657

Penguin Classics, 2023

28Feb26