I want to prolong it with great subtlety. I take a bath, I take nourishment from the very best and finest of life, because nothing is too good as I prepare myself for the arrival of this new season. I want the best oils and perfumes, I want only the best kind of life, I want the most delicate of waitings, I want the finest as well as the richest meats to eat, I want my flesh to dissolve into spirit and my spirit to dissolve into flesh, I want those fine mixturesāeverything that will secretly prepare me for those first moments yet to come. In this initiated state, I can sense the change of season. And I wish I could enjoy the lush life of an enormous fruit. Inside that fruit taking shape within me, inside that succulent fruit, there is room for the lightest of insomnias, namely, my keen animal wisdom: a veil of alertness, just enough to be able to sense what is to come. Ah, being able to sense something is far pleasanter than the unbearable acuity of goodness. And let me not forget, in this fine battle of mine, that the most difficult thing to understand is happiness. Let me not forget that the steepest of wind-battered climbs is being able to smile with genuine happiness. Because, for one reason and another, that is what I have found hardest to grasp: the infinite delicacy of happiness. For when I linger too long in it and try to grasp its feather-light vastness, my eyes fill with tears of exhaustion: I grow weak before the beauty of what exists and what will exist. And during that whole ongoing apprenticeship, I still cannot grasp the initial joy of life.
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Too Much of Life: Complete Chronicles (Clarice Lispector)
