Because the dark hour, perhaps the darkest, in broad daylight, preceded this thing that I don’t even want to try to define. In broad daylight it was night, and this thing that I don’t want to try to define yet is a quiet light inside me, and they would call it joy, gentle joy. I’m a little bewildered as if a heart has been taken from me, and its place there now is a sudden absence, an almost palpable absence of what was before an organ bathed in the daytime darkness of pain. I’m not feeling anything. But it’s the opposite of a torpor. It’s a lighter and more silent way of existing.
But I’m also restless. I was organised to console myself from anguish and pain. But how do I console myself from this simple and calm joy? It's just that I'm not used to not needing consolation. The word consolation happened without me feeling it, and I didn’t notice it, and when I went to search for it, it had already transformed into flesh and spirit, it no longer existed as a thought.
Then I walk to the window, it’s raining a lot. Out of habit, I’m searching in the rain for what, in another moment, would serve me as consolation. But I have no pain to comfort.
Ah, I know. I’m now searching in the rain for a joy so big that it becomes sharp, that puts me in touch with a sharpness that looks like the sharpness of pain. But the search is useless. I’m at the window and all that happens is this: I see the rain with beneficial eyes, and the rain sees me according to myself. We’re both busy flowing. How long will this state of mine last? I realize that, with this question, I’m groping my wrist to feel where is the painful throbbing from before. And I see that there is no throbbing of pain. Only this: it rains and I’m watching the rain. What simplicity. I never thought the world and I would get to this point. The rain falls not because it needs me, and I look at the rain not because I need it. But we are as close together as rainwater is linked to the rain. And I’m not thanking you for anything. Hadn’t I, right after being born, taken involuntarily and forcefully the path I have taken – and I always would have been what I am actually being: a peasant who is in a field where it rains. Not even thanking God or nature. The rain also doesn’t thank anyone. I’m not something that’s grateful to have been transformed into something else. I’m a woman, I’m a person, I’m attentive, I’m a body looking out the window. Just as the rain isn’t grateful for not being a rock. It’s rain. Maybe this is what you could call being alive. Not more than this, but this: alive. And just alive is a gentle joy.
Clarice Lispector in "A descoberta do mundo"
