An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures, Clarice Lispector [story books to read .TXT] 📗

in love? Who is this Lóri, who accepts this demand, and sets off down the road toward it? Who are these bizarre creatures, who ask of each other what no two people who are suffering from desire have perhaps ever asked of the other one?

How does Ulisses know that Lóri hasn’t yet become the full expression of herself? How does he know that she is someone who exists only through pain and suffering, and not through gladness and joy? How does he know, right from the start, that she “wasn’t up to enjoying a man”?

We are brought into the story only after all this knowledge has been won.

* * *

Before I start reading a book by Clarice Lispector, I always go off somewhere I can be alone, and I don’t check my phone or do anything else until the final page. I prefer to read her from start to finish, without interruption. Her novels are something I want to undergo, like a spiritual exercise. Just as Lóri both loses and finds herself in the salty sea with its “unlimited cold that without rage roars,” I feel, when reading her books, as if I am submerged in just as deep a vastness, in the great soul of a great writer who has access to all of Nature unvarnished. I feel “a dizzying seasickness that stirs [me] from the sleep of ages,” wakened by her philosophical mind, which seems to have grasped the deepest structure and meaning of the greatest mysteries of life. Yet twinned with her esoteric knowledge is also so much insecurity and doubt. This at first feels surprising — then it does not. In fact, it comes to seem outrageous that we had not known all along that of course the wisest among us would also worry about how to enter a party without exposing how vulnerable she feels.

As spiritually profound as her writings are, they are also sensually grounded in the things of the world and the pettiest aspects of life as a human — and as a woman specifically. But that all these things are important to the same mind makes the pettinesses seem profound, or at least inseparable from our lives here on earth.

* * *

True love involves waiting for one’s love is something we might guess from all the world’s love stories, but I have never before seen the trial of this waiting so transparently formulated as a spiritual discipline through which one comes to win that love and deserve it.

Each of the two lovers in An Apprenticeship holds all of the power, and each holds none. Each has total dominion over the other, and each is completely flattened beneath the other one’s heel. Although we only see the affair from Lóri’s perspective, it is easy enough to suffer alongside Ulisses, when Lóri doesn’t show up to their meetings, or even touch his hand.

In reading Lispector’s books, I learn about the structure of the relationship between a human and God, between a human and herself, and between a human and the other; in this case, both the other who is just another person one has slept with and lost desire for, and the Other who holds your life’s happiness in their hands. This second Other is the elemental force that drives the life of the loving one, while the other other has no power at all and might as well not even exist. Why is life like this? How can so much importance (for the one who loves) be concentrated in a random, Other, singular individual, while diffused among the rest is nothing, and we are able to stride past them with complete indifference?

What is this Other capable of that the other other could never do? In one sense (unhappy as this is to write) the Other is the one who circumscribes our limits. With the choice of who to love, we end up in a city, with a side of the bed on which to sleep, and a certain set of friends (growing further apart from those who are not invited over because one’s partner does not like them). We watch certain shows, not others. And the Other circumscribes our limits metaphysically, too. Maybe this procedure is necessary, in order for our lives to have a form. Just as the art-impulse must take a certain form — a sculpture, a play, a novel, a dance — so does the election of a specific Other shape our blobbish life-impulse into a specific form. I am now thinking of the part of the novel where Claire writes, “Lóri had a kind of dread of going, as if she could go too far — in what direction? Which was making it hard to go . . . There was a certain fear of her own capacity, large or small, maybe because she didn’t know her own limits. Were the limits of a human divine? They were.”

And so we choose a man or woman to confer some needed limits.

In this book, both Lóri and Ulisses “are attractive as man and woman.” He is a man with whom women easily fall in love, and she is a woman who surpasses everyone in the room, “in educational skills, in intuitive understanding, and even in feminine charm.” Their magnetism is a gift from the gods: she is that rare woman “who hasn’t broken from the lineage of women down through time,” and he, “from the viewpoint of strictly masculine beauty [had] a calm virility inside him.” She knows what she is doing in bed — you only have to glance at her to see it. And he has the ability to seduce. It’s like any Hollywood movie: the leading man must be attractive, and so must the leading lady, so we understand why she desires him (because we do too), and why he desires her (because we do too). And so Lispector makes them both desirable — or tells us that they are. (Because of course Ulisses is not! I mean,