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

he has the manly virtue of self-restraint, but apart from that, what? Wouldn’t I throw down my napkin in disgust onto the elegant tablecloth of the restaurant we were sitting in if he spoke to me as he does her? — but he wouldn’t want me.)

So what locks her in?

Lóri has the twinned feminine virtue and vice of radical self-doubt (which perhaps I also have — but in life, not while reading a book), which makes one susceptible to other people, sometimes to a dangerous degree. That Ulisses resists her sexual charms seems to be all she needs to know that he’s the one to whom she must surrender. He can resist her, so he must be above her. And because she is below him, she is ready to make him her teacher. What does he hope to teach her? How to be worthy of him. Which is also how to be worthy of life itself — to be like rain, “without gratitude or ingratitude.”

This is an incredibly difficult task. It takes great deal of patience to bring herself to that place, and she undergoes a lot of suffering — but also gains more illumination than many people find in a lifetime. Isn’t it horrible? What a plot! Yet can I say Lispector is wrong? It is always tempting to try to make oneself worthy of those who have put themselves above you (or who you have put above you), and nothing is more humiliating than to fail to perform this task well. Anyway, it is a story that should be told.

(I have also tried to look at waiting for love as a spiritual discipline, from even its smallest expression: like trying not to destroy myself in agony over the pain of being a human who knows she has sent a bad email to someone she admires, from whom she believes she won’t — and actually doesn’t — hear back. That feeling is just a speck of what Clarice Lispector is writing about here, as one of the most important things we grapple with: how to assure ourselves that we are — and to actually be — worthy of loving and being loved.)

All love stories must have their obstacles: religion, parents, a stone wall. The obstacle in this book is that we may be unfit for love, plain and simple: because we haven’t lived in such a way that we have let ourselves be fit for it; we haven’t even lived in such a way that we have made ourselves fit for life. For God. For sex. For anything! We slack off on the spiritual level, always. We guess no one’s going to see it. Who’s looking? Even we are not. Then someone like Ulisses comes along and says, You cannot have me until you do the difficult work of being a human that you have been putting off. (And inwardly, the man says to himself, I am also not worthy of her, and cannot have her until I make myself fit for love, too.)

Is this book a fantasy, in a way? While some writers might fantasize about a man coming along who will shower a woman in diamonds and install her in a penthouse, Clarice Lispector, the great mystic, spins a fantasy of having an explicit reason for doing the most difficult labor a person is capable of: the work of becoming an actual human being in this world. Here, the motive to do the work is to win the love of a man. (But a man is not just some guy; he represents one of the elemental forces of the universe — the masculine force that sets the difficult task in motion, of impelling the feminine force, which would otherwise sit, roundly, alone. What woman has not felt that unfortunate thing, that some man, not yet won, was “like the border between the past and whatever was to come”? Yet in a way, isn’t Ulisses asking Lóri to find the masculine force within herself, before coming to him? Or to find it in herself so she doesn’t come to him seeking it, then get bored of what she’s found, like any woman who goes from man to man, never satisfied because she’s mistaken about what she is looking for, really? Yes. Any woman wanting any sort of lasting happiness has to realize that she can — and must — be the impelling force that moves herself through the world.)

The end point of all this spiritual labor isn’t a lasting happiness. Then what is the prize of the work of becoming human (work that those worthy of our love make us twist ourselves up in order to achieve — or else never achieve, which they will never cease to remind us of)? Is the prize simply a few private moments between ourselves and the universe, which are so magnificent — moments of true grace — such as Lóri encounters on the way to her man? Or is the prize of all that spiritual effort just hearing, and being able to honestly say, I love you? Is it a marriage in which one’s spouse is going to be working on a long essay, leaving one alone a lot? Or is the prize being interrupted midsentence by the person one loves, in bed? The struggle toward love is presented as an apprenticeship — but an apprenticeship in what? An ordinary kind of marriage? And after an apprenticeship, we supposedly become masters — but of what? Loving? Living?

No, never masters, for the master understands her craft — whether it’s an art form, or the craft of life, or of love — while the apprentice does not. As Lispector writes, “not-understanding” would always be better than “understanding,” for not-understanding “had no frontiers and led to the infinite, to the God.” Lóri, Ulisses, we, Clarice, remain apprentices, always — apprentices in everything — because apprentices feel more, think more, struggle more, and win more than the master, who has already arrived, ever can.

SHEILA HETI