P.36 There were many good feelings. Climbing the hill, stopping at the top
and, without looking, feeling the ground covered behind her, the farm in the
distance. The wind ruffling her clothes, her hair. Her arms free, heart
closing and opening wildly, but her face bright and serene under the sun.
And knowing above all that the earth beneath her feet was so deep and so
secret that she need not fear the invasion of understanding dissolving its
mystery. This feeling had a quality of glory.
P.119 Flee — and you’ll never be free…
P.123 The dense, dark night was cut down the middle, split into two black
blocks of sleep. Where was she? Between the two pieces, looking at them (the
one she had already slept and the one she had yet to sleep), isolated in the
timeless and the spaceless, in an empty gap. This stretch would be
subtracted from her years of life.
⠀The ceiling and walls joined without corners, silent, arms folded, and she
was inside a cocoon. Joana observed it without thoughts, without emotion, a
thing looking at another thing. Slowly, from a leg movement, wakefulness was
distantly born mixed with a taste of sleep in her mouth, then spread
throughout her body. The moonlight paled the room, the bed. A moment,
another moment, another moment, another moment.
P.128 She silenced again looking inside herself. She remembered : I am the
light wave that has no other field but the sea, I thrash about, slide, fly,
laughing, giving, sleeping, but woe is me, always in me, always in me. When
was that from? Had she read it as a child? Thought it? Suddenly she
remembered : she had thought it just now, perhaps before placing her own arm
next to Otávio’s, perhaps in that moment in which she had wanted to scream…
More and more everything was past… And the past as mysterious as the future…
P.182 Morning. Where she had she been once, on what strange, miraculous
earth had she rested to now smell its perfume? Dry leaves on the moist
earth. Her heart tightened slowly, opened, she didn’t breathe for a moment
waiting… It was in the morning, she knew it was in the morning… Regressing
as if by a child’s fragile hand, she heard, muffled as if in a dream,
chickens scratching the earth. Hot, dry earth… the clock clanging tin-den…
tin… den… the sun raining in tiny yellow and red roses over the houses… Dear
God, what was that if not herself? but when? no, always…
⠀The pink waves were darkening, the dream was slipping away. What was it
that I lost? What was it that I lost?
P.189 Nevertheless she felt that this strange freedom that had been her
curse, that had never connected her even with herself, this freedom was what
illuminated her matter. And she knew that her life and moments of glory came
from it and that the creation of each future instant came from it.
… roam, roam, be humble, suffer, be shaken to her core, without hopes. Above
all without hopes.
P.191 I only have one life and this life slips through my fingers and
travels to death serenely and I can do nothing
… God, this pride to be alive gags me, I am nothing, from the depths I call
thee, from the depths I call thee from the depths I call thee from the
depths I call thee…
P.194 I will be creating instant by instant, not instant by instant : always
welded, because then I will live, only then will I live bigger than in my
childhood, I will be as brutal and misshapen as a rock, I will be as light
and vague as something felt and not understood, I will surpass myself in
waves, ah, Lord, and may everything come and fall upon me, even the
incomprehension of myself at certain white moments because all I have to do
is comply with myself and then nothing will block my path until
death-without-fear, from any struggle or rest I will rise up as strong and
beautiful as a young horse