Invisible angels: Behold us nearly here, coming down the long path that exists before you all. But we are not tired, such a road does not require strength and, were it to require vigor, not even that of your prayers would lift us. Dizziness alone is what makes us whirl round shouting with the leaves until the opening of a birth. Is dizziness all it takes, as far as we know? if men hesitate over men, angels know nothing of angels, the world is wide and may whatever is be blessed. We are not tired, our feet have never been washed. Screeching at this next diversion, we came so as to suffer what must be suffered, we who have yet to be touched, we who have yet to be boy and girl. Behold us in the web of true tragedy, from which we shall extricate our primary form. When we open our eyes to become those who are born, we shall remember nothing: babbling children we shall be and we shall wield your very weapons. Blind on the path that precedes footsteps, blind shall we push onward when we are born with eyes that already see. Nor do we know what we have come to. All we need is the conviction that what is to be done shall be done: an angel’s fall is a direction. Our true beginning precedes the visible beginning, and our true end will follow the visible end. Harmony, terrible harmony, is our only prior destiny.
—Clarice Lispector (translated by Katrina Dodson)
—from “The Burned Sinner and the Harmonious Angels” [“A pecadora queimada e os anjos harmoniosos”] (~1964)
—found in The Complete Stories (2015)