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Only a few people chosen by the inevitability of chance have tasted the aloof and delicate freedom of life. It's like knowing how to arrange flowers in a vase: almost useless knowledge. That fleeting freedom of life must never be forgotten: it should be present like a fragrance.

And I also know a way of life that is gentle pride, grace in movements, slight and continuous frustration, with a skill in avoidance that comes from a long and ancient history. As a sign of revolt only a weightless and eccentric irony. There's a side to life that is like drinking coffee on a terrace in the coldness of winter and wrapped in wool.

Upon this unusually crooked life I have placed my heavy paw, causing existence to wither in its most oblique and fortuitous and yet at the same time subtly fatal aspects. I understood the inevitability of hap-penstance and that is no contradiction.

How can I explain it to you? I'll try. It's that I'm perceiving a crooked reality. Seen through an oblique cut. Only now have I sensed the oblique of life. I used to only see through straight and parallel cuts. I didn't notice the sly crooked line. Now I sense that life is other.That living is not only unwinding rough feelings—it's something more bewitching and gracile, without losing its fine animal vigor for that.

In this dense jungle of words that thickly wrap around whatever I feel and think and live and transform everything I am into something of mine that nonetheless remains entirely outside me.

I hear the mad song of a little bird and crush butterflies between my fingers. I'm a fruit eaten away by a worm. And I await the orgasmic apocalypse. A dissonant throng of insects surrounds me, light of an oil lamp that I am. I then go too far in order to be. I'm in a trance. I penetrate the surrounding air. What a fever: I can't stop living.

The sole guarantee is that I was born. You are a form of being I, and I a form of being you: those are the limits of my possibility.

But there's the waiting. Waiting is feeling voracious about the future. One day you said you loved me. I pretend to believe it and live, from day to day, in joyful love. But remembering with longing is like saying farewell once again.

Night jessamine has a perfume of the full moon. It's phantasmagoric and a bit frightening and is for people who like danger. It only emerges at night with its dizzying scent. Night jessamine is silent. And also belongs to the deserted street corner and in the dark and the gardens of houses whose lights are off and win-dows are shut. It's highly dangerous: it's a whistle in the dark, which no one can bear.

Jasmine is for lovers. It makes you want to put an ellipsis now. They walk holding hands, swinging their arms and giving each other gentle kisses to the fragrant almost-sound of jasmine.

The violet is introverted and its introspection is profound. They say it hides away out of modesty. Not true. It hides away in order to capture its own secret. Its almost-not-perfume is a smothered glory but demands that people seek it. It never shouts its perfume. Violet says frivolous things that cannot be said.

Now the carnation has an aggressiveness that comes from a certain irritation. The ends of its petals are rough and impudent. The carnation's perfume is somehow mortal. Red carna-ions bellow in violent beauty. The white ones recall the little coffin of a dead child—that's when the scent becomes pungent and we turn our heads away in horror.

Rose is the feminine flower that gives herself wholly and such that the only thing left to her is the joy of having given herself. Her perfume is a crazy mystery. When inhaled deeply it touches the intimate depth of the heart and leaves the inside of the entire body perfumed. The way she opens herself into a woman is so beautiful. The petals have a good taste in the mouth—all you have to do is try.

Now I shall speak of the sadness of flowers so as to feel more of the order of whatever exists. Before I do, I'll give you the nectar with pleasure, sweet juice that many flowers contain and that insects seek with greed. The pistil is the flower's female organ that generally occupies the centre and contains the beginnings of the seed. Pollen is fertilizing powder produced in the stamens and contained in the anthers.

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Clarice Lispector is an oyster girlie