certainly, what had saved me until that moment from the sentimentalized life from which I'd been living, is that the inhuman part is the best part of us, it's the thing, the thing-part of us. That's the only reason that, as a false person, I had never before burrowed beneath the sentimental and utilitarian construction: my human feelings were utilitarian, but I hadn't burrowed under because the thing part, matter of the God, was too powerful and was waiting to reclaim me. The great neutral punishment of general life is that it can suddenly undermine a single life; if it isn't given its own power, then it bursts as a dam bursts -- and arrives pure, unadulterated: purely neutral. That was the great danger: when that neutral part of things doesn't sate a personal life, life arrives purely neutral...Life was taking revenge on me, and its revenge was no more than coming back, nothing more. In every case of madness something came back. The possessed are not possessed by what is coming but by what is coming back. Sometimes life comes back. If everything broke in me as the force passed through, that's not because its function is to break: it just finally needed to come through since it had already become too copious to be contained or diverted -- along its way it buried everything. And afterward, as after a flood, floating upon the waters was a wardrobe, a person, a stray window, three suitcases. And that seemed like hell to me, the destruction of layers and layers of human archeology.
--Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H., pg. 65-66
