Instructions

All the agents enjoy many advantages in order to ensure the egg is formed. There is no cause for envy, because even the worst of the conditions imposed on some agents happen to be ideal conditions for the egg. As for the satisfaction of the agents, they receive that, too, without conceit. They quietly savour any satisfaction. This is the sacrifice we make so that the egg may be formed. We have been endowed with a nature which has a considerable capacity for satisfaction, which helps to make satisfaction less painful. There are instances of agents who commit suicide: they discover that the handful of instructions at their disposal are insufficient and sense a lack of support. There was the case of the agent who publicly revealed his identity because he could not bear not to be understood, just as he found it intolerable not to be respected by others. He died after being run over as he was leaving a restaurant. There was another agent who did not even need to be eliminated: he slowly burned himself up in disgust, a disgust which overwhelmed him when he discovered that the few instructions he had been given explained nothing. Another agent was also eliminated because he thought ‘the truth should be spoken courageously,’ and he set about searching for that truth. People say he died in the name of truth, but in fact he simply obscured the truth, he was ingenuous. His seeming courage was mere folly and his desire for loyalty was naive. He had failed to understand that loyalty is not something pure, that to be loyal is to be disloyal to all the rest. These extreme cases of death are not provoked by cruelty. There is a job to be done which one might term cosmic, and unfortunately individual cases cannot be taken into consideration. For those who succumb and become individuals, there are instructions, there is charity, there is an understanding which does not discriminate between motives—our human life, in short.

—Clarice Lispector
from “The Egg and the Chicken”