I stumbled across this statue of the writer Clarice Lispector on Copacabana beach in 2017. She was born in Ukraine of Jewish parentage and her family emigrated to Brazil while she was an infant. I took this photograph and thought little more. Recently through reading some of her quotes, and books I have seen them steeped in mystical contemplative truths, and recognise that inner place where they arise.
She maintained that her work was understood through feeling, rather than intellect and that when she wrote for adults, it came from a sacred place.
Some of her many short quotes;
“What I’m writing to you is not for reading— it’s for being.”
“Obsessed with the desire to be happy I lost my life. I moved with the tension of a bow and arrow in an unreality of desires.”
“They gave me a name and alienated me from myself.”
“The only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live. Who am I? Well, that’s a bit much.”
“To think is an act. To feel is a fact.”
“Never suffer because you don’t have an opinion on this or that topic. Never suffer because you are not something or because you are.”
“I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.”
“And it’s inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.”
“Once in a while, groundless melancholy would darken my face, a dull and incomprehensible nostalgia for times never experienced would invade me.”
“I cannot stand repetition: routine divides me from potential novelties within my reach.”
“I don’t want beauty, I want identity.”
“I am not an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is a moist fog.”
It is as though she lives at the boundary between conscious and unconscious, searching for truth, symbolised between the grounded beach and the deep unknown sea. Was she another spirit of the beach? I would only accept her view. I write similar ideas into little books (which the Greeks called hypomnemata, and I now call “Forget Me Nots”), though she pushes hers further. I want to read this feminine voice, is it different from my masculine, would it tune into my inner feminine and help me find her way?
Her character G.H. in The Passion According to G.H. said she lived in a mirror, and so when we look at Clarice Lispector we could see ourselves reflected, myself as a mystic, and others could see a feminist, mother, hermetic, writer … and maybe our demons and angels too.
Some more from Clarice Lispector;
“Not knowing yourself is inevitable, and not knowing yourself demands courage.”
“Real life is so secret that not even I, who am dying of it, have been given the password, I am dying without knowing of what.”
“How living hurt. Living was an open wound.”
“I must not forget, I thought, that I have been happy, that I am being happier than one can be. But I forgot, I’ve always forgotten.”
“No, I think I need to look without bothering about the colour of my eyes, I need to be exempt from myself in order to see.”
“At the bottom of everything there is the hallelujah.”
“Every idea that occurred to him, because he became familiar with it in seconds, came with the fear of having stolen it.”
“Above all, she went on thinking, she understands life because she is not sufficiently intelligent not to understand it.”
“My truest life is unrecognizable, extremely interior and there is not a single word that defines it.”
“On Sundays she got up early in order to have more time to do nothing.”
“But after much thought, I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing more difficult in this world than to surrender completely. This is one of man’s greatest sorrows.”
“Sometimes she didn’t think. Sometimes a person sat there being. She didn’t have to do. Being was already doing. You could be slowly or a bit fast.”
“You who are reading me please help me to be born.”
“Living demands such audacity.”
She has been described by Colm Toibin as one of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century. Maybe you will find her spirit sitting on the edge of Copacabana beach with her book and dog, and her sacredness in her writing; as she said, she copied herself onto her pages. Her ideas are a companion on my journey and I sense they help me grow.
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