clarice

Clarice Lispector, I am certain, did not write for an audience. Although she aimed at clarity, at expressing thoughts coherently (at times) the process of writing was for her a meditation, a journey to discovery of meaning, of language, of emotion. She wrote to dispel thoughts, cast them out like ugly demons so that the world could too understand them; or rather that through the world's lens she could see them more clearly. Her audience was the mystery of herself - that hidden piece that she did not understand, that came to her through the written word. Her stories, her characters - they're nothing more than second skins, other lives she might have led, her trying on different identities, different hats or Gods or constructions of herself - it's hard to live in the real world when you're constantly desiring some other life - more sordid, more lucid, more real than that which you already inhibit. She longed for the mystery that life and existence held out as possible - the animalistic, the unconscious - but that which a mundane life forced her to wear. So she wrote, she escaped, she hid on self-journeys in her loneliness and solitude and safety of the journey that was all her own.