clarice lispector

Around him, an emptiness blew, in which a man finds himself when he is going to create. 

Desolated, he provoked the great solitude. And, like an old man who has not learned to read, 

he measured the distance that separated him from the word 

-Clarice Lispector, The Apple in the Dark.

Clarice’s writing occupies this unlikely space, the immeasurable: the distance that separates us from the words. It’s the measure of a void, of an abyss that opens itself in the infinitesimal instant in which the words acquire sense. That’s why it feels as if she is writing right in front of us, in order to reveal to us, in its total nakedness, in its pungent abandonment, the act of writing itself.

this is everything, if not, the only thing.