“Genre no longer interests me. What interests me is mystery. Is there some ritual attached to mystery? I believe there is. In order to adhere to the certainty of things. Meanwhile, I somehow already adhere to the earth. I am a daughter of nature: I want to hold things, feel them, touch them, I want to exist. And this is all part of a totality, of a mystery. I am but one being. But there was a difference between the writer and me (or am I wrong? I cannot be certain). But no longer. I am but one being. And I leave you to be yourself. Does that frighten you? I believe it does. But it is worthwhile. Even if it hurts. For the pain soon passes.”
Clarice Lispector, Words From the Typewriter
I read this passage and returned to it several times, not for clarity but for its strange equilibrium: defiance balanced with tenderness, the need to exist pressing through the uncertainty of being. Lispector names something that often sits at the edge of my reading, a sense that literature must exceed category, that it must pass into the elemental, into the act of being itself. Genre, criticism, even narrative dissolve. What remains is a ritual, not in form but in attention. The words assert the right to be both singular and porous, to speak from within a mystery that is not meant to be resolved.
This is not an ars poetica, not exactly. It’s closer to a shedding. And in shedding, it turns outward: “I leave you to be yourself.” The pain is acknowledged, not indulged. The passage leaves me quieter than before, but also more awake. It affirms something I often forget I need literature to affirm.