Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (trans. Benjamin Moser) 🌟
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Dedication by the author (actually Clarice Lispector)
So I dedicate this thing here to old Schumann and his sweet Clara who today alas are bones. I dedicate it to the very crimson color scarlet like my blood of a man in his prime and so I dedicate it to my blood. I dedicate it above all to the gnomes, dwarfs, sylphs, and nymphs who inhabit my life. I dedicate it to the memory of my former poverty, when everything was more sober and dignified and I had never eaten lobster. I dedicate it to the tempest of Beethoven. To the vibrations of the neutral colors of Bach. To Chopin who makes me swoon. To Stravinsky who frightened me and with whom I soared in fire. To Death and Transfiguration in which Richard Strauss reveals to me a destiny? Most of all I dedicate it to the yesterdays of today and to today, to the transparent veil of Debussy, to Marlos Nobre, to Prokofiev, to Carl Orff and Schoenberg, to the twelve-tone composers, to the strident cries of the electronic generation–to all those who reached the most alarmingly unsuspected regions within me, all those prophets of the present and who have foretold me to myself until in that instant I exploded into: I. This I that is all of you since I can’t stand being just me, I need others in order to get by, fool that I am, I all askew, anyway what can you do besides meditate to fall into that full void you can only reach through meditation. Meditation doesn’t need results: meditation can be an end in itself. I meditate wordlessly and upon the nothing. What trips up my life is writing.
And–and don’t forget that the structure of the atom cannot be seen but is nonetheless known. I know about lots of things I’ve never seen. And so do you. You can’t show proof of the truest thing of all, all you can do is believe. Weep and believe.
This story takes place during a state of emergency and a public calamity. It’s an unfinished book because it’s still waiting for an answer. An answer I hope someone in the world can give me. You? It’s a story in Technicolor to add a little luxury which, by God, I need too. Amen for us all.
There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one’s idea for thirty-five years; there’s something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas.
“If Disneyland was indeed the Happiest Place on Earth, you’d either keep it a secret or the price of admission would be free and not equivalent to the yearly per capita income of a small sub-Saharan African nation like Detroit.”
“He once told me that, just as wild animals play when they are young in preparation for lethal circumstances arising later in their lives, mathematics may be, to a large extent, nothing but a strange and wonderful collection of games, an enterprise whose real purpose, beyond any one stated outright, is to slowly work changes in the individual and collective human psyche, as a way to prepare us for a future that nobody can imagine.”
