even*cleveland: word and form

word and form

I'll need courage to do what I'm about to do: to speak. And to risk the enormous surprise at the poverty of what I say. As soon as it's out of my mouth, I'll have to add: that's not it, that's not it! But I can't be afraid of looking ridiculous, I always preferred less to more out of fear of looking ridiculous: because there is also a shattering of modesty. I'm putting off having to speak. Out of fear?

And because I don't have a word to say.

I don't have a word to say. So why don't I shut up? But if I don't force out the words muteness will swallow me forever in waves. Word and form will be the board upon which I float upon billows of muteness.

Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. Translated by Idra Novey.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

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