from Simone Weil's book Waiting for God:
In the first legend of the Grail, it is said that the Grail (the miraculous vessel that satisfies all hunger by virtue of the consecrated Host) belongs to the first comer who asks the guardian of the vessel, a king three-quarters paralyzed by the most painful wound, "What are you going through?"
This is a question I try to ask, that I've been working through, around, that the characters in the novel I'm writing at the moment, ask or refrain to ask each other. A simple question that is most difficult to ask, to arrive at. I'm re-reading the really brilliant, god-send of a book, Why This World: A Biograpy of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser. To write what she wrote, what did she go through? This is the question that seems to permeate the biography.
Near the end of the book Moser talks about an interview conducted near the end of her life, February 1977. From Moser, "The footage is difficult to watch. With her famously penetrating gaze, Clarice stares straight at the interviewer, her face an almost immobile mask. She sits in a drab leather chair, clutching a big white purse in her left hand and a Hollywood cigarette in her right, burned hand. Smoking incessantly in the middle of a giant gray studio, punctuating the interview with long, pregnant silences, she answers the question in her strange and unmistakable voice."
I wish I could speak Portuguese, but it's magical to hear her voice, that alone. Moser, thankfully, includes quotations from the interviews in his book, in translation. In talking about the reception of The Passion According to G.H. she notes the discrepancies in understanding. She says, "It either touches people, or it doesn't. I mean, I guess the question of understanding isn't about intelligence, it's about feeling, about entering into contact."
It all comes down to this, I think, to the question of understanding. To feeling. And as for one's writing, it either touches people, or it doesn't.
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