Listening to music is not only a pleasurable activity but also an almost necessary task for those whose vocation it is to incorporate words – a mixture of sound and silence – as a way of illuminating existence. In the archives of Clarice Lispector, Otto Lara Resende, and Decio de Almeida Prado, there are several LPs that help us get to know a little about the musical taste of these three writers.
Clarice Lispector, for example, was explicit in relation to what music meant to her. In Água Viva, she confesses: “I see that I’ve never told you how I listen to music – I gently rest my hand on the record player and my hand vibrates, sending waves through my whole body: and so I listen to the electricity of the vibrations, the last substratum of reality’s realm, and the world trembles inside my hands.”
Covers from Clarice Lispector’s LPs: on the left, St. Matthew Passion, by J.S. Bach, performed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam; on the right, The Complete String Quartets of Ludwig von Beethoven, performed by the Budapest String Quartet. Clarice Lispector Archive / IMS Collection
On the left, Jeanne D’Arc au bucher, by Arthur Honegger, performed by The Philadelphia Orchestra; on the right, Othello, by William Shakespeare, with Paul Robeson, José Ferrer, Uta Hagen, and Edith King. Clarice Lispector Archive / IMS Collection.
See also
by Antonio Xerxenesky
Clarice left various papers with drafts to calculate responses provided by the I Ching. Some of the questions are scribbled, such as “What’s my future in general?”
by João Camillo Penna
The work of Clarice Lispector revolves around on two notions: the symbol and the thing. The thing, physics, and the symbol, metaphysics; the thing, immanence, and the symbol, transcendence; the thing, the body, and the symbol, language; the thing, existence, and the symbol, the saying; the thing, the event, and the symbol, the way to make it possible to read the nonsymbolizable thing.
by Elizama Almeida
When we had no way of knowing that the hashtag
gratitude would be one of the terms referring to two
strong traits of the future...
by Lilian Hack
That was the first sensation which I had when I saw Clarice’s paintings: my whole body shivered in a flush that was shared with these two women who worked every day at the archive. A kind of slip, a discomposure, a “human dismantling.” As Clarice wrote, “She needs to move her whole boneless head to look at an object.”
by Victor Heringer
Organized by Professor Claire Williams, the conference After Clarice: Lispector’s Legacy will gather the greatest experts of Clarice's work.
by Maria Clara Bingemer
The numerous commentators who not only in Brazil but also throughout the world investigate Clarice Lispector’s work encounter several aspects to highlight in her multifaceted writing.1 From the fruitful tension between transcendence and contingence to the profound and refined attention to the human condition, one can encounter an immense variety of dimensions in her body of writings.
