, Thanks,Typewriter. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2017. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2017/10/09/gratidao-a-maquina/. Acesso em: 28 January 2026.
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 (social media sharing and the new hippie wave of pure gratitude), Clarice, prophetic, published in 1968 the short text “Gratidão à máquina” (“Thanks, Typewriter”), in the Jornal do Brasil newspaper.
Between demonizing the technology available at that time (“I don’t feel mechanized for using a typewriter”) and joining the tendency, Clarice, with appreciation, chooses the second.The author, who even wrote “some eight copies” of The Apple in the Dark, a novel that would be published in 1961, alternated between the Underwood and Olympia models. The habit of typing was adopted above all during the period when she lived with two small children in the United States. For those who love the fetish, there will be a third machine, an Olivetti, which can be seen today in the collection of the Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa.
I use an Olympia portable typewriter that is light enough for my strange habit: that of writing with the machine on my lap.
It runs well, runs smoothly. It transmits me, without my having to get caught up in the tangle of my letters. It provokes my feelings and thoughts, so to speak. And it helps me as a person. And I don’t feel mechanized for using a typewriter. It even seems to capture subtleties. Besides, through it, what I write is printed immediately, which makes me more objective. The low noise of its keyboard discreetly accompanies the loneliness of the writer.
I would like to give my typewriter a gift, but what can you give to something that modestly remains a thing, without any pretension of becoming human? This current trend of praising people by saying they are ‘very human’ is tiring me. In general this ‘human’ means ‘nice,’ ‘affable’, if not ‘honeyed.’ And that is all that the typewriter does not have. I don’t even feel that it wants to become a robot. It is satisfied just to keep its role.
See also
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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.”
