beginnings

I love the beginning of books (well, I love the beginning of everything that is good and new and promising). Every now and then I find myself returning to the opening lines of books I read ages ago, and realise how the spell never ends. It is always a fresh beginning.

Were I to choose an all-time favourite, it would be this most amazing beginning about beginnings, about the beginning of everything. Everything.


Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I do not know why, but I do know that the universe never began.

Let no one be mistaken. I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.

So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing. How does one start at the beginning, if things happen before they actually happen? If before the pre-history there already existed apocalyptic monsters? If this history does not exist, it will come to exist. To think is an act. To feel is a fact. Put the two together - it is me who is writing what I am writing. God is the world. The truth is always some inner power without explanation. The more genuine part of my life is unrecognizable, extremely intimate and impossible to define. My heart has shed every desire and reduced itself to one final or initial beat. The toothache that passes through this narrative has given me a sharp twinge right in the mouth. I break out into a strident, high-pitched, syncopated melody. It is the sound of my own pain, of someone who carries this world where there is so little happiness. Happiness? I have never come across a more foolish world . . . .

Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986), pp. 11-12.