Água Viva

by Clarice Lispector

But now I’m interested in the mystery of the mirror. I’m looking for a way to paint it or to speak of it with the word. But what is a mirror? The word mirror does not exist, only mirrors exist, for a single one is an infinity of mirrors. Somewhere in the world there must be a mine of mirrors. Mirror is not something created but something born. You don’t need many to have the sparkling and sleepwalking mine: two are enough, and one reflects the reflection of what the other reflected, in a trembling that is transmitted in an intense and mute telegraphic message, insistent, liquidity in which you can plunge a fascinated hand and pull it out dripping with the reflections of that hard water that is the mirror.

Mirror is light. A tiny piece of mirror is always the whole mirror. Remove its frame or the lines of its edges, and it grows like spilling water.

What is a mirror? It’s the only invented material that is natural. Whoever looks at a mirror, whoever manages to see it without seeing himself, whoever understands that its depth consists of being empty, whoever walks inside its transparent space without leaving the trace of his own image upon it—that somebody has understood its mystery of thing.

No, I did not describe the mirror—I was the mirror. And the words are they themselves, without a discursive tone.

I’ll tell you a secret: life is deadly. I’ll have to interrupt everything to tell you this: death is the impossible and intangible. Death is just future to such an extent that there are those who cannot bear it and commit suicide. It’s as if life said the following: and there simply was no following. Only the waiting colon.

What I’m writing you is a “this.” It won’t stop: it goes on. Look at me and love me. No: you look at yourself and love yourself. That’s right. What I’m writing to you goes on and I am bewitched.