Copying Words, Carrying Questions: A Pilgrimage

Preparing for a literary pilgrimage in Washington D.C.

“Would you be able to manage the cost of the ticket? Washington may not be the most interesting place, but it is the United States. What do you think?”

“Vocês podiam com o preço da passagem? Washington não é o lugar mais interessante, mas é Estados Unidos. Que é que você acha?”

Clarice Lispector in a letter to her sisters - Washington, 6th of January, 1957

I have never consciously embarked on a literary pilgrimage before, with a map and a plan to see places through another writer’s eyes, and to specifically carry a question, a theme, inspired by their work.

If I ever did, it happened by mere chance when I stumbled upon Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet in Lisbon’s oldest bookstore, Livraria Bertrand (recognized as the oldest continuously operating bookstore in the world), on a solo trip about eight years ago. I vividly remember that it rained the whole week I was there, so I carried paragraphs from The Book of Disquiet and mentally mapped them onto the streets of Baixa, where I was staying.

There was also a time, six years ago in Edinburgh, when I found Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, and the whole trip was transformed by her words, her way of relating to places. Edinburgh felt like a city of writers, for writers—a perfect place for a literary pilgrimage.

This time, on my upcoming trip to D.C., things are a bit different. The main purpose is attending an unconference, followed by three days I will spend alone, at my own pace, unburdened by any fixed schedule. During those days, I want to observe, write, and ponder some questions raised by Clarice Lispector in The Apple in the Dark, the novel she described writing with “great pleasure” while living in D.C. in the 1950s. She famously listened to Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 on repeat and rewrote entire paragraphs over and over again.

“Every morning I typed. I copied it eleven times to find out what I was trying to say, because I want to say something and I still don’t know for sure what. By copying I will understand myself.”

Clarice Lispector

The Apple in the Dark follows Martim, a man on the run after committing an ambiguous crime, whose physical escape mirrors a deeper journey toward self-discovery. I won’t try to understand this work from all the different angles I could look at, and for the sake of the very limited time spent in D.C., I will pull out a single thread, one that I can muse on, chew on, let myself simmer into, as I walk and write those days in March. That particular thread happens also to be a recurring theme in Clarice’s writing: freedom.

Freedom: a topic that I have tackled in my writing only through the lens of place and movement, and personal, individual self-expression. As someone born in a country which has a dark past of totalitarianism, I do not ever want to write about freedom lightly; it is a great responsibility.

How does one prepare for a literary pilgrimage, and what does that actually entail? What is the beginning of this journey, and what could be the end?

I can’t speak of any other preparation other than my own. I have also been reflecting on why I want to call this a pilgrimage, rather than just travel, a trip, a visit. There is change on the other side of the journey, even if it’s just a weekend getaway to a new or old place, so why call this journey a pilgrimage?

I see a pilgrimage as a very conscious choice of seeking an answer without knowing exactly the whole question, often in far-away, unknown places, and often at the expense of many miles and years in time. My travel won’t stop in D.C.; I plan to visit Naples, (revisit) Bern, and Rio de Janeiro in the coming years, all places that Clarice Lispector used to call home. I will leave her lifetime love, Rio de Janeiro, for the last leg of my journey.

There’s a lot of enthusiasm and attention poured into a years-long journey such as this one, and it is a big commitment. I don’t think I could embark on this journey unless I felt a very close connection with a writer, and a persistent wish to start writing about some topics, such as freedom, with more clarity and urgency.

In a previous essay, A Literary Pilgrimage: In The Footsteps Of Clarice, I looked at my immediate infatuation, turned quickly into love and admiration, with Clarice’s writing, describing her powerful sense of observation, of using language that clarifies but also adds a subtle layer of mystery, of something palpable but difficult to grasp. Beyond the ways her crônicas moved me, I felt a closeness to the way she had to keep unrooting herself, living in many places, always more at ease, at home, within a language (Brazilian Portuguese) than a place.

Washington D.C. was a city in which she often felt lonely, restricted by her duties as the wife of an ambassador, and homesick, longing to return to Rio de Janeiro. Eventually she did return, leaving her husband, and starting a new life in Rio as the single mother of two young sons.

“When I think of Clarice Lispector, I think of her years as a diplomat’s wife in Washington, D.C., and the endless round of cocktail and dinner parties that are a necessary part of that life, and how her existence as a writer must have been relegated to a place so inner it was in danger of disappearing; at the very least, no one sitting next to her could see it.

But this place—the inner life—is the one thing that can never vanish, or if it were ever to vanish, literature itself would vanish with it.”

Mary Ruefle

I am not sure how many places I will be able to visit in the span of just a few days, taking into account that I would also like to walk without a precise destination in mind. I know that I will need a good base, a café that’s cozy enough to make me stay and write in a flow for a few hours. Once I have that, it will be easier to pick the places that I feel I need to see.

Call me old-fashioned or slow, but I heavily dislike seeing a city in a rush—it misses the whole point of actually connecting with the city, to make a memory that’s my own. So, I am already accepting the fact that maybe I won’t be able to see much at all, other than a bookstore, a museum, and a good café to rest, think, and write. Some places that I could visit:

4421 Ridge Street, Chevy Chase, Maryland (Clarice’s previous home in D.C.)

4508 Walsh Street, The Writer’s Center

Lost City Bookstore

Kramers Bookstore

Capitol Hill Bookstore

a café that feels good to write for a few hours per day

a few museums

a good restaurant

Before any trip to a new city, I have this urge to buy a new notebook for field notes, observations, quick scribbles. This time is no different: I will bring along a blank notebook, a copy of Clarice’s crônicas from Too Much of Life as much-needed prompts for my thinking and writing, and Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom as a companion on my nine-hour flight.

I am not sure what to expect from this first leg of the journey, and that feels both unsettling and good, depending on how I look at it. I know I will be in good company if I travel and see a new place, musing and thinking about what others wrote.

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Thank you for reading.

Onwards,

Patricia-Andra Hurducaș