Katia N’s Reviews > Too Much of Life > Status Update

I write at typewriter speed and, when I look at what I’ve written, I realize that I’ve revealed a certain part of me. I think that even if I wrote about the problem of coffee overproduction in Brazil, I would still end up being personal. …I’m consoled by something Fernando Pessoa wrote, and which I read somewhere: “Speaking is the simplest way of making ourselves unknown.”

Writing saves the imprisoned soul, it saves the person who feels useless, it saves each day we live through and can only understand if we write about it. Writing is trying to understand, it’s trying to reproduce the unreproducible, it’s feeling to the deepest depths an emotion that would otherwise remain vague and suffocating. Writing is also bestowing a blessing on a life that was not blessed.

God is quite right not to give us this state of grace very often. If he did, we might pass over permanently into the other side of life, which is also real, but then no one would ever understand us again. We would lose our shared language.