I’m tempted to suggest you skip this introduction and save your energy for Clarice Lispector, but she will give you energy instead of taking yours away. The fruits of her project—both an art and a philosophy (ontological, but also chosen, deliberate, developed)—are strangely restorative. While reading itself is not passive, you can relax, while she is hard at work, asking questions that are inside you, too, so that you yourself don’t have to frame them. Her aspiration is nothing less than to uncover the bizarre mystery of consciousness, to contemplate being while being, to apprehend life while living it. Someone has to do this work. Lispector seems to have recognized that she had a gift for the job and plunged in. I’m not claiming she made art as self-sacrifice. But in some eternal space, the philosophical boiler room of the world, the secret alcove behind a heavy velvet drape, she is yet tarrying in the void, the same void that in you and me is repressed for the sake of appearances. For the sake of “reality.”