Today's challenge

 Oh, well, how to start? By the beginning, I’d say…

So, the beginning is that I’ve just “repaired” my blog and because of it, I’ve been a little more enthusiastic about putting my thoughts into words.

This afternoon I was talking to my friend Camila, at work. She’s always got a book with her, she always knows about the latest and most viewed videos on youtube, she’s always making references to classics she’s read or movies she’s seen. By the way, she goes to the movies basically every weekend (and I wouldn’t say that the price of movies here in Brazil are cheap…). Anyway, she is dedicating some of her iddle time to read one or other post of mine and this is what we were talking about today.

Camila said she admired the way I am able to communicate my thoughts in a manner that people can see and feel what I am talking about. Of course I thought she was only trying to be nice to me. Writing is not an easy task. For anyone.

Writing requires time, creativity, inspiration, vocabulary, reading, rereading and rewriting. A text is never done. Every person that takes the time to read their text over and over will find things to change or better ways of saying something. Clarice Lispector said in one of her books that whenever she read a text of hers and found something baddly written or just odd, she would take the liberty to rewrite it and have it published differently the next edition. If I were a professional writer, I guess I wouldn’t do it though.

Back to the subject, Camila’s confessed that she isn’t a good writer, which I deeply doubt. How can a person with such knowledge not be able to express their feelings? As I said this to her, she opened a book in front of me and started reading something. The book was in English and all I remember from what she read goes like “writing is difficult because words diminish the feelings”. Beautifully written, I thought. I gave my opinion, she gave hers and I left work. On my way to the school where I take French classes, I kept thinking on our talking.

Feelings are indeed hard to be transformed in words, but mostly, because the words we know will never be as great, deep and broad as our emotions. An emotion cannot fit in the shape of letters with the same intensity, for the intensity of what is experienced by each one of us in infinite. The same happens with languages. When we don’t have full control of a language (usually what happens when we speak a foreign language), we may feel frustrated if even applying the right words in the right context, our speech seems to be contentless, just empty. 

So, I thought of experimenting my writing in English once, since it is my foreign language and I never have the need of writing to anybody in English. As a teacher of English in Brazil, what I normally do is try and correct my students’ writings, not my own.

Then, I guess this would be better written in my mother tongue, but I  had to challenge myself on trying to fill up words with my simple thoughts…