The Description of the Human Body He believed the heat of the heart somehow caused all movement of the body. Blood vessels he realized were pipes, he saw that veins carried digested food to the heart. (This was brought further by William Harvey. Harvey developed the idea of the circulation of the blood.) Descartes felt that an energetic part of blood went to the brain and there gave the brain a special type of air imbued with vital force that enabled the brain to experience, think and imagine. This special air then went through the nerves to the muscles enabling them to move. The Description of
Near to the Wild Heart read the originals chapter by chapter, but Clarice vividly rejected his occasional suggestions: “When I reread what I’ve written,” she told him, “I feel like I’m swallowing my own vomit.” Cardoso suggested a title, borrowed from James Joyce’s "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man": “He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.” This became the book’s epigraph, which, together with the occasional use of the stream-of-consciousness method, led certain critics to describe the book as “Joycean.” The comparison annoyed Lispector, who had not read Joyce; instead, the book bears the much