Sublime

You feel exiled, as if you are lost in a dark wood. It was like the feeling I’d had when Tabitha died: the world was emptying itself of meaning. Everything was hollow. Everything was withering.

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs Willard’s kitchen mat.

I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer. Then, child, make another.

For so long, she could see now, she had made her daughter live by her whim: moving on anytime she needed new ideas; anytime she had felt stuck or uneasy.

There she must remain proper and silent ... no overt yearning allowed, and more specifically, no fulfillment of that yearning. This is the beginning of soul famine for the creative spirit.

I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.

Shelley had lived for as long as she could remember in perpetual dread of being dislikeable – a fate even more terrible than being disliked, for it encompassed not only her relationships with others, but her private judgments of herself.

I did not at that time know Emily Dickinson’s great definition, her ‘Publication is not the business of poets’; being a poet is all, being known as a poet is nothing. The onanistic literary picture of myself