Thinking is the hardest thing in the world. The mind resists order...You have this flash of insight, then you have to put flesh on it. Days of misery… - Vivian Gornick

A lot of it was just sheer grinding shitwork. You think making a revolution is all agony and ecstasy? It's not, it's mostly drudgery. Hard, disciplined, repetitive work that's boring and necessary. But what keeps you going is that twenty times a week something would happen—out there in that lousy capitalist world or inside among your comrades—and you'd remember. You'd remember why you were here, and what you were doing it all for, and it was like a shot of adrenaline coursing through your veins. The world was all around you ail the time. That was the tremendous thing about those times. The sense of history that you lived with daily. The sense of remaking the world. Every time I wrote a leaflet or marched on a picket line or went to a meeting I was remaking the world.

This is the intimacy that will bind us all our lives, holding us forever to the task implicit in all love relations: how to connect yet not merge, how to respond yet not be absorbed, how to detach but not withdraw.

Art and psychoanalysis are both reflections of the natural process of human growth: the adult body rises from the childish form, the mature mind flows directly out of the early personality. All is of a piece, all clearly related, logically concluded. The conscious relatedness of one's entire existence is what produces the integrated self; the recognition that what one is now one has always been — to hold live in one's hand the sense of what one has always been — is to have oneself. For the integrated human being there is no past: there is only the continual transformation of original experience.