Here is where I lose all patience with my younger self. She has come back from the mountains and desert, come back from being whacked by a power greater than herself, maybe even from the kind of epiphany that filled the biblical prophets with their prophecies, and, at least in the journal entry made less than twenty-four hours after her return, she has nothing coherent to say about it. This is the point where intellect should have kicked in, guided by science, inflamed by curiosity. What exactly happened out there? Has anything like this ever happened to anyone else? But what we find in that first journal entry after the events in question is an emotional meltdown, unleavened by intellectual curiosity: “I have suffered. I have crossed the shadow line. I have lost my youth. Now I am writing this on purpose so it will look silly to me and not be true.” It goes on in this blubbery vein: “The universe has no purpose.…Life is a joke in poor taste of which I am the brunt and which I am also expected to laugh at.”
All right, perhaps this is an overly harsh way for an old person to talk about an adolescent’s weepy confessions. I hear echoes of my mother here. When I was a little girl she would yell at me for something, and then, as soon as I started to cry, she would yell at me for crying—a crime that quickly superseded the original transgression. An old fight goes on within me between the critical mother-self and the slovenly, needy child-self, whose tendency is always to crouch in a corner and whimper. It’s the psychological work of a lifetime to resolve this battle between superego and sodden id, or at least bury it under the floorboards, but when I read that first journal entry from the time I already understood to be “after,” as in “before and after,” and think of all the questions I have today, I feel like grabbing that useless girl by the shoulders and shaking her myself. What happened? What exactly went on in your head? Tell me everything even if it sounds crazy.
But generosity compels me to acknowledge something more than self-pity in that first wretched journal entry: It is, if nothing else, evidence of trauma and possibly damage. Physically, the only damage was the sunburn that turned my face almost black, which was brought on by the sun’s UV rays at high altitude, but seemed also to have been emanating from an inch or so underneath my face, where important neural circuitry had been fried to a crisp. In the intervening years, I have formed the impression from my scattered reading that ecstatic states may be something like epileptic seizures, in which large numbers of neurons start firing in synchrony, until key parts of the brain are swept up in a single pattern of activity, an unstoppable cascade of electrical events, beginning at the cellular level and growing to encompass the entire terrain that we experience as “consciousness.” Maybe some similar cataclysmic cellular events could account for what I experienced in May.
If there was a family precedent for late adolescent trauma it would have been my great-uncle Johnny, who had come back from World War I with the undefined psychological injury then called “shell shock.” I wouldn’t make too much of this analogy, because Uncle Johnny had actually been fired on, and reduced, at age nineteen, to a prematurely old man, barely capable of taking care of himself. He lived in a shack behind my paternal grandparents’ house, in silence and isolation, except for trips to the bathroom in the house. I think that the artillery just kept exploding in his head, hour after hour, year after year, and that’s why he couldn’t make himself heard. I was in far better shape than that in May 1959, of course, but, to be merciful to my younger self, I could no more be expected to launch a rational inquiry into unusual psychic phenomena than Uncle Johnny could have been expected to come home from the war and undertake a study of the Hapsburg Empire.
But then, in another journal entry just two weeks after my return from the trip, I offered a very different interpretation of what had happened. It was not that I had lost something, like “youth,” but that I had found something there in the mountains that now I could no longer recapture. “Ever since that,” I wrote, with “that” serving as a marker for what could not be named,
I’ve never known a moment’s calm or comfort or happiness. Having once contained all, having once suffered, having once looked about and seen and felt every object completely in its naked and purposeless significance, nothing less will do. No matter how comfortable the circumstance I am nagged by the remembrance of total perception beside which my present awareness is thin and vague.
Maybe I was too stunned to sort things out. Or maybe the experience was inherently unclassifiable under headings like “good” or “bad.” What I really needed to know was what, if anything, I was supposed to do next. If I had completed my quest and found “the truth,” the moment of complete and radiant comprehension, then there was not much point in hanging around except for the occasional satisfaction provided by a good book or a surprising chemical factoid. And if I could not claim to have completed my quest, since obviously I was unable to report what I had found, then how was I supposed to proceed?
Marina would have been the one to talk to, had it occurred to me to seek human counsel. She would have been familiar with mystical experiences or at least quick to claim one for herself, because when it came to shamanic prowess, there could be no competing with her. Oh yes, she would probably have chortled and said, “That happens to me all the time.” And probably nothing would have been better for me at the moment than to be assured that what happened to me was a fairly common experience—if not normal, at least within a recognizable range of abnormal. But Marina had a boyfriend by now, an actual man in his twenties, as it turned out, a graduate student and a surprisingly preppy-looking one, who took up all her evenings and weekends. She was, in other words, going over to the other side, the grown-up side—a place I had vowed to stay out of.
So at this point in my self-education, I had no way of knowing whether any other human being had ever experienced anything similar. All I knew from my reading was that a few other people, beginning with Dostoevsky’s epileptic prince, had also experienced things that did not lend themselves to verbal representation and that presumably occupied some alternative realm of being and knowing. Sometime in the spring of 1959 I had found Sartre’s Nausea in the same paperback bookstore near UCLA where I had first encountered Camus, and felt a thrill of recognition when his hero Roquentin exclaims, “And suddenly, suddenly, the veil is torn away, I have understood, I have seen.” But Roquentin, or Sartre, is revolted by what he sees behind the veil: “soft monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.” He is terrified of the world without words—sickened by it in fact—by its senseless writhings and, in his view, constant reminders of death and decomposition. If his place behind the veil was the same “place” revealed to me through dissociation, I did not want to go anywhere near there with queasy old Sartre as a companion.
I also read, somewhere around this time, Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, which was my first literary encounter with an “altered state of mind,” and again felt a shock of recognition. He had taken mescaline, in a more or less scientifically supervised setting, and then stared at things like flowers and furniture, reporting that
what [the] rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were—a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.
But it got all weird and gaudy, Huxley’s mescaline trip. Flowers breathed, colors pulsated, walls did not always meet at right angles. This, I decided, was not about enlightenment but about chemistry—the action of a foreign molecule on certain sites in the brain. During my experience in Lone Pine nothing unnatural or physically impossible had occurred, objects had not moved on their own, and the laws of geometry had remained in force.
When people run up against something inexplicable, transcendent, and, most of all, ineffable, they often call it “God,” as if that were some sort of explanation. I fell back on this semantic sleight of hand myself once in those first few weeks after the return from Mammoth, and instantly regretted it. My friend David and I were driving in L.A. when he asked me how the skiing trip had gone. I said something vague and hesitant, which naturally led him to start nosing around more aggressively, until at last, in a spirit of verbal economy, I blurted out, “I saw God.” I could see from the wolfish look that came over his face that I had made a terrible mistake, because of course he wanted to know what God was like.
This was totally embarrassing, as if I’d been caught in an act of plagiarism or, more precisely, antiquities theft. Why would I want to apply the ancient, well-worn notion of “God” to that force or power or energy I’d encountered in Lone Pine, which bore not the slightest resemblance to anything in the religious iconography I had grown up around? There had been no soulful, long-suffering face, no accompanying cherubs or swooning Madonna—no face at all, in fact. “God,” in the prevailing monotheistic sense, is a curious bundle of admirable or at least impressive qualities, including omnipotence and cosmological creativity. As for the most highly advertised property of the Christian—or Jewish or Islamic—God, that he is “good,” in fact morally “perfect,” I had no evidence of that, either derived from epiphany or more conventional forms of observation.
And what did God mean to David, who was as far as I knew a nonobservant Jewish atheist? Maybe his remote pastoral ancestors had had a sunstruck hallucination they called God, and maybe it even resembled the content of my own epiphany, but I doubted that David was familiar with any such entity or that it lived on in suburban synagogues. I told him I was only kidding, that I was as firm in my atheism as ever.
And that much was true. It was not my beliefs about the existence of a deity that had changed, but the landscape around me, the sensory “given” out of which the world can be imaginatively constructed. The “epiphany,” if I may call it that, seemed to be best understood as an explosion, a calamitous natural process like an earthquake or storm, leaving behind it what is known in science fiction as a “rent in the fabric of space-time.” Something was broken. Things no longer cohered. Colors did not reliably attach themselves to flowers. Things retained the dark outlines they had first displayed in Death Valley, giving them a lurid, cartoonish quality. The world was becoming increasingly hostile, and still I had to try to make my way around in it.
There was the fight with my brother not long after we returned from the skiing trip, for example, over the volume of the TV. The TV set was in the living room, just outside my bedroom, so if the volume was too high I had no escape from its strident banality, its mocking good cheer. One night I complained that I couldn’t read or study. My brother refused to lower the volume, and in fact seemed enraged by my request, so I foolishly marched into the living room and turned the knob myself—leading to a knock-down physical fight in which furniture fell over and a lamp was broken. When my mother got home from wherever she’d been, possibly the community college where she’d started taking classes, she was so infuriated by the mess that she slapped me across the face—me because I was the older child.
I prefer to think that this couldn’t have happened. Or rather, like so many other things that summer, it “happened” only in the improbable new dimension I had entered, the hard dry ground of which seemed to nourish the grotesque and extreme. Not long after the fight with my brother, there was a drunken scuffle with Frank, the guitar player. He and Marina and I had gone back to my house after one of his performances because we knew that no one in my family would be coming home that night. There in the refrigerator was my parents’ handy pitcher of premixed gin and orange juice—a terrible idea when I think about it now, all that acid and alcohol leaching away at the plastic. But we were thirsty, and, urged on by Frank, I drank until I threw up, then passed out on the couch—waking up in darkness a little later to find him on top of me, trying to get his hand into my pants. Maybe Marina had been through the same thing with him in the other room or maybe she had gone home already. I felt some mild curiosity about where the hand intended to go, but not enough to pursue the question. I pushed him away firmly and repeatedly, using vomit-breath as an additional weapon.
After these two “assaults,” I must have picked up on the new spirit of aggression in the air. If the world was getting more dangerous, I would have to get a little more dangerous myself. “Do you know that for the first time I hate someone?” I wrote in my journal. The novelty here was not that I was capable of such a hostile emotion, but that a person I barely knew, and had no reason to even try to imagine as a conscious being, could inspire it in me. He was a regular customer at the new diner I was working at, a low-tipping consumer of coffee refills:
Suffice it to say that his every feature and mannerism was cleverly designed to arouse my desire to kill. He is bearded, wears an exotic cross, carries a dressed white cat, knows everything about anything, and is virtuous at the top of his voice. There are two things which need only to be announced to be destroyed; and they are silence and virtue. It is hard to describe my hate. Just that anytime he talks (about his honorable discharge from the army, his love of all people and animals, his good-christianship, his good citizenship, his prowess with the knife) I start breathing hard, I feel strong and efficient, I stammer, but I know I could do it. Kill him. I hate him. I don’t know him.
Ordinarily I might have been sympathetically inclined toward someone so eccentric and needy, but even at an age when I was innocent of political categories other than “communist,” the combination of blowhard Christianity and patriotism set my teeth on edge. The cat alone, with its felt-trimmed jacket and tiny cap, made me want to drag this man off his stool and smack him around.
I was a 110-pound girl whose upper body was toned only by tray-carrying, but by the middle of the summer I had developed new powers. I could go all day without eating anything more than a few cookies. I could put out cigarettes in the palm of my hand. On days when I didn’t have to work, I took longer and longer walks, from our house down open hills to the beach, then south to the Santa Monica Pier, which was already sinking into seediness, and sometimes farther south all the way to Venice—impressed that I possessed the strength to exhaust myself. Once I got my sister, who was eight at the time, to go with me to the pier, where I sat her down with a cotton candy and told her that she could do anything—anything—that anyone could, if only they saw they had the power to do it. Maybe I said this in an overly fanatical way, because she declared she felt queasy and had to go home.
I did at the time seem to have some unusual new abilities. There was—and still is, because I’ve seen it in recent years—a huge rock, maybe fifty feet high, on a publicly accessible part of the Malibu beachfront. You have to admire rocks, holding out as best they can against all the forces of dissolution, the wind and the sea spray, and I was determined to establish some sort of intimacy with this one. When the chance arose to borrow my mother’s car for a few hours, I drove up to Malibu, parked near the rock’s base, and started climbing. I had no experience at all and of course no sort of gear, so the only way to ascend was to grip the rock tight on whatever handhold presented itself and hope that the bonds holding together the rock’s internal crystalline structure were strong enough to compete with the gravity pulling on my body. One microfissure, one tectonic shift among the planes of atoms, and I would be set loose into the air for a quick flight down to earth.
When I got to the top, or as high as I could go, I seriously debated whether to twist my head around to take in the view that I had earned. This seemed to me the only human thing to do, or the only noble and heroic thing anyway—to see what there was to see even at the risk of death. Maybe the colors would be deeper from this height, maybe I would spot seals out at sea. As for dying, I was confident that after the sudden rush of flight, the end would arrive totally unnoticed. Still, I did not turn and look. For no good reason I can think of, I put my cheek up against the rock for a few seconds, absorbed its cool gray strength, and then let it guide me safely back down again.
My powers had to extend far beyond the physical. It was my job, since there was clearly no one else around to do it, to try to put the broken world back together again. “Yesterday,” I wrote, “being deadly tired and disgusted, I decided to be God and be responsible for the whole thing.”
I took this responsibility very seriously, as a matter of survival, which of course it was. I had to take the raw materials, whatever they might be—a pile of laundry on the floor, the drone of an airplane, my face reflected in a bus window—and try to figure out whether there was some pattern or arrangement they needed to achieve. This was not a matter of imposing a pattern, as a writer or filmmaker might try to do. In fact I understood that it was my duty to “erase” imagination, and with it memory, because they get in the way of perceiving things-as-they-really-are. No matter how disparate or chaotic the data, there is always an emergent pattern, and you know it when you see it because this is where the beauty comes in, like an aftershock from the events at Lone Pine. Take the elements of an ordinary moment—a line from a pop melody, a flash of sunlight from a door swinging open, a rush of human motion, the confused onset of color from a retail display. Let these elements fuse and intermingle until something shockingly fresh arises from the mix. “Then make of the instant a beautiful, profound and therefore eternal experience,” I wrote, in a gust of adolescent fervor. “That is the Now, the perpendicular instant in the directional flow of events.”
But I could not reliably achieve these brief bursts of glory. The morning might go well enough, but in the afternoon there was a good chance that the sunlight would turn rancid and I would glimpse what Sartre had seen—the sneering faces of unnamed, unmanaged things:
Wednesday, I think it was, I looked over the edge of the cliff and into the abyss where snakes writhe and devils laugh. Yes really. I felt as if I were slipping deeper and deeper into chaos. I laughed hysterically, put out cigarettes in my hand, paced, and wept.
Where was the beauty, then, or even the memory of beauty? I was a failure. I could not fulfill my assigned task and hold the world together. I was too weak, too stupid, and thinking did not help. In fact, I wrote, it made things worse:
Any profound thought is true because its opposite is true…because any profound thought contains utterly meaningless words, which being meaningless, have all meaning, which is nothing, which is everything, and which door can I take to get out of here?
I had to face the possibility that the “fabric of space-time” was doing just fine—that the problem might be more localized. There could be something wrong with me. In August I began for the first time to use the word “madness”—not because I acknowledged any external point of view from which I could be judged that way, but because I just could not do this anymore. It was too exhausting to keep building up the world from raw materials only to see it disintegrate again within hours or even minutes, the fragments of sensory data flying off in all directions. Hence my lifelong avoidance of LSD, even when that drug was widely available and eagerly promoted: For some of us, at some times, participation in the dullest, lowest-common-denominator version of “reality” is not compromise or a defeat; it is an achievement.
Of course I always knew there was a way out, an exit door. With a quick and forceful intervention, I could kill myself and thus bring the entire universe to a sudden halt. This is one of the great advantages of solipsism: Someone else’s death—my darling little freckle-faced sister’s, for example, to pick the one person I unreservedly loved—would be tragic, but mine would be incidental, since the death of a solipsist is necessarily the end of the world, and can be experienced only as nothing, which is the same as not experienced at all.
One late summer afternoon when a slight haze was making the sunlight even more malicious than usual, I decided to make a dash for the exit. My chemistry set, with its collection of slow poisons, had not accompanied us on our latest move, and the medicine cabinet offered nothing more belligerent than aspirin, but then
I remembered that mother told me once about some plant in the front yard whose berries are poisonous. They all left me alone and I cried to think that so close, so convenient, was the switch to turn it all off with. But there are lots of plants out there. Finally I found some complacent, fruitish globes which might be berries. When I broke one off a thick white pussy fluid oozed out lasciviously. This I tasted. It was unbearably bitter and I couldn’t finish the whole thing. Nor could it [finish the whole thing] because here I am.
This was not a serious suicide attempt of course, just a “suicide attempt,” undertaken in a spirit of ruefulness and, I will admit now, even a tiny bit of curiosity.
How crazy was I? Over the years the question has arisen again and again, often taking on an edge of maternal concern. When I review the events of that summer as recorded or recalled by memory, I cannot deny a certain amount of symptomatology that it would be terrifying to detect in any child of my own—“self-destructiveness,” to fall back on that lame term again, and a level of social detachment that would probably be considered pathological today. I managed to hold on to my waitressing job, but I lost a job as a clerk in a dry goods store because I hid behind displays of fabric whenever a customer approached. I attended the one and only party of my high school career—a Coke-and-potato-chips kind of event at a classmate’s home—and spoke to no one at all until my school friend took pity and attempted to draw me out.
As for my one real friend: The last time I can remember seeing Marina she actually broke into tears as she confessed that she’d just had a “miscarriage.” Her face, which I had never seen before without a complicitous smile in some stage of development, got all blotchy, and still I could think of nothing to say, not even bothering to ask what a miscarriage was, since I could tell it had something to do with the dark, swampy side of female existence (and was, I now realize, probably not a miscarriage at all but an abortion). It was stunning to think that sex, even with the innocuous fellow in question, could bring a proud girl so low, and my impulse was to get away from her before I was somehow implicated myself. I can’t remember how the evening ended, but, even more than getting drunk or risking my life on a rock, this was not good behavior.
I knew something was wrong; otherwise I would never have used the word “madness” to describe my episodes of self-dissolution. All I knew about “mental illness” came from magazines—Life, Ladies’ Home Journal, and, at this, the pinnacle of my family’s upward mobility, the New Yorker—and there were very few diagnoses to choose from. Autism and bipolar disease had not yet achieved their current popularity among mental health professionals, and “anxiety,” the most common disorder at the time, thanks to the introduction of pharmaceutical tranquilizers, in no way matched my “symptoms.” That left “schizophrenia,” which in the 1950s had not yet distinguished itself from its terrifyingly archaic-sounding early-twentieth-century progenitor—dementia praecox—in which the mind just crumbled into a pile of moist little particles. As I understood it, other mental illnesses involved inappropriate moods—sadness, fear, etcetera—while only schizophrenia featured a general cognitive deterioration, manifested as a loosening grip on reality. All of my “symptoms,” I realized—dissociation and the occasional excursion into mystical grandiosity—could be subsumed under “schizophrenia.”
And though I wasn’t sophisticated enough to see this at the time, so could just about anybody’s symptoms, since “schizophrenia” pretty much boiled down to “abnormal patterns of thought.” As a historian of psychiatry observed in 1952, “If anyone were to take the trouble to summarize the descriptions of childhood schizophrenia by various authors in the past fifteen years, they would find every symptom ever occurring in abnormal psychology,” and the same could be said of adult and adolescent schizophrenia—labels that could be applied equally well to unhappy housewives and to juvenile delinquents, people who heard voices no one else did and people who ignored the voices of those around them, anyone, in other words, who was confused in any way about what constitutes “reality.”
What was different about schizophrenia was that it was serious and at the time pretty much a ticket to a lifetime in a locked ward. I would have readily owned up to milder problems like “maladjustment” or “alienation,” but I knew that with schizophrenia a line was crossed into the nightmare territory of “psychosis,” inhabited by sociopaths and clowns. This was where the psychotherapeutic big guns came out—the shock treatments, lobotomies, involuntary institutionalizations, the antipsychotic drugs that could leave you permanently drooling. If I wanted to live among other people—and my attempt to live alone in the abandoned world of my long-running post-apocalyptic fantasy had not been promising—I would have to dodge any such diagnosis. If only to keep the supply of food and books flowing in, I would have to fake some sort of participation in a human environment that had never really made much sense.
I can say now though, with complete confidence, that I did not have schizophrenia, if it is even a single meaningful disorder you can “have.” When I read subjective accounts of schizophrenics’ experiences, I am struck by how thickly populated the world of the schizophrenic is: Voices issue from inanimate objects, conspiracies arise among people unknown to you, demons emerge from the darkness. The schizophrenic, and especially the paranoid schizophrenic, imagines conscious beings everywhere, most of them apparently hostile. She makes her way through a landscape so crowded and noisy that she may start gibbering nonsensically herself just to gain some sense of control over the din. And this obviously was not my problem.
Would religion have saved me, if I had one or could have adopted one? Years later, as an adult, I read in one of the women’s magazines I wrote for at the time an article that actually dealt with the subject of “mystical experiences.” These could be unhealthy, even shattering, the writer averred, unless a person had a religion in which to “house” them. This was the function of religion, in fact—to serve as a safe storage space for the unaccountable and uncanny. You were to carry your mystical experience back from the desert or wherever, and place it on, say, your improvised home altar, along with the images of Ganesh and the Virgin of Guadalupe—a little personal sample of the sacred. Better yet, you’d have a whole church filled with other people who did not find you crazy. And when I read this article, sometime in the 1980s, I thought, Ah, that’s what I needed during my post-epiphany crack-up! I should have been whisked off to a Buddhist nunnery, or maybe a fourteenth-century order of Beguines, where I could have meditated and discussed the undiscussable with like-minded others. I should have been debriefed by the mother superior—so superior to my own!—and filled my days with simple chores, punctuated by outbursts of group song.
So yes, those last few months in L.A. would have gone much better, from a mental health perspective, if I’d had a religion in which to house the epiphany of May 1959, and a god, preferably a benevolent one who did everything for some ultimately kindly reason. In fact the whole world would be a far better place if everyone subscribed to a belief in a good, just über-being, who punishes malefactors and rewards the pure of heart. Best of all, of course, would be a universe that is actually ruled by such a being, where even cruel or inexplicable things all happen “for a reason.” But I doubt if such a universe—one run by a good and kindly god—would bear much resemblance to the one we have, this scene of constant carnage, where black holes crouch in the center of galaxies and feed on stars and planets, where an asteroid could wipe out the earth’s most advanced reptiles just as they were beginning to nurture their young and hunt in packs, where babies die every day.
Besides, if I was not ready to attribute consciousness to other humans, how was I going to attribute it to the far dodgier category of “God”? Maybe it’s possible to be both a solipsist and a theist; in fact a combination of the two may help explain the long history of religiously motivated persecutions and massacres. But I knew that, outside of fairy tales and religion, there were no gods and no spirits, and I was not prepared to see my experience in May as a possible refutation of that obvious fact. My “epiphany” could not have been an encounter with some other mind or intelligence, because there was no firm evidence that such a thing existed. It was just a mental breakdown, internal to myself, best thought of as a kind of equipment failure.
A few days before my departure for college, I reflected, disjointedly, on the coming transition:
I am trying to understand the situation. Not The Situation, but the immediate exigency of going away to college. Sometimes I get a grip on one or two wispy filaments, but I cannot hold all the elements of this change at once. Right now mother is in the kitchen crying because my tuition will so painfully drain her resources. That is an element. Daddy looks at me thoughtfully and fancies he understands me and wishes we could talk. Diane is simpler. She wants me to stay or her to go with me. Benny? He has enough to think about without me. The ponderous problems of puberty are his. I am sorry to take so much of their money.…Something had to happen though.
I thought I should feel excited, but I knew that anything important that was going to happen to me had already happened, and that the rest of my life was a purely optional excursion. I had been reading Proust, which led to the question of whether anticipation wasn’t just a by-product of memory anyway. Was I anticipating the coming years of study and “irresponsibility,” as I put it to myself, or was I, through some odd temporal aberration, already looking back on them?
In fact I am very mixed up as to sequences. All we have, truly, is the past. Hope can be constructed only out of fragments of past happiness whose recurrence seems likely (or, at least, advisable). Isn’t the aesthetic sense only a delicate selective nostalgia? This week I think Proust was right that beauty occurs when present dim reality is mnemonically connected to some lost past experience.
Clearly I am dodging something here, spinning out speculations to distract myself from something painful. That I was leaving my family, which had always traveled as a unit before? That I had failed in my five-year-long quest for “the truth”? Well, not entirely failed, since I knew something that I hadn’t known before. But as my mother had said years earlier, after my theological argument with Bernice, if you can’t say what you know in words, you don’t really know anything. Then I ended this entry on a note of self-mockery, attributing my “spleen” to the late summer haze that had been leaching color out of the sky. “When the weather is better I can be a Nietzschean superlady—becoming, every day, in every way, better and better.” The truth was that everything was over—and everything was just beginning.