Life is difficult: a glory and a punishment. Ideas are excitement, glamorous company. Loneliness eats into me. When the balance between struggle and self-pity is maintained I feel myself one of the Odd Women—that is, I see myself on a continuum of that amazing two-hundred-year effort—and I am fortified, endowed with new spirit, new will. When the balance is lost I feel buried alive in failure and deprivation, without love or connection. Friendships are random, conflicts prevail, work is the sum of its disabilities.
