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Life requires space as well as air and light, room for exploration and self-discovery. The limits of exploration on the life of our feelings were set by Joe’s marriage, and those limits were close in. However deeply we might feel, our love could not make laws or map territory. There was no country of experience for it to cross, no coast to reach, no center to penetrate. We were in possession of a small interior space somewhere in the midst of a fertile region of unknown proportion. Around this space stood boundaries of rigid stability. Love might intensify, but it could never expand to occupy
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Only a small part of it contained substance, I was daydreaming the rest. Joe, and the time I spent at the desk, were equal efforts at manifest destiny. I backed off even farther and saw that I could not imagine how I would begin to take possession of the larger territory, either in love or in work.
The rectangle had opened wide and remained open: in the middle stood an idea.
Mama worships at the shrine of Love but that lifelong boredom of hers is a dead giveaway.
“That’s not true,” he said. But it was true. For Joe, the situation was always more important than anyone in it. Because we spent our lives in the bedroom, I’d not had a chance until now to feel in the flesh what I had long known in the intellect.
Yes, why, she replied calmly. She was always saying why to me. Why all this breathlessness. Why just this rectangle. Why only a small interior space always under attack. Why does the space not enlarge and expand to fill your life. Why. As the whys fell on me I
This little bit of space provides me with the intermittent but useful excitement that comes of believing I begin and end with myself.
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.
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