“One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another–secret and passionate and intense–which is the real life. . . . One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters . . . there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives.”
Willa Cather, Not Under Forty (as quoted and elided in Nancy Mildford’s Savage Beauty)
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
An ArtsJournal Blog