1 result for (book:deavf1 AND heading:"essay 2 monday april 5 1982" AND stemmed:ourselv)
[... 4 paragraphs ...]
There was no doubt that we’d been reading ourselves “wrong.” There was no doubt as far as I was concerned that every one of our standard explanations for life (pause) were relatively useless now, regardless of how much they might have helped or hindered us in the past.
[... 4 paragraphs ...]
Our week just past had been filled with a desperate energy as we struggled to get settled so that we could return to “work”—to our arts—on some sort of a regular basis. To our dismay, we discovered that Jane had lost much of the use of her legs while in the hospital, since during that month she’d been actively discouraged from using them in her accustomed way. This complicated enormously all of our efforts to help her move about the house as she used to in her office chair, which is on rollers, and nearly signaled the failure of our efforts to live by ourselves. We’d scheduled just a two-hour visit by a registered nurse five afternoons a week for Jane’s physical therapy, and to change the dressings on her decubiti. Neither of us wanted live-in help on the premises 24 hours a day. I, for one, was afraid that such an arrangement would not only demonstrate our acceptance of the fact that Jane was really caught in a terrible, permanent situation, but that it would end up destroying us psychologically and creatively.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
And amid all of this frenetic activity our painting and writing—those activities we’d always regarded as the creative hearts of our lives, the very reasons we’d chosen to live on earth this time around—had receded into a far distance, so that they’d become like dimly remembered dreams, or perhaps actions practiced in probable lives by “more fortunate” versions of ourselves.
[... 1 paragraph ...]