on monsters

Tillie Olsen wrote: “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” It was a physical problem, a time problem; it was also a question of selfhood. “The obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential . . . contradicts and must

So many of those who dedicate their careers to creativity have, like many of us, been motivated by a sometimes unconscious desire to reconcile the various contradictions of our era: between utility and transcendence, a yearning for greatness and a belief in the dignity of the everyday, between the work available and the work we want to do.