ABSTRACT
I grew up in a family that discouraged intellectual adventure and risk. To me, the opera and the Sunday concerts in the Brooklyn Museum Sculpture Court and the outdoor concerts in the summer were rebellions, breakthroughs, secret gardens. Since the age of 7, of course, I was writing-mostly stories in hard-covered notebooks to give to my father, because I knew no way of communicating with him. I think it was a sublimation; and I wrote so much-in journals, on the backs of old compositions, on flyleaves-I developed a kind of facility. Later, I wrote out all my pain and guilt and embarrassment and loss in journals and notebooks, while I was trying to write novels when I graduated from college. Some years later, when I entered therapy, I realized that I was using the notebooks as a way of ridding myself of my perplexities and confusions, instead of really dealing with them. Also, I let a lot of my passion find its way into that kind of private writing-and that may have caused a writing block in other domains. Anyway, I have not used journals since those first days of therapy-although I sometimes write down descriptions of things or feelings, and I sometimes write lines of poetry or metaphors or something, but it is different; and I now try to tap the subjectivity I was releasing into those notebooks when I write other things, even philosophy.
