Perhaps it’s that every time you enter into the life of art, you come back a little less yourself. This is not, I know, the going wisdom, which teaches us that art heightens our individuality, makes us more actual. But perhaps it’s more like being dipped into a plating solution, or the way in which fossils form—a few cells carried away, replaced by something else. So that a gradual substitution is going on, a transformation or sea-change which has to do with conjoining us to a human community—or a once-human one!—quite indifferent to time: listen, pour yourself into the music or the language or the color, and now you are a little more Mozart, a little more Auden, a little more Holbein. Like fabric dipped into dye, to borrow a metaphor from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who used to say that the more we immersed ourselves in Being, the more of that transcendent state would color our everyday lives. Do we come back from the experience of art bearing in ourselves more harmony, more color, more of time?

If this is true, then every time you get drunk or stoned, reaching for a way out of the trap of the self through those magical agencies, you are, in fact, a little more yourself: stuck, limited, with fewer resources to climb out of the pit you sought to escape in the first place.

Once, just once, my father actually intervened: he took my mother, certainly by surprise, maybe by force, and drove her to rehab. She hated it. Later she’d say she was mortified, because they put her in a room next to a heroin addict in withdrawal, and all that first night she had to listen to his screams. And she was mortified again when she went to meetings, the things people said about themselves, things she’d never say. Her addiction seemed to heighten her Southernness, as well as her Catholicism: a lady would never say those things about herself.

After rehab, repentance, rigidity: you can’t forgive me, no one can. How long it was before she drank again—two weeks, a month?—I can’t say; I was in the blur, I was in Waiting for Godot, and waiting for my father to protect me, or himself. He sat on the couch with her, listened to her tirades, and rubbed her back when she cried. Once he told me she had to drink, because of the pain of a pinched nerve in her back, pain she’d had since a suitcase fell on her from the overhead luggage rack in a train, in 1942. But he didn’t want to talk much about it. What could he say, except it was better that I “lay low”?