It is astonishing how little we know about what is actually happening in Washington, and yet how much we think we know.

Kate ran around and got me my things, but the best part was that she told me her injury stories, of which she has plenty, as she is a fellow aging athlete. I listened with fascination. In fact, I am now fascinated by all such stories, as long as they have happy endings: the storyteller was injured, but now is all better. All better. It’s kind of like being lost and then being found.

I am not in my eighties, yet, but I felt twinges of recognition. Like Donald Hall, I can hardly walk, can’t drive, can really only sit and look out the window and, thankfully, read and write. According to the orthopedist, this will be my condition for a while. My old self, the one that whizzed around in her car, talking on her cell phone, overbooked, either late or early to something, fitting her son’s schedule around her own, seems remote, and now, the silence, the inabilities, the many limitations, the dependence on others for basics like groceries, seem more real, realer than the other life, and a prediction of what lies ahead when I reach Hall’s age, if I do, that is. As he says, he would rather be alive, housebound, than not alive at all. I do know that I will be back in the world soon enough, whizzing around in my gray car. But I also have learned, having been through this once before with my back, that this world of silence and stillness, of physical incapacity is always there, on the other side of the daily schedule.

To begin with, to single Speilrein out as the only “disturbed” one in this triangle is as absurd as it is unfair. Whatever else one might say about Freud and Jung, they were far from being entirely “rational” beings. And, far from being an emblem of passionate and irrational femininity, in fact, Speilrein was a highly trained medical doctor and analyst. She published important analytical papers and influenced many of the important analysts of the next generation. It is true that she began her career as a patient in the asylum where Jung worked, but she was far from being “crazy” in the sense the movie suggests. She was a “hysteric,” and as John Kerr points out in the book upon which the movie is ostensibly based, Speilrein’s “hysteria” was actually a run of the mill ailment of the period. No one thought of her as “crazy.” It is true that she and Jung became lovers (of a sort). But this is not all they were to each other. They were passionately entwined as thinkers and analytic colleagues; he was the lover/teacher that betrayed her. In addition, she was not simply the woman who came between the great analysts, she was an intellectual force in her own right and is actually yet another example of a woman whose ideas were ignored and overlooked simply because she was a woman. Both Freud and Jung are to blame for this.

The real danger of this movie is the danger of the cliches it reinforces, a danger that was brought home to me when a friend of mine told me he liked the movie because of how it depicts the complicated relationship between Freud and Jung. Oh, and that woman. “The woman?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said, “I can’t remember her name.”

In Venice, on the trail of the Marys

This picture is from my last trip to Italy, when the book stretched out and out and out. I feel nostalgic for that time, which now seems like an innocent, happier time, which it was not. I spent all of my time worrying that I would never finish.

But for now, tonight, I think it might be over, because I have a strange feeling of being adrift, let out of my shell. It is not a relief. It’s more like being homeless or exposed, like coming up from underwater and the air is cold. I can’t imagine what one does with one’s time, when one is not always thinking through a book. I guess one goes to meetings and goes out to dinner with friends and picks up children at school, all with a clear, open mind, as opposed to a mind wrapped in a cocoon.

I don’t really like it out here. I can’t wait to tuck myself into a new book.

I suppose lots of different professionals hear this kind of thing. But do they? I mean, do people say to electricians, “You know, I was almost an electrician, but then I realized I needed to get a real job.”

My first editor used to refer to first time writers, as in writers of their first books, with an eye roll. A kind eye roll, but an eye roll all the same. And now that I am on book 3, I know why. I don’t think my editor can solve all my book’s problems. I don’t think my agent can, either. I know that it takes a long time to write a book and that it takes daily, steady work. I do not think that I could re-wire a house. I wonder why people think they can write books.

After that exchange, I bought 5, yes 5, large chocolate bars (organic chocolate caramel crunch) from the startled health food store lady, just to cope.

There was a drought and everyone, lions included, were starving. And yet, I was stupid enough to ask a man at a party why there was no diet coke. He gave me one of those, are-you-crazy-looks, and said, “Charlotte, we don’t have that much need for diet soda.”

I thought of this today when the students in my genocide seminar told me their friends had never heard of the Cambodian genocide and that some of them even thought Cambodia was in Africa. I was never that clueless, but I was close. This is why I am a good teacher. I have empathy for the clueless.

Mary Wollstonecraft

I know that for those of you who are not all that sure who Wollstonecraft is, it is hard to be excited. And, actually I can’t really tell you what the revolution is that she did launch, or get you all excited about it, because it is a New Insight, and it will have to wait until the book comes out. But it is exciting — I promise. And I can’t believe I did not figure this out until now, when I only have four weeks left. But I did. And now I am on even more of a mission to tell the story of these two women. And, even as I write this, I realize that nowhere on my website does it tell you what this new book is about. Or when it will appear or what publisher is publishing it. Probably I should do that, but I am too superstitious. It feels like buying a crib before the baby is done.