We know we need to get out of the house. We rent a car and drive to the beach, to the Rockaways. The shore is cold and windy on the day we’ve chosen, but it’s gloriously empty. The sunlight is yellow in the early afternoon and the pale water dissolves into pale sky where there should be a horizon line. A reads a book and I sit a few feet away, scooping sand with my feet and chatting on the phone with a friend in California (even though I feel like I should be reading, too, because reading a certain number of pages counts as a certain number of reps).

A magazine asks me to write a short piece in response to Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium, a series of texts Calvino wrote in the 1980s about the qualities he believes are unique to literature and which will carry us through the next millennium. My assignment is to write about his first memo on “Lightness,” in which he says you can’t write about this heavy world with a heavy hand; you have to treat the gnarly stuff with delicacy and wit.

The belief that work will be there for me even if all else falls apart is also part of my inheritance. After every breakup or rejection I call my mom in tears in order to receive her reliable instruction to work through it. She tells me to write about my feelings and to channel my energy into other projects. I must not give up, I must process and parse the mess, I must harvest meaning from it, I must find my way back to myself through laboring by myself. I must gain recognition elsewhere to remind me that I exist, even when there is no lover to assure me. And she’s right: work always works. Work will always take me back.

One of my art teachers in college sympathized with my inability to leave the studio until I made something good (with no criteria for what that would be). He said the problem was that I couldn’t get out of my own head enough to let things flow. He said I was too worried about what people would think. He passed on a piece of advice, advice that John Cage once gave to Philip Guston:

When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue, they start leaving one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.

I get the lesson: it takes a lot of time to learn to rid oneself of other people’s opinions and voices and create something that isn’t about pleasing anyone or getting attention. The lesson is that a true artist makes work for no one else but—no one? Posterity? The lesson is that good work comes from within. I used to find this a helpful image, but now it creeps me out. Who is this person with no body behind her? One unknown woman slides further and further into another . . .