by
Helen Garner
‘Where life immures, the intelligence cuts a way out…The intelligence knows nothing of those closed situations of life from which there is no escape…Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure our heart; the transformation itself, even, for an instant, releases suddenly a little joy.’ —Proust, The Captive