You reveal a more moderate view of life, less combative, less competitive. You even mention this directly. You are withdrawing or at least from the I-am-Ella-and-fuck-off tone that had so long been apparent if not actually dominant in most of your actions. That quality -- to defy rather than submit -- was your particular survival mechanism.

You were ready to defy your family, your mother, your culture, your lovers, your friends, your collective identity, your language, your needs. Individualism pointed to your personal salvation, anarchy was your weapon against the conformity that you feared would pull you down. That is what the fear of becoming your mother represented.

But there was one other element in the equation, success. You needed to succeed in art, your chosen avenue. You needed to have the affirmation of the people you were separating from that your individualistic efforts were right. In a sense you need those you left behind to submit to you with an unconditional surrender.

But I think there was one exemption from this general aggressive view of life in which you separated from culture and even biology. The one clear exception is Alexander. With him, you are subject to all the conventional of biological projection. You see him as the unique and perfect fulfillment of aspirations that in your own life are inevitably subject to increasing compromise.

So, here you are like your mother, projecting desires onto your son and through him onto future generations. He has the freedom you had, but you cannot stifle your hopes for him just as you suspect your mother cannot nullify her earlier yearnings.

And so you are growing up, just as you thought you were. You cannot withdraw from culture. No one is an ethnologist in his own family. The best we can be are Prousts, but even he could not write about love without feeling its joys and pains. So what I think these fragments are about is the maturing of joy in compromise. The acceptance of something less than total victory, the recognition that even if we cannot become Godlike and fully controlling of our destiny and shape our personalities to be totally distinct, and conquer both enemies and loved ones, we can still do pretty well.

In a sense, I see these fragments as parts of a prayer in which you are bargaining with God or whatever life force you recognize. You are forswearing an element of hubris. You are submitting to time and culture and the tugs of family and biology but in exchange you want some guarantees of acceptance by what? By cultural élites, by a universal intelligentsia? By local peers, by life forces.

Maybe, more specifically, you want the success of your exhibition. Maybe you are saying, here see, I left my orbit and I veered close to the sun, but I did not quite burn up and while I am now stabilized I am paying homage to my journey, to where I came from, to the people and places that I once scorned. I could not have done what I did, of which I am proud, unless I left all that behind, but I cannot find peace and growing self respect unless I pay respect to those origins that nurtured me and to their role in my continuing journey. It is like a pause, looking backward, smiling a bit, in order to move on. so that is what I think. Of course, I may be wrong.

~Michael Kaufman

retired foreign correspondent and editor of the New York Times