Ara Intelligence

I used to be someone who believed so strongly in my ability to make commitments. That Didion line: I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic, holding always before me the examples of Axel Heyst in Victory and Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove and Charlotte Rittenmayer in The Wild Palms and a few dozen others like them, believing as they did that salvation lay in extreme and doomed commitments, promises made and somehow kept outside the range of normal social experience. I was someone who thought I could make promises and keep them. I don’t believe that anymore. I think the commitment I’ve made that I’m most serious about is to writing. Everything else I don’t know about.