PASSIONS are likened best to floods and streams: The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb;

Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.

A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet.

In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.

I want to be a Renaissance Woman. I want to paint, and I want to write, and I want to act, and I just want to do everything.