I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 71
WHEN I was twenty I was one strong Cell firmly, primly closing many little cells different from each other but each greenly intact.
When I was thirty the Cell had burst in dusty worldly winds and loosed the little cells. Those in turn had subdivided, losing strength by the cellful but gaining in shadowed truth by a roundabout road. And they showed me my fates and inevitablenesses as in a broad wrecked field misty but plain to view. And thus I see me in the subdivided cells:
a piece of a normal woman.
a piece of a child.
a piece of a poet.
a piece of a Lesbian woman.
a piece of a writer.
a piece of a jester.
a piece of a savage.
a piece of something someway brave.
a piece of a student.
a patriotic American.
a lump of tiredness.
My strength is in knowing the evil from the good and the false from the true in it.
My weakness is in wildly waveringly inclining toward the false.
Except for love of my country I am ardenter, determinder, stronger in my falseness than in any of my shadowy truth.