April 1976. There is no light in the studio, nothing moves and the colored jokes are fading fast. The disorder is grievous. (Is the heart condemned to break each day?)

June. Still in the studio. Everything is there at the bottom of my crazy brain. Everything. But it’s stone-heavy and will not rise. Most of the time it’s all dark down there. You can stumble around for hours without joy. My mind is a cave and its words are hidden in boxes and trunks with lost or rusty keys. If you find the keys they don’t fit the locks. Or if they fit they don’t turn. Or if they open the lock the lid does not rise, the hinges are stiff. Even if, finally, the trunk is opened, most of its contents are rotted or moldy from their long wait and aren’t worth the trouble of dragging into the light.

I went on painting, numbly, doggedly, somberly, something that when it was finished I called Still in the Studio. But it was as if the paints had curdled in their tubes. Colors that I had so loved stubbornly eluded my brushes in this brokenhearted work that turned out to be a kind of farewell to Paris and to France.

     –from Between Lives: An Artist and Her World. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001, pp. 297-298.