[Growing up in Galesburg, Illinois] There was a long dining room table that on Sunday, especially when the pastor came to dinner, got covered with, first, a pad and then the great gleaming white tablecloth. They shook it out a laid it down, smoothing out the folds that made a gentle grid from end to end. The grid surely proved that order prevailed in this house. In Notes for an Apocalypse the grid may still be trying to prove something, to reassure, to bring order our of turmoil and to anchor the turbulent images. Once, years ago, a writer, referring to another work of mine (Some Roses and Their Phantoms, 1952), used the word eucharist. Wrong again, I thought at the time. But the Sunday tablecloth…

     –from Dorothea Tanning: Birthday and Beyond. Exhibition brochure. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000.