Don’t let me become like Lily Briscoe, the painter from the novel To the Lighthouse, whose integrity I admire, whose indifference to success I would like to remember, and make my own, but whose fate, it seems, as a person among people, while not keeping her from understanding them, and interacting with them, and even, one might say, connecting with them in a way that goes beyond touch, or verbalization, is to live out her days alone.