What I saw then was this fairly obvious faculty of art: that it goes on, it lasts a bit longer that our frail human lives—it offers comfort. The vision is more enduring than our persons—it uplifts us past the vicissitudes of time, uplifts till it, too, is done or forgotten: ten years, five hundred years. It is the working of our loving hearts, burrowing out of us into the light of day. Like Bodhisattvas we bring this liberation, this space to each other when we are simply ambitious: working for fame, as Keats once thought he was doing. Working for money or glory. What we are left with is finally what we leave: this reaching out to touch, to comfort others. To make the world bearable, possible at all.
–Diane di Prima, Recollections of My Life as a Woman
