using the oracle of my bookshelf for Julie.

"In January 1944, Cornell left his job at Allied Control, but by spring he was looking for work once again. I was always the same: he would dream of having time to himself and then quit his job only to wonder why he had done such a careless thing, condemned himself to days of aloneness and shapeless yearning. Downstairs, in his basement workshop, it was rarely quiet. He could hear his mother pacing in the kitchen one flight above, could hear her brisk footsteps, the metallic clanging of pots and pans, the sound of the water swishing through the pipes and filling the sink as she washed his laundry, her very industry reminding him of his own seeming idleness and the uncertainty of his worth as an artist."

from Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell by Deborah Solomon