by which each person could find out for himself what he was like, not by reading what other people thought he ought to be, but directly, as directly as knowing the sky is blue and how an apple tastes[.]
In Defence of Creativity
Ellen Smith on Marion Milner’s therapeutic legacy
What role does creativity have to play in medicine? Reviewing two recent books on the psychoanalyst Marion Milner, Ellen Smith shows what Milner’s experiments in creativity tell us about the flaws in contemporary mental health care.
When the writer and psychoanalyst Marion Milner died in 1998 – her life spanned the twentieth century – she had published nine books. She is best known in psychoanalytic circles for The Hands of the Living God (1969), her account of a twenty-year treatment of a psychotic woman, Susan, conducted largely through providing a space for Susan to draw. She is also increasingly remembered for her early diary books: in particular, A Life of One’s Own (1934) and An Experiment in Leisure (1937). A Life of One’s Own begins from the feeling Milner has that she is ‘shut away from whatever might be real in living’ and going about ‘in a half dream state’. She wants to know if there is a way
The book records her particular method for finding this out: she writes every day as freely and honestly as possible and then reads back over the entries to see what she can discover about herself. She discovers not only that she is not at all who she thinks she is, but that the act of paying attention to her life in this way has a profound effect; that ‘the act of looking was somehow a force in itself which changed my whole being’.
Ten, even five years ago, Milner was a largely forgotten figure of twentieth-century psychoanalysis. Milner does not have the high theoretical pretentions of Jacques Lacan, the poetic accessibility of Donald Winnicott, or the foundational significance and broad social explanatory power of Melanie Klein. But the past three years have seen the reissuing of Milner’s early autobiographical writings alongside generous critical and personal engagements with Milner’s life and writing. These include recent publications by mental health researcher Emilia Halton-Hernandez, the late Mari Ruti, a philosopher, and the writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, who includes an extended discussion of Milner in his latest book, On Giving Up. Yet, as with the two recent publications that are the subject of this review, most of this re-engagement has come from people within the sphere of literary studies. This is partly explained by the fact that Milner was a writer before she was a psychoanalyst and her work bears a resemblance to the auto-theoretical writing of Maggie Nelson and the diaries of Helen Garner. But it is also because she thinks about the relationship between aesthetic and clinical practices with enormous seriousness and originality.
Milner first encountered Freud at University College London in the early 1920s. However, it was not Freud but Montaigne who prompted her to start keeping the diary that would lead to A Life of One’s Own and opened up Milner’s lifelong investigation of subjectivity and the unconscious. Literature helps frame the exercise in self-scrutiny: A Life of One’s Own opens with a quote from Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim – ‘in the destructive element immerse’ – and early in the book, she quotes Virginia Woolf’s essay on Montaigne from The Common Reader – ‘the soul of life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us’. She does not reference A Room of One’s Own, which was published just five years earlier, but the title nods to it.
In retrospect the diary books are already profoundly psychoanalytic. Milner herself would note later that after her experiment in free and automatic writing ‘there was […] no escaping the fact that Freud was right, that there was a part of my mind the working of which I was totally unaware’. In A Life she calls this her ‘automatic self’ which she differentiates from her ‘deliberate self’. The two terms are loosely analogous to unconscious and ego in psychoanalytic terms; Milner’s version of the unconscious is ‘busy with happenings in my remote past […] perhaps bringing over into my present concerns emotions which had no real connexion with adult life’. The style of Milner’s early work is simple and direct; she never uses technical or theoretical language. Reading it, one feels that theorising would be superfluous because what Milner finds, when she finds it, could almost amount to common sense. Milner wanted to invent something more democratic than psychoanalysis – ‘a privileged way out’, as she then understood it. Instead, she ‘wanted to find something that was available to everyone’. I think, as well, Milner rejected psychoanalysis to begin with because she saw theoretical explanations as too external and liable to make one overly ‘dependent on other people’s opinions’. She sought ‘a standard of values that [was] truly one’s own and not a borrowed mass produced ideal’. Science also, according to Milner, dealt in abstractions and with ‘whatever can be passed from one social being to another’, but the thing she was after was ‘an essentially private affair’.
There is a romantic naivety to the way Milner framed her early project – as though it were possible to dredge from the depths of the self an authentic core untouched by social influence. As David Russell says in his book (which is, among other things, interested in Milner’s literary heritage), the middle group within the British Psychoanalyst Society to which Milner belonged was very interested in authenticity, ‘the great preoccupation of romantic art and literature’. But Milner’s skepticism towards borrowed ideas and generalisations also made her wary of psychoanalysis’ own propensity for becoming a ‘mass produced ideal’ in clumsy hands. The relationship between the field of knowledge it has produced and the absolute particularity of the analytic subject should always be a question for psychoanalysis. One tends toward generalisation and abstraction; the other must go ‘one by one’, as Lacanians put it. As an analyst, Milner remained suspicious of forms of psychoanalysis that too quickly interpreted or claimed to know. ‘One must not set out to “cure” anyone by psychoanalysis,’ she said in Susan’s case. The analyst’s desire to cure, we might say, risks claiming to know what is best for the patient. But this is psychoanalysis as propaganda, as Phillips once put it, something to which Milner never fell prey.
The resistance to knowingness is also what makes Milner difficult to write about. Her work lends itself to neither paraphrase nor summary and, as Russell observes, it is in this sense that Milner’s project is a literary one. What cannot be communicated propositionally is nonetheless experienced, and, if we believe in Milner’s project, transmitted. What would be the genre – the way of reading, writing, speaking, drawing – that might allow us to know what we are like, how to feel alive and, perhaps most importantly, how to face reality? This set of questions is one reason Milner has been of interest to literary scholars like Russell who describes his book on Milner as about ‘reading, drawing and getting better – and what they have to do with one another’. Russell’s previous book was a study of the nineteenth-century British essay and what he calls ‘aesthetic liberalism’, and he places Milner as a twentieth-century inheritor of this tradition – against the tendency to read Milner as a modernist, alongside Woolf for instance. All good essayists, for Russell, ‘are wary of abstraction’. Following Samuel Johnson who calls the essay ‘a loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece’ and ‘a first taste’, Russell characterises the essay as ‘a form of tasting experience just in the way that Milner proposes – to find out for oneself what one likes’.
As Russell elaborates, reading Milner makes us aware of not just the literary precursors of psychoanalysis, but the literariness of psychoanalysis in the way that it thinks and knows. Like literature, the insights of psychoanalysis cannot be reduced to summary. The startling wisdom of a book like Middlemarch cannot be conveyed by describing the plot, Russell notes. Similarly, ‘what may feel like profound and moving insights within the frame of an analytic session may appear trivial, cliched, or mere common sense in the reporting’. For Milner, the frame – or the ‘framed gap’ – of the analytic session means that ‘what is inside [the session] has to be perceived, interpreted in a different way from what is outside’. This is an effect of the transference – the way the presence of the analyst takes on unconscious significance within the treatment. But it is also because the analytic session makes it more possible to perceive the literary quality of one’s own speech and to understand that what we say might ‘be taken as symbol, as metaphor, not literally’. This irreducibility means, as Russell points out, that ‘both literature and psychoanalysis share a vulnerability that is inextricable from their wisdom’ – a vulnerability particularly pronounced in a contemporary moment addicted to summary and ‘evidence-based’ practices.
It is worth saying some more about Milner’s idea of the framed gap, which brings together her orientation towards aesthetic experience and her clinical work. It also throws into relief the difference between Milner’s thinking about what might allow someone to feel alive, and the response to human suffering that is offered by mainstream mental health care. In her 1952 essay, ‘The Framed Gap’, Milner lists a series of activities for which a frame is essential: ‘the acted play, ceremonies, rituals, processions, even poems [which are] framed in silence when spoken and [by] the space of the paper when written’. Importantly, she also includes the psychoanalytic session, which is thereby continuous with a broader range of aesthetic and cultural activities. As Russell argues, Milner’s framed gap is a way of marking a space of ‘autonomy or partial autonomy’ for ‘a particular kind of experimental making use of the world’. A good clinical example of this is found in Milner’s detailed description of her work with ‘Simon’, an eleven-year-old boy and child of the Blitz who lost interest in his schoolwork. Simon sets his toys out in the form of a village and then bombs the village ‘by dropping balls of burning paper upon it’. Milner’s earnestly offered psychoanalytic interpretations have no effect except to make Simon more aggressive and defensive. It is only when she comes to recognise and appreciate the aesthetic quality of the boy’s play that something shifts:
[A]t times there was a quality in his play which I can only describe as beautiful – occasions when it was he who did the stage managing and it was my imagination which caught fire. It was in fact play with light and fire. He would close the shutters of the room and insist that it be lit only by candle light, sometimes a dozen candles arranged in patterns, or all grouped together in a solid block. And then he would make what he called furnaces, with a very careful choice of what ingredients should make the fire, including dried leaves from special plants in my garden; and sometimes all the ingredients had to be put in a metal cup on the electric fire and stirred continuously, all this carried out in the half darkness of candle light. And often there had to be a sacrifice, a lead soldier had to be added to the fire, and this figure was spoken of either as the victim or the sacrifice. In fact, all this type of play had a dramatic ritual quality comparable to the fertility rites described by Frazer in primitive societies. And this effect was the more striking because this boy’s conscious interests were entirely conventional for his age; he was absorbed in Meccano and model railways.
Whenever I read this case, I am astounded by Milner’s tolerance of fire play in the consulting room – the furnaces of dried leaves, the melted lead toy soldiers. It’s a good indicator of the talent she had for allowing and taking seriously the patient’s everyday creativity with the materials at hand – whether Meccano toys or words – and for enduring the anxiety of not knowing what they will do with them, what the patient will make. Reading this case, you can be left wondering what exactly Milner did; there are no real interventions. What she does do is provide a situation, a framed gap, in which the boy can ‘have a different kind of relation to external reality, by means of the toys’. They are his ‘pliable medium, external to himself’, but not entirely separate. The ‘framed gap’ is produced by the space of the room and the time of the session. This is standard for psychoanalytic practice. But it is Milner’s willingness not to insist too much on meaning that opens up a space for the boy to invent something for himself – a scene, something like a ritual, through which he can make sense of the rupture he has experienced and, perhaps more importantly, discover that the world and its objects are there for him to make use of. Milner recognises the beauty of the boy’s play and so catches his desire. As Russell states, Milner’s work makes us ask whether, ‘once the conditions of survival are established, there is nothing so important, for feeling alive in our ordinary lives, as aesthetic judgement’?
It can sometimes feel as though Milner sets too much store by artistic reverie, as though what it mainly takes to get better is to enter a weekly creative fugue state (in some ways what she gives us is a defence of sublimation without ever putting it in those terms). But there is something instructive about Milner’s spacious therapeutic disposition for those of us who work as clinicians.
Mainstream mental heath care in Australia promotes ‘evidence-based treatments’ that follow scientific results from randomised controlled trials. But a substantive body of work shows that this evidence is weak if not unscientific. In practice ‘evidence-based’ often means manualised treatment, ‘therapy literally conducted by following an instruction manual’, as Jonathan Shedler puts it. These are interventions that have been scripted in advance of any actual patient presenting actual symptoms. Evidence-based treatment also depends largely on diagnosis – for Generalised Anxiety Disorder or Major Depressive Disorder, apply Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, for Borderline Personality Disorder apply Dialectical Behaviour Therapy – even though such psychiatric diagnoses have been subject to much debate and disagreement. There is public, and perhaps more importantly, political appetite for treatment that has been ‘shown to work’, and evidence-based interventions like CBT have the best publicity campaigns on this front. But CBT is also favoured because it’s a short-term treatment that can be delivered in six to ten sessions, or even ‘self-directed’ – meaning there is no need for an actual therapist. Training is also easily standardised and cheap to deliver when clinicians are essentially being taught to follow a manual – you can get up to speed on CBT by doing a six to twelve-hour self-directed online course. Victoria’s Centre for Mental Health Learning has a catalogue of a 181 self-directed online training modules for the public mental health work force on topics such as ‘Building the therapeutic relationship’, or ‘Effective psychological treatment for BPD’.
But there is a more foundational issue here: evidence-based treatments place the knowledge on the side of the clinicians – or the manual, to be precise. This is often what clients or consumers explicitly demand: ‘I am so anxious. What can I do? Give me some strategies!’ But one of the best insights of psychoanalysis is that often what is required is not to respond to the demand, to practice abstinence as Freud once put it, so that the nature and history of the demand can be thrown into relief. A space can then open up where the patient can discover something for themselves about their life and their suffering, and something new can happen.
Reading Milner provides us with a radically different idea of what mental health is, and what it means to work with psychic suffering, to what we have become used to today. Particularly in the language of diagnosis, mental health is framed as a possession – something we do or don’t have – strangely disconnecting it from our lives and subjectivities. For instance, when depression is seen to arise from chemical imbalances in the brain, it has nothing to tell us about who we are, or what might have happened in our lives to leave us feeling so bereft. By contrast for Milner, the question that matters is how we sustain a sense of aliveness in our lives. This is not something that can be reduced to a ‘measurable quantity’, as Russell puts it, but is rather a ‘describable quality: somehow connected to the flows of attention, or moments of surprise, that we experience when beauty comes into our lives’. It is relational, not just in the sense that it encompasses our relationships with other people (although this is important), but also in the sense of our capacity to relate creatively to the world that we find, making some use and meaning from it. When we think about mental health in these terms it becomes much harder to submit it to the regime of measurement and quantification that underpins evidence-based practice. It also makes the scope and cost of therapeutic work harder to draw a circle around.
For all the analysts associated with the middle group, and particularly for Winnicott and Milner, the capacity to experience beauty and feel that our lives are real leads back to our early infancy, something they saw as more foundational than a diagnosis. They posited that before we learn to speak, and to see other people as subjects who are separate from us, ‘we use them as objects, as part of the material of the world – as a medium’, as Russell elaborates, and, moreover, a medium we are mixed up with. If our maternal environment is ‘good enough’ (to quote Winnicott) and so survives our use of it – as an object of hate, for example – then we can come to relate to others whom we consider substantial, real, and separate, while also entering the world of language and symbolisation. But for Milner in particular, the child’s capacity to separate and to symbolise was a creative achievement, akin to the moment of ‘artistic ecstasy’ when ‘the original poet in each of us create[s] the outside world […] by finding the familiar in the unfamiliar’. Creativity in our adult lives arises from our ability to play again in the space between subject and object. This is essential to a life that feels real. As Russell describes it, ‘the losing and re-finding of boundaries between self and the world [is] requisite to [Milner’s] picture of sanity’.
From the trenches of Australia’s failing mental health system, the confidence in the lay psychoanalyst in Britain’s postwar welfare state seems remarkable. The number of psychoanalysts in social welfare and public health institutions back then is almost unthinkable today when it is difficult even to get a Medicare rebate to see a psychoanalyst (and even then it will be limited to ten sessions – much shorter than is required for proper analytic work). But those were years in which psychoanalysis was able to make a much broader appeal to the public. Indeed, when Milner wrote, she was thinking not just about individual neurosis, but also about creativity as a social good with a role to play in the development of a populace committed to democracy in the years after the Second World War. So, for example, On Not Being Able to Paint (1950) was published in a cheap edition by Heineman Educational Books so as to be easily available to teachers – though it’s hard to imagine this very strange book, based around Milner’s own experiment in free drawing, on a Masters of Education reading list now. Here Milner was interested in the limitations of orthodox educational methods. She drew upon an experimental investigation of her own creativity to address teachers working with ‘the quiet over-introverted child who seems to have insufficient contact with the external world’. She also insisted upon the broader implications of her psychoanalytic experiment in free drawing for thinking about the relationship between education and democratic citizenship. Milner presents ‘a sort of social democratic psychic vision’, Russell tells us. For Milner:
[Education,] if it is to foster that true sanity which is necessary in citizens of a democracy, foster the capacity to see the facts for oneself, rather than seeing only what one is told to see, must also fully understand the stages by which such objectivity is reached. In fact, it must understand subjectivity otherwise the objectivity it aims at will be in danger of fatal distortion.
Reading Milner reminds us that psychoanalytic thinking has not always felt as elite as it does today, nor its questioning of the value of standardisation and objectivity as marginal. At the same time, her emphasis on essentially private practices of creativity and creative attention read differently in a neoliberal context where state-funded mental health services are increasingly channeling money towards short term and ‘self-directed’ treatments. While it is seductive to imagine that our own inner resources and everyday practices of creativity have the potential to offer us moments of transcendence and transformation, private practices also require a supportive social infrastructure – one Milner could assume in a way that perhaps we can’t anymore. Milner’s diary experiment does not require one to have an analyst, but it does assume one has the time, space and the concertation to write every day.
What would it mean to take seriously Milner’s experiments in living today? This is the question asked by Akshi Singh in her autobiographical In Defence of Leisure. The book begins with Singh’s encountering A Life of One’s Own while sitting in an Italian restaurant in the English seaside town of Ramsgate. She is the age Milner was when the latter started writing A Life and it is exactly eighty years after the publication of An Experiment in Leisure. What follows is an account of reading Milner over seven years as a way for Singh to ask herself the same question: ‘how could I have a life of my own?’ It takes us through the most significant events of Singh’s life over those years: mourning her brother’s death, building a life in the UK, leaving one romantic relationship and beginning another, leaving a career in academia, and, perhaps most centrally, her encounter with psychoanalysis. Each of these milestones is paired with one of Milner’s books, and Singh gives an account of each ‘with a complete disregard of the careful distance cultivated by academic training’. (In Defence is in part a work of academic ‘quit lit’.)
The question of leisure is a question about time: what we do with it, but also what are we not doing while we are busy? Singh reflects that people often think about leisure and psychoanalysis as luxuries, ‘something that is only relevant to those who have yachts and trust funds’ – a thought that returns us to the question of the material assumptions of Milner’s project. But rather than dismiss leisure as a bourgeois privilege, Singh is interested in the way that forms of uncommodified leisure might challenge our accustomed ways of living, working, and consuming. Leisure is perhaps less about making use of our free time than a matter of making our relationship to time freer. How can we experience our own time outside of its relentless abstraction and valuation under late capitalism? How do we get beyond the automatic valorisation of efficiency and productivity? Defending leisure is for Singh a way to open up a space without obvious utility in which different kinds of experience and ways of understanding can unfold – from attentiveness to beauty to those troubling feelings and impulses that a state of being preoccupied allow us to pass over. We need leisure, she says, ‘to reckon with what is difficult and inadmissible, in our lives and minds’. This project is not merely personal; it is also social, political, and potentially even ‘revolutionary’.
As anyone who has done it knows, undergoing an analysis is hard and painful work. But Singh’s point is that analysis has a similar relationship to time as leisure in that it is, almost by definition, inefficient. One of Singh’s most persuasive claims is that the inefficiency of psychoanalysis, the time it ‘seemingly wastes’, is crucial to what it can do:
You can have efficiency only when you know where you’re headed. But for any real discovery or surprise, for something unexpected to come into language, surely all this needs plenty of time when nothing recognisably important happens – a meandering, wandering kind of time.
What also struck me as I read this was the problematic way evidence-based treatments think about time. It is not just that mental health care plans do not allow enough time in the form of sessions (Singh describes going to a university counselling service and being told by the admirably honest clinician that her five sessions won’t help and that she should try to find someone she can work with long term). Such treatments are also too predictive of the future; in their drive to efficiency, they want already to know what will happen and the time that it will take. One effect of this is an awful deadening to surprise on the side of both client and clinician. Disturbingly, however, when the treatment doesn’t work – leaving aside for the moment what it means for therapy to ‘work’ – the fault seems to lie not with the method (which has been ‘evidenced’, that is, proven to work), but with the patient, who can come to feel that they are beyond cure, that nothing will help. For both Milner and Singh, aliveness to creativity, surprise, and beauty are central to what it means to get better. Any of the profound shifts that may take place in a life – loss, love, identification, survival – must be handled creatively if they are to be handled at all.
Singh says that her analysis allowed her to inhabit her own time – not always to bend to the demands of a job or a boyfriend – in a manner similar to Milner who also wants to know what she wants beyond influence or the compulsion to appease the other’s desire. But threaded through the book is also another story about reckoning with the repetitious time of one’s family, what Lacan called the subject’s ‘lines of fate’. We hear about a series of suicides in Singh’s family: first the suicide of her brother, then an uncle dies by suicide, then a young cousin jumps off a roof to his death. Singh calls this the family’s ‘tragic destiny’– a destiny about which it has found no way to speak. ‘The stakes of speaking and not speaking shouldn’t feel so high’, but of course the point is that sometimes they are. In the absence of speech, something repeats. Psychoanalysis for Singh is about mourning her brother’s death and reorienting herself away from this destiny: ‘I thought I had started psychoanalysis to learn to grieve – but it has turned out to be about living.’
The stories that run through the book mark a difference between Singh and Milner. An interesting thing about the latter’s diary books is that, notwithstanding the intimacy of their style, we learn virtually nothing about the details of Milner’s life. In A Life of One’s Own, we discover that she has a child, there are passing references to a husband, and we know she lives in London. But Milner refuses to answer the question of ‘who I am’ by cataloguing ‘what has happened to me’. This difference, I think, marks the ninety years that separate the two women, despite all the manifest ways that Singh models her life on Milner’s insights. One explanation for the absence of either personal or sociological detail in Milner’s writing is that she assumes a universal woman’s experience that needs no explanation, no qualification. The fact that Singh’s book does not assume such a perspective produces certain insights about, for example, the way that her relationship to leisure is shaped by the precarity of her residency status in England as a migrant. It also allows her to see what Milner misses – Milner travels to Kashmir and Jerusalem and does not notice that she is in occupied territory. But it is too simplistic to reduce the difference between the ways Milner and Singh write about the self to the former’s privileged blindness.
There is something fundamentally different, and historically contingent, about the way that Milner thinks about what a self is, what introspection is for, and what it is to write about one’s life. It is a given now that who we are is fundamentally shaped by our place in history, our economic position, and our identity markers: race, gender, religion, sexuality, nationality. It is also taken for granted that the personal details of our life – our life ‘story’ – are not only of interest, but what makes us interesting. In contrast, Milner sees the markers of identity and personality as part and parcel of the defensive structures of the ‘deliberate self’ that she wants to get away from and beneath. In fact, for Milner the vivid and transient experiences that underpin her idea of a life worth living are those which cause personal preoccupations to fall away. It is when she is able to widen her perception ‘beyond the circle of personal interests’ that she achieves deep satisfaction and contentment.
She will say, for instance, that her exercises in self-exploration have led her to discover two ways of perceiving that she calls narrow and wide attention. Narrow attention is the ‘everyday’ form of attention ‘in which I saw only what concerned me, and saw everything with the narrow vision of personal desires’. It is a ‘questing beast’ that sees ‘items according to whether they [serve] its purposes’, or ‘as a means to its own ends’. By contrast, wide attention occurs
when the questing purposes were held in leash. Then, since one wanted nothing, there was no need to select one item to look at rather than another, so it became possible to look at the whole at once. To attend to something and yet want nothing from it, these seemed to be the essentials of the second way of perceiving […] if by chance we should have discovered the knack of holding wide our attention, then the magic thing happens.
Neither of these modes of perception describe the kind of attention, or perhaps more precisely distraction that we are condemned to in the media-saturated attention economy. Although Milner describes narrow attention as a ‘questing beast’ caught up with ideas we have of who we are and what we want, she never had to contend with clickbait. What she is really speaking about here is the kind of attention that allows one to focus and follow through with a task. Narrow attention she says, is ‘probably essential for practical life’. And while ‘wide attention’ involves a loosening of the reins of purpose, it is not sheer absent-mindedness or distraction. Singh describes it as ‘a way of paying attention with one’s body and mind without channeling that attentiveness into an obvious focus […] a way of being both relaxed and present’. Both Singh and Milner insist it is something that we can learn to practice, although Singh will also say that to live according to Milner’s advice, she has to – as much as possible – banish her phone. As an example of wide attention Milner describes sitting in front of a Cézanne painting – tired, bored and forgetting for a moment the question of what ‘one ought to like’ – and becoming aware of the painting in a different way: the colours come alive, gripping her gaze until she is ‘soaking myself in their vitality’ and overcome with ‘a great delight’.
This encounter may sound rarified, highbrow, and of another time. But it is the experience rather than the art that matters here. Reading Milner for this essay I thought about a woman I encountered while employed as a social worker. This woman, whom I will call Jan, had faced shocking adversity in her life: poverty, drug addiction, drug-induced psychosis, domestic abuse, having a child removed from her care, chronic pain, and, perhaps most foundationally, the death of her mother from a heroin overdose when she was a small child. One day, when I was driving her to an appointment, as I did every week, she described a kind of ritual she had come up with for herself. ‘Some nights’, she said, ‘I take my shoes off and go out to the nature strip. I feel the grass between my toes and I look at the moon. I just stand there. It’s quiet and peaceful and it makes me feel like everything will be alright.’ I can’t help thinking of Jan’s ritual in light of an episode in A Life of One’s Own when Milner is holidaying in the Black Forest in Germany. In a bad mood, she goes for a walk and something happens that, as she puts it, ‘opens a door between me and the world’. She finds herself awake to her surrounding: ‘draining sensation to its depth, wave after wave of delight flowing through every cell in my body […] I no longer strove to be doing something. I was deeply content with what was.’ Milner’s account of her experience is much more detailed than Jan’s, carrying over several pages. But I think both are describing something kindred in their relaxed yet expansive moods of attention. Milner’s work gives dignity to these kinds of ordinary extraordinary experiences that are, at least potentially, available to all of us.