Living alone in quiet, with no vocal contributions from others, no sounds (except music) from beyond my own ear, I was apt to hear news of an inner terrain, an endolithic self, resembling the conditions of lichens embedded in rock.

My intention was to discover what was in there, no matter how deeply hidden, a process not unlike uncovering the treasure that accompanied the body of a Mayan king, hidden in a secret room in a tomb within a pyramid. I thought that if everything beyond myself was cut off, the outside turned inside, if I dug into the pile of protective rock and mortar I had erected around me in seventy-five years, perhaps I would be able to see if something was still living in there.

Doris Grumbach, Fifty Days of Solitude