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The title of my essay comes from the end of The Tortoise and the Angel, the 400 page journal that Ethel Schwabacher began in 1967, when she was 64 years old, and continued until shortly before her death in 1984. Projecting herself into the image of a placid turde, moving slowly across the sky toward visionary truth, she writes: “Let us assume … that the goal of the turtle is to find just ‘a little more knowledge,’ as Freud put it” (Schwabacher, June 28, 1979). The allusion is to Freud's 1926 letter to Romain Rolland, stating his intention “to explore, solve riddles, uncover a little of the truth” (Freud, 1975, p. 370). Like Freud, whom she greatly admired, Schwabacher was determined to unlock the mysteries of the mind. Unlike Freud, she viewed herself not as a conquistador but as a prosaic turtle, plodding along life's way, open to new experiences, recognizing, as she puts it, the “importance of one's effort to find a little truth.”
The Tortoise and the Angel records Schwabacher's tenacious pursuit of self-knowledge, and when the journal is published, as I hope it soon will be, readers will recognize her remarkable literary accomplishment. Best known as a painter, she turned to writing when she became incapacitated by arthritis. Her journal is a treasure trove of