"No, I am living in the present, not in the past. Or in the future, I don’t know. I live day by day..."

"... and what is happening that day, the next day, is important to me — so I don’t care. I’m not somebody who cares very much about 'this happened on such a day,' all that."

Said Françoise Gilot, asked "Do you have any thoughts on it today, looking at it after so many decades?," quoted in "Françoise Gilot, 97, Does Not Regret Her Pablo Picasso Memoir/In 1964, her book about a decade-long affair with the legendary artist was a succès de scandale. Now, it’s back in print" (NYT). 

"It" = her memoir, "Life with Picasso."

"Life with Picasso" is a great read. I read it in the 1970s, when I myself was embedded in an artist-on-artist relationship.

Gilot began a 10-year relationship with Picasso in 1943, when she was 21 and he was 61. The quoted interview is from 2019, when Gilot was 97. I'm glad to see she's still alive. She'll be 100 soon. I like her idea of how to live as an old person — a very old person. As an old but not that old a person, I believe in living in the day, where you always have been, but have often disregarded for various reasons that don't apply anymore.

I'm reading this 2-year old article today because it's linked along with a few other things at the end of an article that is published today:

"When Two Artists Meet, and Then Marry/Such creatively charged partnerships are, from the outside, often viewed as idyllic havens, even if the reality is often more complicated" by Thessaly La Force. 

I love the name Thessaly La Force, and there are some wonderful photographs at the link, but I'm surprised to see this old topic brought up again as if it were new. 

Back in the 1970s, this was a major feminist topic. Yet La Force says:

Today, a more feminist framework cautions against the role of the muse....

Today? Half a century ago, the feminist framework was well worked out. What you're saying today isn't "more feminist" that what we had then. 

If women still fall into the view that an artist-on-artist relationship is an "idyllic haven," it's not because they haven't heard enough about the "feminist framework." It's because they have hopes and illusions that buoy them up as they dream about the future and visualize a beautiful life or because they think they are fabulous and special and up for taking on a brilliant man who's just too much for those other girls.