Name: Journal of a Solitude
ISBN: 9780393309287

May Sarton

The modern American author describes everyday experiences and conveys her feelings of frustration and anger over her attempts to write in solitude

Journal of a Solitude

Maria Amaro

Fasiha🌺🐧

I WOKE to the meadow bright silver with frost, and brilliant sunlight through yellow leaves over the barn. What would I do without this calming open space to rest my eyes on? It is the mystical opening of the whole place. It is what I come back to when I have been away, as to a deeper breath. Each time I am gone, even for a weekend, I have to recover the house and the garden; something dies with absence and must be reconstructed.

I have time to think. That is the great, the greatest luxury. I have time to be. Therefore my responsibility is huge. To use time well and to be all that I can in whatever years are left to me.

Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year. Somewhere in The Poet and the Donkey Andy speaks for me when he says "Do not deprive me of my age. As I have earned it"

Maybe patience is the last thing we learn. I remember Jean Dominique, old and blind, saying to me, "On attend toujours (we're still waiting)." I was under thirty then and she was over sixty and I was amazed to think that someone so old could still wait for someone so intensely. But now I know that one does so all one's life.

The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become. It is necessary to be as exact as circumspect as possible in order to tell the truth.

kite

“If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked.”

mayfly

That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened.

It may be outwardly silent here but in the back of my mind is a clamor of human voices, too many needs, hopes, fears.

That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?

Machines do things very quickly and outside the natural rhythm of life, and we are indignant if a car doesn’t start at the first try. So the few things that we still do, such as cooking (though there are TV dinners!), knitting, gardening, anything at all that cannot be hurried, have a very particular value.

This morning I woke at four and lay awake for an hour or so in a bad state. It is raining again. I got up finally and went about the daily chores, waiting for the sense of doom to lift—and what did it was watering the house plants. Suddenly joy came back because I was fulfilling a simple need, a living one.

How is one to accept such a death? What have we come to when people are shoveled away, as if that whole life of hard work, dignity, self-respect, could be discarded at the end like an old beer can?

YESTERDAY picked mushrooms on the front lawn, and a cup of raspberries for Mildred. The leaves are falling fast, but so far the colors are gentle, not the blaze of October yet. And we are having tropical air, humid, depleting.

I hate small talk with a passionate hatred. Why? 

I suppose because any meeting with another human being is collision for me now.

It is always expensive, and I will not waste my time

. It is never a waste of time to be outdoors, and never a waste of time to lie down and rest even for a couple of hours.

Sometimes I think the fits of rage are like a huge creative urge gone into reverse, something dammed up that spills over, not an accumulated frustration that must find a way out and blows off at some tiny irrelevant thing.

I woke in tears this morning. I wonder whether it is possible at nearly sixty to change oneself radically. Can I learn to control resentment and hostility, the ambivalence, born somewhere far below the conscious level? If I cannot, I shall lose the person I love. There is nothing to be done but go ahead with life moment by moment and hour by hour—put out birdseed, tidy the rooms, try to create order and peace around me even if I cannot achieve it inside me.

"...the more one is a receptacle of human destinies, as I have become through my readers, the more one realizes how very few people could be called happy, how complex and demanding every deep human relationship is, how much real pain, anger, and despair are concealed by most people. And this is because many feel their own suffering is unique. It is comforting to know that we are all in the same boat. Into this house comes the despair now of many middle-aged women, to take one example."

With the return of cheerfulness I feel a sense of loss. The poems no longer flow out. I am more “normal” again, no longer that fountain of tears and intense feeling that I have been for months.

Ashley Johnson

The poet and author’s “beautiful . . . wise and warm” journal of time spent in her New Hampshire home alone with her garden, her books, the seasons, and herself (Eugenia Thornton, Cleveland Plain Dealer). “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.” —May Sarton May Sarton’s parrot chatters away as Sarton looks out the window at the rain and contemplates returning to her “real” life—not friends, not even love, but writing. In her bravest and most revealing memoir, Sarton casts her keenly observant eye on both the interior and exterior worlds. She shares insights about everyday life in the quiet New Hampshire village of Nelson, the desire for friends, and need for solitude—both an exhilarating and terrifying state. She likens writing to “cracking open the inner world again,” which sometimes plunges her into depression. She confesses her fears, her disappointments, her unresolved angers. Sarton’s garden is her great, abiding joy, sustaining her through seasons of psychic and emotional pain. Journal of a Solitude is a moving and profound meditation on creativity, oneness with nature, and the courage it takes to be alone. Both uplifting and cathartic, it sweeps us along on Sarton’s pilgrimage inward. This ebook features an extended biography of May Sarton.