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

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There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over any encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.

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.

It looks as if I were “meant” to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant. Am I too old to acquire the knack for happiness? Too old, perhaps, ever to take in another’s life to share with mine on a permanent basis? If so, I must make do with what I have … and what I have is a great richness of friends and a positively ardent love of nature. Not nothing!

I find that when I have any appointment, even an afternoon one, it changes the whole quality of time. I feel overcharged. There is no space for what wells up from the subconscious; those dreams and images live in deep still water and simply submerge when the day gets scattered.

Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.

Now there are crimson tulips in one room, white and pink ones in another, and I can breathe, am full of joy and at home again.

Roles should no longer be assigned on the basis of sex or of any preconceived idea of marriage, but should grow organically from the specific needs of two human beings and their capacities and gifts.

I have said elsewhere that we have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can—if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough—be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being, what the hazards are of a fairly usual, everyday kind.

I am so glad I don’t have to go out. A whole day before me in which to think and be!

It occurs to me that boredom and panic are the two devils the solitary must combat. When I lay down this afternoon, I could not rest and finally got up because I was in a sweat of panic, panic for no definable reason, a panic of solitude, I presume.

Love is one of the great enlargers of the person because it requires us to “take in” the stranger and to understand him, and to exercise restraint and tolerance as well as imagination to make the relationship work. If love includes passion, it is more explosive and dangerous and forces us to go deeper.

A strange empty day. I did not feel well, lay around, looked at daffodils against the white walls, and twice thought I must be having hallucinations because of their extraordinary scent that goes from room to room. I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal.

We are one, the house and I, and I am happy to be alone—time to think, time to be. This kind of open-ended time is the only luxury that really counts and I feel stupendously rich to have it.

For of course one is never safe when in love. Growth is demanding and may seem dangerous, for there is loss as well as gain in growth. But why go on living if one has ceased to grow? And what more demanding atmosphere for growth than love in any form, than any relationship which can call out and requires of us our most secret and deepest selves?

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.

If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine—why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women’s creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as “irrelevant”?

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.

"...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."

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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?

Fasiha🌺🐧

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.

Journal of a Solitude

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