Journal of a Solitude

by May Sarton

It is an elegant bouquet; shibui, the Japanese would call it. When I am alone the flowers are really seen; I can pay attention to them. They are felt as presences. Without them I would die. Why do I say that? Partly because they change before my eyes. They live and die in a few days; they keep me closely in touch with process, with growth, and also with dying. I am floated on their moments.

I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose—to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines.

So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.

The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive. 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. Dusting never has this effect (and that may be why I am such a poor housekeeper!), but feeding the cats when they are hungry, giving Punch clean water, makes me suddenly feel calm and happy. Whatever peace I know rests in the natural world, in feeling myself a part of it, even in a small way. Maybe the gaiety of the Warner family, their wisdom, comes from this, that they work close to nature all the time. As simple as that? But it is not simple. Their life requires patient understanding, imagination, the power to endure constant adversity—the weather, for example! To go with, not against the elements, an inexhaustible vitality summoned back each day to do the same tasks, to feed the animals, clean out barns and pens, keep that complex world alive.

We can do anything, or almost, but how balanced, magnanimous, and modest one has to be to do anything! And also how patient. It is as true in the arts as anywhere else.

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?

And when we sit down at ten for coffee and a talk, it is never small talk. Today she told me that she had seen a perfect round cobweb in the branches of the chokecherry outside her back window, sparkling with the dew on it. She and I have lived through a lot of joy and grief together and now they are “woven fine” through all that we exchange.

But it is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every effort to find out the real person, but if I can’t, then I am upset and cross. Time wasted is poison.

The begonias have thrived remarkably, first as house plants last winter, then outdoors all summer. A sturdy plant is a great comfort.

“How does one grow up?” I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause; then she answered, “By thinking.”

I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep. Eliot’s statement comes back to me these days: Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.

Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

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.

The dismay comes when I lose the sense of my life as connected (as if by an aerial) to many, many other lives whom I do not even know and cannot ever know. The signals go out and come in all the time.

Gerald Heard’s saying “he must go unprotected that he may be constantly changed”

I felt dépaysé;

There is too much luxury, maybe, and too little quality.

I am in a limbo that needs to be patterned from within.

There are days when only religious music will do. Under the light of eternity things, the daily trivia, the daily frustrations, fall away. It is all a matter of getting to the center of the beam.

There is really only one possible prayer: Give me to do everything I do in the day with a sense of the sacredness of life. Give me to be in Your presence, God, even though I know it only as absence.

I DID SPEND some hours in airports completely absorbed by Robert Coles’s second piece on Erik Erikson (New Yorker, November 14th), rich in that kind of insight that opens up new understanding of oneself and of what is happening now.

Eakins pores over the human face, and at his best gives us portraits that probe the whole person, and act upon the viewer as if an entire novel had been encapsulated there.

What other painter has so managed to catch a thinking face, except Rembrandt?

English play Home, acted magnificently by Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud as two old men who, one gradually comes to understand, are in a mental institution.

I OPENED Teilhard de Chardin (The Divine Milieu) to this passage this morning: The masters of the spiritual life incessantly repeat that God wants only souls. To give those words their true value, we must not forget that the human soul, however independently created our philosophy represents it as being, is inseparable, in its birth and in its growth, from the universe into which it is born. In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way. But this summing-up, this welding, are not given to us ready-made and complete with the first awakening of consciousness. It is we who, through our own activity, must industriously assemble the widely scattered elements. The labour of seaweed as it concentrates in its tissues the substances scattered, in infinitesimal quantities, throughout the vast layers of ocean; the industry of bees as they make honey from the juices broadcast in so many flowers—these are but pale images of the ceaseless working-over that all the forces of the universe undergo in us in order to reach the level of spirit. Thus, every man, in the course of his life, must not only show himself obedient and docile. By his fidelity he must build—starting with the most natural territory of his own self—a work, an opus, into which something enters from all the elements of the earth. He makes his own soul throughout his earthly days; and at the same time he collaborates in another work, in another opus,...

It is only when we can believe that we are creating the soul that life has any meaning, but when we can believe it—and I do and always have—then there is nothing we do that is without meaning and nothing that we suffer that does not hold the seed of creation in it.

I shall never get used to this joy of living in the country—when help is needed, it is there.

Here I am at fifty-eight and in this past year I have only begun to understand what loving is … forced to my knees again and again like a gardener planting bulbs or weeding, so that I may once more bring a relationship to flower, keep it truly alive.

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.

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?

Flannery O’Connor’s The Artificial Nigger. Countless times in these past years it has helped me move from shame after anger to the sense that one has to forgive oneself, to that moment on one’s knees when the tears of relief pour down.

When I speak of life and love as expanding with age, sex seems the least important thing. At any age we grow by the enlarging of consciousness, by learning a new language, or a new art or craft (gardening?) that implies a new way of looking at the universe. 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. Great art does the same thing … Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”: Here there is nothing that does not see you. You must change your life.

I woke several times and wandered about the house, checking taps to be sure the pipes had not frozen and stopping to think. The stars were huge, like daisies through the windowpanes.

How delighted I am to plunge again into Arthur Waley’s translations from the Chinese!

What bothers me is nakedness as bravado. Then it becomes embarrassing: “Look at me … Aren’t I shocking?” But transparency does not shock: “Look through me and find everyman, yourself.”

Simone Weil says, “Absolute attention is prayer.”

We are aware of God only when we cease to be aware of ourselves, not in the negative sense of denying the self, but in the sense of losing self in admiration and joy.

We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.

I have begun again to play two Schubert Impromptus that Louise Bogan gave me—Opus 90 and Opus 142, Gieseking.

I have been pondering two passage from Jung. The first is a key to the dangers of sublimation: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

Now it is snowing in earnest. Another wonderful day enclosed in my cocoon.

Here life goes on, even and monotonous on the surface, full of lightning, of summits and of despair, in its depths. We have now arrived at a stage in life so rich in new perceptions that cannot be transmitted to those at another stage—one feels at the same time full of so much gentleness and so much despair—the enigma of this life grows, grows, drowns one and crushes one, then all of a sudden in a supreme moment of light one becomes aware of the “sacred.”

We fear disturbance, change, fear to bring to light and to talk about what is painful. Suffering often feels like failure, but it is actually the door into growth. And growth does not cease to be painful at any age.

We are terribly frightened of admitting that we have been wrong, of admitting weakness; yet only when we can does the light flow in like a pardon.

I remember Jean Dominique, old and blind, saying to me, “On attend toujours.” 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.

CBS (Charles Kurault on the road) that left me in tears. It told the story of a black man, Mr. Black, a bricklayer from North Carolina in his ninety-third year, a thin eager face. Mr. Black was flown, at government expense, to an African country in dire need of building materials and the expertise to learn how to use their own earth for bricks. He showed them how to dig clay, how to make the forms, how to build whole villages at little or no expense. What an imaginative act, for once, on the part of the powers that be! And how marvelous for him, a very old man, to see his gift used, to discover what he had to share! I took it as a parable, and that is why I wept.