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I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose—to find out what I think, to know where I stand.
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 come in these last days to feel again the validity of my struggle here, that it is meaningful whether I ever “succeed” as a writer or not, and that even its failures, failures of nerve, failures due to a difficult temperament, can be meaningful. It is an age where more and more human beings are caught up in lives where fewer and fewer inward decisions can be made, where fewer and fewer real choices exist. The fact that a middle-aged, single woman, without any vestige of family left, lives in this house in a silent village and is responsible only to her own soul means something. The fact
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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.
I have often imagined that if I were in solitary confinement for an indefinite time and knew that no one would ever read what I wrote, I would still write poetry, but I would not write novels. Why? Perhaps because the poem is primarily a dialogue with the self and the novel a dialogue with others. They come from entirely different modes of being. I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.
But I believe we learn through the experiences of others as well as through our own, constantly meditating upon them, drawing the sustenance of human truth from them, and it seems natural to me to wish to share these aperçus, these questions, these oddities, these dilemmas and pangs. Why? Partly, I suppose, because 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
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The delights of the poet as I jotted them down turned out to be light, solitude, the natural world, love, time, creation itself. Suddenly after the months of depression I am fully alive in all these areas, and awake.
When I talk about solitude I am really talking also about making space for that intense, hungry face at the window, starved cat, starved person. It is making space to be there. Lately a small tabby cat has come every day and stared at me with a strange, intense look. Of course I put food out, night and morning. She is so terrified that she runs away at once when I open the door, but she comes back to eat ravenously as soon as I disappear. Yet her hunger is clearly not only for food. I long to take her in my arms and hear her purr with relief at finding shelter. Will she ever become tame enough
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It has been a year of unusual branching out, and I feel quite young. You will laugh at that, but many of our friends now are pathetically worried about aging and full of envy for young people and regrets about wasting their own youth—and these are parents of small children, under thirty!
For after all we make our faces as we go along,
We have to live as close as possible to all that leaves the door open to what E means by the “holy.” More and more I see how true is the Hindu idea that a man may leave family and responsibilities and become a “holy” man, a wanderer, in old age, in order to complete himself—a time for laying aside all that has pulled the soul away from nature, from pure contemplation. The problem is not to sink into apathy. The chores, the household tasks, do provide a kind of frame, but I get more and more impatient with bothering about things.
You see, I am very fond of you and I should like you to possess all virtues, without a spot or stain. You have millions of virtues, but you postpone their practice. Hence my preaching at you. But as you are not only a darling but a terribly wise being, you must listen to me seriously, although you are allowed to smile. (See what an inconsistent person I am, for the sake of your smile, I spoil my whole case.) … I want you to be aware of what you call your “steel,” and what I call your wisdom, all the time. I mean, that whatever mad or chaotic things you do, never forget that there is your
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is that every artist is androgynous, that it is the masculine in a woman and the feminine in a man that proves creative.
I would agree also that the ultrafeminine may be as off the beam as the ultramasculine and that people of the greatest creativity and force, as well as the greatest understanding, come near the middle of the spectrum.
LIFE COMES IN CLUSTERS, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.
I feel that a false image of me is being built up, the image of a wise old party who is “above it all.” I believe Carol was somewhat disappointed not to find that mythical person, but to find, instead, a far more vulnerable, involved, and unfinished person than she had imagined.
The problem is to keep a balance, not to fall to pieces.
It was partly, I feel sure, that the detachment demanded of the critic (and especially his absorption in analyzing the work of others) is diametrically opposed to the kind of detachment demanded of the poet in relation to his own work.
It may be that when a relationship deteriorates into recriminations, it is simply that the chance for growth has been buried, “so as not to make trouble.” I have learned this year more than ever before about what Jung calls “letting in the darkness,” “the shadow.” The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is. For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no
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I feel renewed by having gone down into Hell, the Hell of self-hatred, the Hell of war with a person whom I love, and come back to the Heaven of self-forgiveness, as well as forgiveness of the other because in the struggle between us, if we can face it, the truth is concealed, and could be revealed.
For weeks and months I have allowed myself to be persuaded into a frustrated pseudopeace to spare the other. But if there is deep love involved, there is deep responsibility toward it. We cannot afford not to fight for growth and understanding, even when it is painful, as it is bound to be. The fear of pain and of causing pain is, no doubt, a sin.
“Anticipate change as though you had left it behind you.”
I shall never, never feel at home in it. It all went off well, yet I came home full of misgivings and disgruntlement. Why is it so upsetting to be involved with the selling of books? How does a writer of my kind survive the big machine? And to be a witness, even for a short time, of the way in which it works creates panic.
SOMETIMES WONDERFUL PRESENTS arrive from nowhere. Yesterday an unknown sent me, out of the blue, a book called Loneliness, by Clark E. Moustakas. I opened to this passage: “I began to see that loneliness is neither good nor bad, but a point of intense and timeless awareness of the Self, a beginning which initiates totally new sensitivities and awarenesses, and which results in bringing a person deeply in touch with his own existence and in touch with others in a fundamental sense.”
In the end what kills is not agony (for agony at least asks something of the soul) but everyday life.
The immense value of a love affair is, of course, that it burns up the clutter like the trash it is. When X and I first met life was nothing but a long hymn of praise. I am revising those poems now, so I am very much aware of the difference between those first weeks after X came into my life and where our relationship is now. What is asked of us now is to be tolerant, patient, to try to bridge the gaps between our personalities and temperaments, even between our values … and the Gestalt of our lives.
I feel cluttered when there is no time to analyze experience.
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.
If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against. He lives in “The House of Gathering.” Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an
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“It takes a long time, all one’s life, to learn to love one person well—with enough distance, with enough humility, he thought.”
I betrayed an animal that trusted me.
The book is less and more than I had imagined it might be.
