Journal of a Solitude

by May Sarton

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

Whole lines run through my head and I cannot stop writing until whatever it is gets said.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It occurs to me that boredom and panic are the two devils the solitary must combat.

There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one’s gifts to those one loves most.

The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.

“People want to become you and when they find they cannot, they want to kill you.”