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For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been a collision. I feel too much, sense too much, am exhausted by the reverberations after even the simplest conversation.
I live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperament I have never learned to use as it could be used, thrown off by a word, a glance, a rainy day, or one drink too many.
I hardly ever sit still without being haunted by the “undone” and the “unsent.” I often feel exhausted, but it is not my work that tires (work is a rest); it is the effort of pushing away the lives and needs of others before I can come to the work with any freshness and zest.
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.
Whatever peace I know rests in the natural world, in feeling myself a part of it, even in a small way.
I am an ornery character, often hard to get along with. The things I cannot stand, that make me flare up like a cat making a fat tail, are pretentiousness, smugness, the coarse grain that often shows itself in a turn of phrase. I hate vulgarity, coarseness of soul. I hate small talk with a passionate hatred.
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. It is then that images float up and then that I plan my work. But it is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show.
I long for the bulbs to arrive, for the early autumn chores are melancholy, but the planting of bulbs is the work of hope and always thrilling.
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.
And here in my study the sunlight is that autumn white, so clear, it calls for an inward act to match it … clarify, clarify.
It is a mellow day, very gentle.
I really get to weeding only in spring and autumn, so I am working through a jungle now. Doing it I feel strenuously happy and at peace. At the end of the afternoon on a gray day, the light is sad and one feels the chill, but the bitter smell of earth is a tonic.
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.
I WOKE this morning to a silver world, the meadow under a thick blanket of frost.
I have come back to my solitude, my joy, and I am sure these radiant skies have much to do with it.
I began the day with Vaughan Williams’ Mass sung by the King’s College choir. 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.
To do this takes a curious combination of humility, excruciating honesty, and (there’s the rub) a sense of destiny or of identity. One must believe that private dilemmas are, if deeply examined, universal, and so, if expressed, have a human value beyond the private, and one must also believe in the vehicle for expressing them, in the talent.
Somehow the great clouds made the day all right, a gift of splendor as they sailed over our heads.
the work itself stand alone and make its way, heart by heart, as it is discovered by a few people with all the excitement of a person who finds a wildflower in the woods that he has discovered on his own. From my isolation to the isolation of someone somewhere who will find my work there exists a true communion.
But there always have been and always will be people who can breathe only there and who are starved for nourishment. I am one of those readers and I am also one who can occasionally provide this food. That is all that really matters to me this morning.
Help us to be the always hopeful Gardeners of the spirit Who know that without darkness Nothing comes to birth As without light Nothing flowers. *
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.
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. I have earned it.”
But for some reason Americans are terrified of the very idea of passionate love going on past middle age. Are they afraid of being alive? Do they want to be dead, i.e., safe? 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?
YESTERDAY was a strange, hurried, uncentered day;
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.
What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?
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.
have a great responsibility because I can afford to be honest.
Yesterday afternoon the light in the cosy room was beautiful, marbling the cupboard by the fireplace as I have seen it every year at this time, turning the hills across the meadow deep rose at sunset, making long shadows across the snow below every tree trunk. It was a tender light, gentler, no longer the relentless brilliance of January.
writing some poems of quiet happiness,
After I had looked for a while at that daffodil before I got up, I asked myself the question, “What do you want of your life?” and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, “Exactly what I have—but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.”
I am so glad I don’t have to go out. A whole day before me in which to think and be!
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.
Gardening is altogether different. There the door is always open into the “holy”—growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.
No partner in a love relationship (whether homo or heterosexual) should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable. But the fact is that men still do rather consistently undervalue or devalue women’s powers as serious contributors to civilization except as home-makers.
A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless. It all comes back to the fact that we are not asked to be perfect, only human. What a relief it is to walk into a human house!
In each instance the habitation reflected in a very special way the tone, the hidden music, as it were, of a woman, and a woman living alone, the sense of a deep loam of experience and taste expressed in the surroundings, the room a shell that reverberated with oceans and tides and waves of the owner’s past, the essence of a human life as it had lived itself into certain colors, objets d’art, and especially into many books. The nostalgia comes from the longing to be taken into that world by what the French call an amitié amoureuse, recognized from the start as an attraction that will never be
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And oh, the sea—“La mer, la met, toujours recommencée!”
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.
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.
When I got back from Cambridge on Wednesday I walked into a house full of surprises—a hanging fuchsia, two marvelous rose plants, a little bag of supremely good brownies made by Nancy (aged eleven), and a note from Anne to say that she was giving me a day’s time. (She had come on purpose while I was away.) This is the day she has given me and I have two poems simmering,
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!
Why is it so upsetting to be involved with the selling of books? How does a writer of my kind survive the big machine?
The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.
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.”
As soon as I have a deadline, I work much better. Time unbounded is hard to handle.
How does one rest? I am trying to do it by not hurrying, by not allowing the pressure to build. One step at a time. It is like climbing out of a deep well.
Had Anne married, she would have led a different life and no doubt a rich one, but she would not have been able to give what she does here and in the way she does.
