May Sarton

Ever since reading Anne Morrow Lindberg's Gift By The Sea decades ago, I've probably read more memoirs and journals than fiction.

There was a time--back when I was leaving the country of Marriage and moving into the country of Solo--that I read and loved May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude. She also wrote other memoirs, all of which I'm re-reading with even more interest than the first time--House By The Sea, At Seventy, and another written when she was 82. She also wrote fiction and many poems.

Here are some May Sarton lines  to start your day:

"Loneliness is poverty of the self; solitude is richness of the self."

"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 the 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 pass.  Let it go."

"There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious balance. 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 my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it."

She writes about the lovers and loves of her life--this one in fiction, but still, herself:

"I loved them in the way one loves at any age--if it's real at all--obsessively, painfully, with wild exaltation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them; I put them into novels (disguised of course): I brood upon why there were as they were, so often maddening, don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters.  I lived with their faces.  I knew their every gesture by heart.  I stalked them like wild animals.  I studied them as if they were maps of the world--and in a way, I suppose they were."

Writers of  journals and memoirs--not famous people--are like friends you can visit any time you want, even after they have left the world they write about.  May Sarton is that kind of friend for me.   I still remember reading about her death years ago while I was house-sitting for Linda and Steve on Cape Cod.  I knew her so well, though I'd never met her in person, that it felt like a little grief descended.  But she lives still, in her writing, and what she has to say is as real and true as it was for me when I first met her books.