Journal of a Solitude

It brings me great pleasure to sit down and write this blog post about May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, which was first published in 1973. This pleasure is a continuation and deepening of the pleasure I felt when first discovering the book, the pleasure I have felt in knowing it’s been on my shelf, and, finally, the exquisite pleasure of reading it from start to finish.

I had never heard of May Sarton before I came across Journal of a Solitude while browsing the shelves at Bagatelle Books in West Asheville, which must’ve been about three years ago now. Any book with the word “journal” or “diary” in the title tends to jump off the shelf at me, and I’m also drawn to anything having to do with solitude, so in first thumbing through Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude: The Intimate Diary of a Year in the Life of a Creative Woman, there in Bagatelle Books, I knew right away that it was worth owning and adding to my collection.

But I didn’t actually take the time to read the blessed thing until a few weeks ago, when it occurred to me that I could devote blog post to it. In this way I gave myself a good reason to not only read a book I’d long fantasized about reading (but other books always seemed more important), but to also savor it by typing up my favorite passages (which came to total six pages, single-spaced) and then reflecting on those passages in writing of my own, and then sharing those reflections with you, my dear reader.

This kind of mulling over, processing, contemplating, is something that Sarton herself writes a lot about in Journal of a Solitude. She mostly writes of her need for regular time and space in which to practice such contemplation so she might “understand what has a really happened to [her].” Without being able to process her experiences, she loses her center.

But before I dive any deeper into the book, I’ll give you some background info on its writer. May Sarton was born Eleanore Marie Sarton in Wondelgem, Belgium (now part of the city of Ghent), on May 3rd, 1912. The only child of science historian George Sarton and English artist Mabel Eleanor Elwes, Sarton was two years old when German troops invaded Belgium (following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand), and her family fled to Ipswich, England. After living there for a year, they moved to Boston, Massachusetts, so Sarton’s father could teach at Harvard. As a girl, Sarton was interested in theatre and poetry. She graduated from Cambridge High and Latin School in 1929 and went on to study theater for a year in New York. At 19, she traveled to Europe        and lived in Paris for a year, falling in with a literary crowd that included Virginia Woolf, whom she mentions a couple times in Journal of a Solitude.

Sarton met Judy Matlack in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1945, and the two remained romantic partners for thirteen years. They parted ways when Sarton’s father died and Sarton moved to Nelson, New Hampshire—the setting for Journal of a Solitude, and for an earlier published journal called Plant Dreaming Deep. She later moved to York, Maine, where, despite being temporarily debilitated by a stroke, she ultimately remained independent. All tolled, Sarton wrote 53 books in her lifetime: 19 novels, 17 books of poetry, 15 nonfiction works, 2 children's books, a play, and some screenplays. Her journals and memoirs, though, are considered her best and most enduring work. Sometimes described as a lesbian writer, due to the vivid erotic female imagery that characterized her early writings, Sarton herself did not identify with that label, saying, “The vision of life in my work is not limited to one segment of humanity…and has little to do with sexual proclivity.” Her work consistently dealt with the deeply human issues of aging, isolation, solitude, friendship, love and relationships, self-doubt, success and failure, envy, gratitude for life's simple pleasures, love of nature (particularly flowers), the changing seasons, spirituality, the constant struggles of a creative life, and yes, lesbianism.

While the latter theme isn’t prominent in Journal of a Solitude—aside from her repeated, non-sexual mentions of someone she calls X—all of the others I just mentioned are accounted for. She is also, at times, a social critic, disturbed here by how many people expect applause and recognition instantly for performance in an art or craft that they haven’t even begun to learn, wondering there if machines are to blame for this “instant success” mentality. In a world where more and more people are trapped in lives where fewer and fewer “inward decisions can be made,” and fewer real choices exist, she sees herself—middle-aged, single, alone, “responsible only to her own soul” and adept at describing her “pilgrimage inward”—as a source of comfort for those people.

Sarton died of breast cancer on July 16th, 1995, at the age of eighty-three, in York, Maine. She is buried in Nelson Cemetery in Nelson, New Hampshire.

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Journal of a Solitude contains eighty-five entries of widely varying lengths, and spans a little less than 200 pages, starting on September 15th, 1970, and ending on September 30th, 1971, when Sarton is 59 years old. I love that she is 58 and 59 when writing these entries. These unassuming years in a person’s life—especially a woman’s—seem to get overlooked in literature. 

I’d like to officially start my discussion of Journal of a Solitude by reflecting on some of Sarton’s reflections on writing, and on what it generally means to be an artist. Then I’ll explore what she says about solitude, and then love and relationships, which, funnily enough, is a theme implied by the theme of solitude. For someone who’s used to living alone, Sarton has a lot to say about dealing with other people. I also love her thoughts on obligation/responsibility, on suffering, on aging, and on God. But first: art. And writing in particular—my favorite of the arts.

In the first entry, Sarton asserts that her reason for ever writing anything—poems, novels, and journals alike—has been to “find out what I think, to know where I stand.” I came across this same idea years ago in graduate school, when I was studying creative writing. “I write to discover what I think.” The notion runs counter, I’d assume, to how most people conceive of writing, in that most people probably think it’s something a person does when they know a lot about a certain topic. One writes to communicate what they know, not to discover it. And of course that is often the case. But not when it comes to writing as an art and a way of life. Joan Didion expressed a similar idea by once saying (and I read this in a recent New Yorker piece by Nathan Heller), “In retrospect, we know how to write when we begin. What we learn from doing it is what writing was for.” Sarton further narrows her own conceit to say that she writes novels to find out what she thinks, and poems to find out what she feels. She says a poem is mostly a conversation with the self, while a novel is a conversation with others.

There are more than a few instances in Journal of a Solitude of Sarton quoting—often at considerable length—whatever she happens to have been especially struck by in something she recently read. She quotes British diplomat and author Humphrey Trevelan’s thoughts on the poet Goethe, and what Trevelan believed any person must possess if they’re going to remain an artist for life. He calls it “divine discontent,” which results from being abnormally aware of and burdened by life’s mysteries. Without this state of inner tension, artistic energy dies. And in many cases the tension is so great that the artist himself dies, destroyed too young by the power of his own “disequilibrium.”

I’m sure some people would take issue with this contention about artists and the so-called “artistic temperament.” In her 2015 book about creativity—called Big Magic—Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat, Pray, Love fame) disagrees that a person must be tortured in some way in order to create good art. I myself am not sure. And given what I know about Sarton’s temperament—she was prone to throw “tantrums” (that’s her word) and has been described by at least one close relationship as exceedingly difficult to get along with—I’m not surprised that she felt compelled to copy down Trevelan’s thoughts on Goethe.

Another person Sarton quotes in her journal is the developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, who, in his book Young Man Luther, suggests that art is one way for a person to “lift his individual patienthood to the level of a universal one and to try to solve for all what he could not solve for himself alone.” Sarton agrees with Erikson scholar Robert Coles that giving one’s particular fears and desires a “chance to be of universal significance” isn’t something everyone is  even capable of doing, let alone willing. But in order to be a real artist, that very willingness must exist, along with, according to Sarton, “a curious combination of humility, excruciating honesty, and a sense of destiny or of identity.” She says that this last element—the conviction that one’s private dilemmas will, if properly examined and conveyed with skill, be of value to other humans—is the trickiest. One must believe, in other words, that their suffering matters, and that their talent is commensurate to the task of conveying it. It’s a pretty tall order.

In a further explication of this notion, Sarton asserts that the artist/writer must also set aside her fear of hurting others in her life by revealing a given personal truth. If the artist’s purpose is to understand the human condition, and through that understanding, free the self up to its greatest potential for action and creation, then she must start by understanding herself, and she cannot do that while hiding. “We have to be willing to go naked,” she says. And if we hurt others by doing that, so be it. Later in the journal, in the context of talking about intimate relationships, she says that “the fear of pain and of causing pain is, no doubt, a sin.” We have a responsibility to be honest, both in our lives and our art. And we should want others to be just as honest with us, even if it brings us pain.

Sarton also contends, in a seemingly contradictory turn, that we must make myths of our lives. But by “myth” she does not mean falsehood. She means it in a Jungian sense (and she does quote Jung in her journal—which I’ll address later). She means that our mythmaking is essentially meaning making, enabling us to turn every hardship into an opportunity for “insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being.” She says that the discipline of work—and specifically creative work—provides support for our mythmaking. She compares said work to an exercise bar that “keeps one from falling on one’s face.”

And yet, sometimes, the myths we create must later be debunked. It is this very debunking that provided Sarton with one reason for writing and publishing Journal of a Solitude. In an earlier journal, published in1968 as Plant Dreaming Deep, she’d created “a myth of a false Paradise.” I haven’t read that book, but I assume it idealizes her solitary existence in her charming 18th century New England farmhouse, resplendent with cut flowers and cozy with a fire crackling in winter. With this current journal, she aims to destroy that myth and address the Hell of her solitary life alongside the Heaven of it. She battles, for instance, the shame that follows an emotional outburst toward a friend or romantic partner, quoting the Roman poet Horace in saying, “Anger is a short madness.” She also battles a raccoon who’s after the cat food in her mud room, and the heartache of not being able to take in the feral cat that she feeds every day but is too scared to come inside. She has a pet parrot (for shame! a bird should never be in a cage!) named Punch who eventually develops a tumor over his eye, and whom Sarton must take to the vet multiple times so that the tumor can be cut away, but Punch is ultimately no match for this foe, and he dies. Sarton writes, “It is not absurd to feel such grief. I am undone. He had given me much joy.”

In short, Sarton debunks her formerly created myth of a false Paradise by laying her suffering out for all to see—or at least for anyone who cares enough to read it. Sometimes the simple act of watering houseplants and thereby fulfilling “a simple need, a living one,” can save her from succumbing to the depths of despair. She realizes that it’s far more interesting how one handles depression than one’s reasons for having it in the first place. On one particularly down-in-the-dumps morning when just the task of getting out of bed feels impossible, Sarton receives a much-needed jolt of energy from the sight of a single beam of sunlight on the “yellow frilled cup and outer petals” of a daffodil that was part of a bouquet she’d placed on her bureau (she kept flowers in the house year-round, either collecting them from her garden or buying them in town, and they are real presences in her life, perhaps saving her life with their beauty). After letting her gaze rest on that sun-shot daffodil for a while, Sarton posed this question to herself: “What do you want of your life?” And the answer came to her with startling clarity: She already had exactly what she wanted; she just needed “to be commensurate, to handle it all better.”

I wonder how many of us could say the same of our own lives. How many of us have exactly what we want from life, and just need to handle it all better?

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I’ve already addressed the “journal” portion of Journal of a Solitude’s title by reflecting on what Sarton had to say about writing and the artistic life in general. Now I’ll address the “solitude” portion of the title. In an entry written on January 8th, 1971, Sarton describes her house as having “an atmosphere of festival, of release,” and she is “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.” And what is solitude, it occurs to me when reading Sarton’s words, if not open-ended time to think and be? Of the many ways in which other people affect our lives, who could argue that they tend to encroach on this kind of time? They require our attention, and they need us to act in certain ways that help them feel comfortable, and they typically want to talk, and to be responded to in kind. They want to do things with us. They don’t want to just think and be. After all, they could do that by themselves. So I like the idea of defining solitude as not merely “the state or situation of being alone,” but also as “open-ended time to think and be,” which we typically do not have if our lives are heavily peopled.

However, ironically enough, Sarton also sees solitude as a way toward “communion” with other people. She quotes French philosopher Louis Lavelle, who basically said that human beings cannot truly connect with one another until they’ve actually become beings, and the way to do that is through solitude. In order to give of oneself as true communion requires, “one must have taken possession of oneself in that painful solitude outside of which nothing belongs to us and we have nothing to give.” This kind of solitude, Lavelle says, "obliges me to realize myself by multiplying my relations with myself.” And only on that foundation can we multiply our relations with all human beings in a way that is meaningful and nourishing.

In what I see now as a continuation of this idea, Sarton says that solitude connects us to what she calls “the universal state of man,” which is essentially a state of aloneness, of separateness. In his beautiful book about grief and praise, called The Smell of Rain on Dust, Martín Prechtel theorizes that the first cry of every newly born infant is a cry of grief, because he has lost the sound of his mother’s heartbeat, which had been his companion for what, to him, felt like an entire lifetime in the womb. Nine months to an in-utero human is basically, Prechtel says, the equivalent of 90 years. Which really makes a lot of sense if you think about how slowly time moves for young children. But the relevant point here is that, as soon as we are born—or as Ram Dass would say, as soon as we “take birth”—we become separate-from and alone. And so of course, we cry and cry and cry. And Sarton asserts that, “when it comes to the important things,” we remain alone. And so to actually live alone and be “physically and in every way absolutely alone much of the time,” one contacts one’s humanity, a defining factor of which is existential aloneness. In reckoning with this profound solitude, in learning how to navigate it, one embarks on what Sarton calls “the great psychic journey of everyman.”

And then almost in the same breath, she says that she learns by being in relation to others. She goes on to say that her choice to live alone is surely not the best solution to what we might call the human problem. She allows that her solitude has enabled her to create art (53 books in all, as you may recall), but it demands a high price, and its currency is emotional maturity and happiness. Sarton suggests that if she could be married or otherwise share her day-to-day home life with another person and still have “space around me and time around me,” then she would probably choose that path. But her own life experiences and observations of society showed her that such solitude is not possible in a marriage—and most definitely not possible if one has children. She was writing this in 1970, and I’d argue that it’s become even more difficult since then for a person—especially a woman—to have ample space and time around her while also tending to a family, or even just a spouse and couple pets. Because now she must have a career, too, even if she might not really want one. Our lives have become much more expensive. And, I’m convinced, our children have become much more needful. But that’s a topic for another episode.

And isn’t it interesting that we tend to focus on the dichotomy of kids and career, with the question being, “Can we have both?”, when meanwhile there’s this other really important part of being human that we’re not even considering in our quest to “have it all”? Can we have kids and a career and some time to our freakin’ selves? Time to simply think and be and discover who the hell we are underneath all the doing and striving and tending to? Time to process what’s happened to us and what we’ve learned from it and how we’d like to proceed?

I’m writing this in the middle of a busy week. And as I write, I see that I am trying to have all three of those things—not kids (thank you, premature ovarian failure—and I really mean that: thank you!), but a husband and two dogs and a household to maintain—and a career (I’m a psychotherapist), and an artistic life with ample time for what Walt Whitman called creative loafing, and time to myself. And I don’t just mean time to myself to create what I long to create, but time to do nothing. Essentially, time to meditate.

For whatever reason, this week—which contained its usual responsibilities of career, marriage, household, and radio show, along with a social engagement and two doctor’s appointments—I was able to prioritize meditation, and in doing that—in sitting still and silent for fifteen minutes each morning after yoga—I realized how important it was to be doing that! A common reason people give for not meditating when they claim to really want to, is that they’re too busy. The ironic thing is that the busier you are, the more you could benefit from meditation and therefore absolutely should make time for it. I speak from experience. The more we have going on in our lives, the more there is to process—but the less of this processing we do.

“I hardly ever sit still,” Sarton writes, “without being haunted by the ‘undone’ and the ‘unsent.’” Same. When meditating, I am constantly amazed by what a ceaseless, tireless planning machine the brain is. What else do we have to do? it says. What else do we have to do? And how are we going to do it? And when? In what order? But that moment of realizing that I have once again succumbed to the haunting, to borrow Sarton’s word—gotten swept up in discursive thought and future-tripping—is a moment of pure relief and freedom. It never lasts long, but I’m thoroughly convinced that these moments of detachment from thought will have a positive cumulative effect, and it is good for my brain to experience them. And I’m certain that the less we meditate, the harder it is to meditate, because there is that much more of what Sarton calls “silt—unexplored experience that literally chokes the mind.”

I’ve been amazed in my meditation practice this week, by how much material is vying for my attention in my own mind—just try to stay focused on your breath for a few minutes and maybe you’ll see what I mean. And then on top of this silt, we’ve got an insane amount of material in the external world that’s also constantly vying for our attention—especially if we’re on the damn internet, which I’m sure Sarton would have been appalled by. It’s a wonder we’re able to function at all.

But function we must. We are humans, and for most of us, that means having relationships with other humans. Even May Sarton knew that she needed to be challenged in the way that only interpersonal relationships can challenge. She knew that intimate relationships were what kept her alive, and that without them she would merely exist, “Bearing…enduring…waiting.” Like wind that forces a leggy plant to be stronger, relationships asked Sarton to “be something, do something, respond.” To grow, basically. She said that love in any form creates the “most demanding atmosphere for growth, and without growth, there’s no point in living.

By the same token, if a relationship was not demanding in this way and did not require that a person’s deepest self step up to the plate again and again, Sarton wanted nothing to do with it. She hated small talk with a passion because it was a supreme waste of time, and she said, “Time wasted is poison.” Which is not to say she didn’t try to draw the real person out, to reveal the complex human beneath the surfacey gloss of pleasantries, but if her efforts failed she would become “upset and cross.” That Sarton equates wasted time with poison might imply that she was uptight about being productive—and on some level, she was. There was a part of her—a part resembling her father—who saw it as a “damaging, sinful day,” the day that doesn’t end in exhaustion due to over-exertion. But another part knew this wasn’t true, and Sarton valued the “empty days” in which her psyche could “rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room, not try to be or do anything whatever.” This was most assuredly not a waste of time. Nor was, she asserted, any time spent in nature. But small talk always was.

When it came to her intimate relationships in 1970, when she was writing Journal of a Solitude, Sarton was also realizing the importance of detachment. She probably would have liked what Anthony de Mello, whom I wrote about in my very blog post, had to say about detachment, or the opposite of what she called “clutching.” “Clutching is the surest way to murder love,” she wrote. I appreciate this image, which calls to mind a fragile bird being crushed within a clenched fist. Like any other fragile thing, love must be handled carefully. We want to hold on tight for fear of losing it, but if we squeeze too tight, it shatters. And we get wounded in the process.

This notion is basically synonymous with “If you love something, set it free.” Which doesn’t mean you stop being in a relationship with it. It means you stop burdening it with your expectations and misplaced needs. Sounding very similar to Anthony de Mello in the book Awareness, Sarton writes, “Attachment, even that which imagines it is selfless, always lays some burden on the other person.” And de Mello would add that real love makes no demands. In letting go of her attachments to people—which again, doesn’t mean she stops wanting to see them or stops caring about them, but simply means she stops making her emotional needs their problem—Sarton is better able to appreciate her own self and her own life “in all its riches, depth, freedom for soul-making.” Life becomes easier when we’re not putting so much energy into clutching and clinging. And letting go is also a gift to the person we’ve been clutching to. Sarton says that detachment is “perhaps the greatest gift we can give to another human being."

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Another major recurring theme in Journal of a Solitude is one I’ve already touched on in addressing its other themes: the difficulty and suffering that characterize life, the despair that defines humanity. Sarton points out that other animals don’t seem to despair like we do, as they are too busy with the tasks of survival. She therefore concludes that maybe we should do the same. The trees don’t despair about losing their leaves every fall. Perhaps we could learn to lose in the same way, trusting in the implicit knowledge that such loss is necessary in order to regain a new set of metaphorical leaves, each such process just another example of how nothing can stay the same for very long.

Sarton believed that most people are walking around in a constant state of hiding. We conceal our pain, anger, and despair because we believe they are unique to us, and that by sharing them we make ourselves vulnerable to being judged as odd or weak or whatever. And while I do believe that we can never know exactly what another person’s suffering feels like, I also agree with Sarton that, in the grand scheme of things, our suffering ultimately isn’t unique. As my recent guest Cat Ashe said in quoting the Mavis Staples song “You’re Not Alone,” “Every tear on every face tastes the same.” Pain is pain. Sarton contends that it can be a comfort to know we’re all in this painful life-thing together and that “very few people could be called happy.” I’d add that it can humbling, too, to realize that our suffering is not special and does not make us special.

But what it can do, if we can let it, is help us grow. To quote Rilo Kiley, “With every broken heart, we should become more adventurous.” But the common temptation is to become more protective of our wounded selves, to prioritize safety over growth. Sarton quotes historian, educator, and philosopher, Gerald Heard, who said, “[A person] must go unprotected that he may be constantly changed.” Not to mention, all that armor is really heavy. Isn’t it funny that what so many of us fear—change—is what Life essentially is? And we could therefore say that many of us fear Life itself? We want the good stuff to stay in place and the bad stuff to move on along. But all of it comes and goes. And all too often it seems, to quote Joni Mitchell’s “Down To You,” that “pleasure moves on too early and trouble leaves too slow.” Sarton writes, “It seems altogether right and appropriate” that we should have to wait for a seed to become a flower, and that said flower, once bloomed, cannot last forever. But we struggle to apply this same attitude of acceptance to our own lives and the events comprising them.

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In another entry from Journal of a Solitude that I see as falling within the theme of hardship and suffering—or what you might call the more problematic elements of human existence—Sarton quotes Carl Jung. The words rang so familiar when I read them that I’m sure I read them before, years ago, and quoted them myself in some graduate school essay or other. Jung said, “The serious problems in life are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so it is a sure sign that something has been lost.” I’ll let you absorb that for a second. First of all, there’s the notion of “the serious problems in life,” which Sarton applies to herself by assigning the problems of solitary life to this category—loneliness being a big one. So if we insert loneliness into the equation, we could recast Jung’s words thusly: “Loneliness is a problem that’s never fully solved. If ever it should appear to be solved, you can bet something’s been lost.” So if Sarton decided to “solve” her loneliness problem by living with someone else—assuming she had that option— would actually still be lonely in an existential sense, because we are all alone in this sense, and she would have lost the many invaluable insights that come from regular solitude, and the works of art that followed.

Another “serious problem in life” that comes to mind for me is loss. Relationships end, loved ones die, and eventually we, too, must cease to be. And lord knows we have tried to postpone this inevitable demise that each of us must face—and thanks to advances in hygiene, medicine, and other technologies, we have succeeded. But postponing is not the same as solving, and our mortality is not a problem that can—or should—be solved. If we did find a solution, life would lose its meaning. And what would be the point in living forever if it didn’t mean anything? I suspect that something has already been lost by our lengthening the average life span as much as we have. With how much more earnestness and intention—and at the same time irreverence and playfulness—might we approach life if we expected to die at, say, forty, instead of eighty?

Jung goes onto say, “The meaning and purpose of a problem seems to lie not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly. This alone preserves us from stultification and petrefaction.” For Sarton, continuing to live alone, and to write poems and journal entries about that experience, was a way to “work incessantly” at the very problem of living alone.

Another problem that comes to mind that many people struggle with is aging, and not just to the extent that it relates to our mortality, but I mean the physical signs of aging, which so many people try to cover up or even erase, through mild interventions like make-up and hair dye, and through more extreme ones like plastic surgery. Where the latter intervention is concerned, I’d say that something is most definitely lost. I’d love to know, for instance, what Courteney Cox would actually look like today if she hadn’t had so much work done. I bet she’d be much more beautiful, despite her wrinkles. And of course I know that it doesn’t matter what I think and that Courteney Cox should be able to do whatever she wants to her body and maybe she’s not doing it to please others, but to please herself. I nonetheless believe that she herself has lost something by having all that work done—she’s lost her own age! Can she not be proud of her age, as Sarton so whole-heartedly is, and say, as Sarton does, “Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.”? Even in dying their white hair, women deprive themselves in this way—not just of a chance to feel proud for having made it this far in this maddening life and for having this white hair to show for it. They also deprive themselves of the oh-so-interesting experience of seeing someone in the mirror who is, because of that white hair, noticeably older. That is a person we must relate to a bit differently than we did to the person who preceded her. Of course if your hair doesn’t make your slow decay apparent, something else like does. Eyelids are a dead ringer. And again, I don’t condemn anyone for dying their hair. I myself never leave the house without make-up on. But I’m not sure how much of that has to do with age, as I’ve been that way since college.

And the way our bodies change is another big one. Menopausal women, for instance, naturally develop more of a belly—it has something to do with estrogen—but instead of engaging in the very interesting work of accepting that belly and maybe even learning to love it as a manifestation of our body’s wisdom, as something our body needs to have, many of us instead work even harder at flattening that belly, either through exercise or surgery. And something very important is lost indeed.

I could go on with more examples of how problematic problem solving can be, but you probably get the point. I’ll just take this opportunity to segue into something Sarton says about tidying up—which is a mundane task that I’m sure many people consider problematic, something they’d rather not do. But Sarton says, “There is a mystical rite under the material act of cleaning and tidying, for what is done with love is always more than itself and partakes of the celestial orders.” When we outsource our cleaning and tidying responsibilities to machines and gadgets, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to partake in a mystical rite. Maybe instead of seeing these tasks as onerous, just something to get through and ideally get rid of, we should focus instead on how we do them. Can we do them with love instead of resentment? Might everything we do be approached as a mystical rite?

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There’s one last theme I want to address from Journal of a Solitude, and that is God. Sarton quotes French Jesuit priest, scientist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Divine Milieu, which is a book I’ve seen referenced elsewhere, including in Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy, and upon seeing Sarton refer to it I decided to finally order myself a copy, so don’t be surprised if that ends up being the focus of a future blog, because every quote of his I’ve come across has been lovely. What is it about those Jesuit priests? Anthony de Mello, Bernard Bassett, and now Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I just love ’em.

Take these words from the latter, quoted by Sarton: “The human soul…is inseparable, in its birth and in its growth, from the universe into which it is born.” So if our soul is our essence and our essence is inseparable from the universe, then we essentially are the universe. And what I ultimately take from that notion is: If I am the universe, nothing can hurt me. Teilhard de Chardin goes on to say, “In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way.” I love the idea—and obviously Sarton did, too—of every person being God’s way of loving the whole world. His way of expressing that love, which transcends words, is “incommunicable” in every way but as a given person or soul. And simultaneously each of us also contains—or “sums up”—the whole world; or maybe you could say we’re distillations of it. Where Henry David Thoreau made the earth say beans, God makes the universe say, well, Henry David Thoreau, and May Sarton, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Carl Jung, and Sarah B., and every other person that’s ever lived and ever will live. But nothing is ultimately said, according to Teilhard de Chardin, if we do not ourselves create something, and through our own activity assemble something coherent from the “widely scattered elements” we contain. We must create our own soul in this way, and in doing that, we help create the whole world. So I guess it’s a virtuous cycle. In reflecting on Teilhard de Chardin’s words, Sarton concludes that “it is only when we can believe that we are creating the soul that life has any meaning,” and we can see that every experience of suffering “holds the seed of creation in it.”

Despite her appreciation of Jesuit priests and her belief that the only real prayer is “Give me to be in your presence,” Sarton did not identify as Christian. To do so, she writes in Journal of a Solitude, "would require giving up all material things and literally going among the most destitute, the sick, the old, or the deprived children.” And she’s really got a point there. I was struck, when reading Tolstoy’s translation of the Gospels a couple years ago, by how very hardcore Jesus was in his total lack of attachments, and by how clear and concrete his exhortations were, to do exactly as Sarton is saying here—to do what Sarton herself is not willing to do (nor am I), and so she does not call herself Christian (nor do I). To be Christian in the way that Christ was—the guy the religion is named after—would be a serious undertaking, indeed. Most people just aren’t that serious. So a Christian by this definition is therefore incredibly rare.

And that’s how I’m going to leave it. My apologies for any scatteredness or non sequiturs or excessive associativeness in this post. Journal of a Solitude, being a container for one woman’s wide-ranging thoughts on what it means to be human, has those same qualities, so I wouldn’t be surprised if my reflections on it do, too. Big thanks to May Sarton for writing down her thoughts and feelings and for living the solitary life that felt like her destiny, and from which so many of us can continue to benefit. I’m definitely going to get my hands on a copy of her other acclaimed journal, Plant Dreaming Deep, and look forward to living vicariously through her again while reading it, knowing deep down that I do not actually want the kind of solitude that she needed to survive. I like to fantasize about having open-ended time and space to myself in some remote locale, but I know I’d all too soon start missing my husband and my dogs, so I’m content to make due with this room of my own, where I write this blog, do yoga, and meditate, and I’m grateful for never being made to feel guilty for any of it.