Has anyone read May Sarton's books? I doubt she is still alive, her date of birth is 1912. She writes or wrote poetry, novels, and nonfiction. I am beginning "Journal of a Solitude" and I like it very much. I just stumbled upon it at the library, drawn to it's title. It's not at all new, it's 25 years old, copywrighted in 1973 so she would have been slightly older than me when she wrote it.

My inner world is hard to put into words for me, but she is good at it:

"...I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my "real" life again at last. That is what is strange--that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and "the house and I resume old conversations".

and speaking about the "I want it now" desire for instant success "I wonder whether this is not part of our courruption by machines. Machines do things very quickly, and outside the natural rhythm of life, and we are indignant if a car doesn't start the first try. So the few things we still do, such as cooking, (though there are TV dinners!), knitting, gardening, anything at all that cannot be hurried, have a very particular value."

lol about her dismay about TV dinners but I do admire the depth and beauty of her journal.

I am one who likes my solitude. I've always known I need a quieter, slower life than others prefer. It is my balast. I appreciate that this T gets that and appreciates it. Other T's have wanted to see it as another symptom, something that needed to be righted.

Anyway, I am enjoying this book and wanted to share. one last pasage...

"I live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperment 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. My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there. I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines. I write too many letters and too few poems. It may be outwardly silent here but in the back of my mind is a clamor of human voices, too many needs, hopes, fears. 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."