Art by Sir Quentin Blake from Michael Rosen’s Sad Book I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines. 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 have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose - to find out what I think, to know where I stand. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting, and tormented self.

I feel too much, sense too much, am exhausted by the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. She considers solitude as the seedbed of self-discovery:įor a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been a collision. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone… Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. 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.

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last.

I look out on the maple, where a few leaves have turned yellow, and listen to Punch, the parrot, talking to himself and to the rain ticking gently against the windows. In an entry from September 15, 1972, Sarton writes: Out of these twelve private months arises the eternity of the human experience with its varied universal capacities for astonishment and sorrow, hollowing despair and creative vitality. In her Journal of a Solitude ( public library), Sarton records and reflects on her interior life in the course of one year, her sixtieth, with remarkable candor and courage. This divine discontent, this disequilibrium, this state of inner tension is the source of artistic energy.”įew artists have articulated the dance between this “divine discontent” and creative fulfillment more memorably than the poet, novelist, essayist, and diarist May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995). A generation later, with an eye to what made Goethe a genius, Humphrey Trevelyan argued that great artists must have the courage to despair, that they “must be shaken by the naked truths that will not be comforted. “A great deal of poetic work has arisen from various despairs,” wrote Lou Andreas-Salomé, the first woman psychoanalyst, in a consolatory letter to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke as he was wrestling with depression, nearly a century before psychologists came to study the nonlinear relationship between creativity and mental illness.

May sarton solitude