Yesterday I had a letter from a young woman who is living alone, a film maker of some reputation. One August day, life brings Sarton a prompt to consider the art of living alone and the necessary preconditions for making of solitude not a resignation but a rapture: Solitude, like a long love, deepens with time.īut what solitude brings to a person is shaped by what the person brings to solitude. In her elder years, living alone on the coast of Maine and savoring a renaissance of creative energy after a long depression, Sarton returns to the subject of what solitude is and is not on the pages of her boundlessly rewarding journal The House by the Sea ( public library). It is especially not for those who hunger for another consciousness to validate their experience and redeem their reality. It is not for those who find silence shattering. It is not for those who romanticize its offerings of freedom and focus, but excise its menacing visitations of loneliness and alienation. Living alone can be deeply rewarding and deeply challenging. “There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone,” the young May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) wrote in her stunning ode to solitude - the solitude she came to know, over the course of her long and prolific life, as the seedbed of creativity.
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