by May Sarton
ISBN: 9780393313901
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I was totally ignorant about dogs. I had fallen in love with one special dog, Tamas’ mother, but knew nothing about the breed except that they were sensitive and beautiful. But luckily for me Shelties (Shetland shepherds) are by nature guarders not hunters, so Tamas can be let out safely at all times, even when I go away for half a day, and will never run off. He also shepherds Bramble, the last of the wild cats, whom I had tamed at Nelson. For her, his arrival as a small barky puppy was traumatic. For three weeks she would not come up on my bed and stayed out most of the time. But Tamas learned, learned not to bark —how moving it was that afternoon when he approached Bramble, sitting beside me on a couch, and swallowed his bark! I saw him do it, saw the impulse come, and then be quelled. And for a while that day they sat side by side, and then, little by little, became fast friends.
Every day we set out together in the late morning after the stint at my desk is done, and walk through the woods, making a large circle on dirt roads, around the swamp and home again. They both sleep on my bed at night, Bramble coming in through the window when she wants to and often leaving before dawn. Solitude shared with animals has a special quality and rarely turns into loneliness. Bramble and Tamas have brought me comfort and joy.
p. 12
In the years at Wild Knoll my life has expanded rather than narrowed. Not only is this house larger and more comfortable than the Nelson house, but my life inside it has changed. I find myself nourished by the visits of many friends, friends of the work who have written me for years and finally turn up from South Dakota, or Ohio, new friends, old friends who are passing by, for everyone comes to Maine sooner or later! I try to see them one at a time. I mean every encounter here to be more than superficial, to be a real exchange of lives, and this is more easily accomplished one to one than in a group. But the continuity is solitude. Without long periods here alone, especially in winter when visits are rare, I would have nothing to give, and would be less open to the gifts offered me. Solitude has replaced the single intense relationship, the passionate love that even at Nelson focused all the rest. Solitude, like a long love, deepens with time, and, I trust, will not fail me if my own powers of creation diminish. For growing into solitude is one way of growing to the end.
p. 14
A SERENE DAWN. I saw the sun first bathing my bureau in rich orange light, sat up, and caught the red dise just as it stood for a second exactly on the horizon’s rim. It is so silent all around that a moment ago when a single wave broke I was startled by its gentle roar.
p. 19
I am more and more convinced that in the life of civilizations as in the lives of individuals too much matter that cannot be digested, too much experience that is not been imagined and probed and understood, ends in total rejection of everything – ends in anomie. The structures breakdown and there is nothing to “hold onto.” It is understandable that in such times religious fanatics arise and the fundamentalist rise up in fury. Hatred rather than love dominates. How does one handle it? The greatest danger as I see it in myself is the danger of drawl into private worlds. We have to keep the channels in ourselves, open to pain. At the same time, it is central true, be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us on moved, for civilization depends on the true joys, all those that have nothing to do with the money or affluence – nature, the arts, human love. Maybe that is why the pandas in the London Zoo brought me back to poetry for the first time in two years.
p. 25
IT HAS BEEN unseasonably warm for the last few days …and today again, a romantic sunrise, clouds edged in crimson just before the sun rose between two banks of soft gray. Now at half past nine the sea is that ineffably calm satin blue and the clouds have vanished. Purity and peace.
p. 37
I want to think about saints, who they are and who they are not, as far as I am concerned. In the first place, people who want to be saints very rarely are in my experience. The saint must not know he is a saint … he is far too busy thinking about other people. His preoccupations are not primarily with his own saintliness-not at all. (It reminds me of that wonderful statement by an Archbishop of Canterbury that “it is a mistake to believe that God is primarily concerned with religion.”) At the moment I think of Eugénie Dubois, who at eighty still does all the housework and cooking-and, like my own mother, always had had help until she was seventy and help was too expensive-walks miles over cobblestoned roads, (often damp in Belgium) to get in food, but has not allowed what amounts to servitude to dim, for a second, her eager participation in all the life around her, her idealism, her strength and wisdom in being always available to her grandchildren, her openness to all that is in the air if one has the imagination to catch it. (It is like her to have sent me a remarkable French book about the violence of the sixties among youth which suggests that it has been a world revolt against materialism and the distorted values of the industrial world.) She is a flame, and that flame warms and lights everything around her. Yet she is often, I feel sure, close to exhaustion.
p. 56
People who say they do not want to pick flowers and have them indoors (the idea being, I suppose, that they are more “natural” in the garden than in the house) don’t realize that indoors one can really look at a single flower, undistracted, and that this meditation brings great rewards. The flowers on my desk have been lit up one by one as by a spotlight as the sun slowly moves. And once more I am in a kind of ecstasy at the beauty of light through petals … how each vein is seen in relief, the structure suddenly visible. I just noticed that deep in the orange cup of one of these flat-cupped daffodils there is translucent bright green below the stamens.
p. 61