XII. On Solitude - by jamie hood - regards, marcel

Nine months into the year recorded by May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, a stranger mails her the American psychologist Clark E. Moustakas’ 1961 study of loneliness, Loneliness. By her recollection, Sarton randomly opens its pages to this: I began to see that loneliness is neither good nor bad, but a point of intense and timeless awareness of the Self, a beginning which initiates totally new sensitivities and awarenesses, and which results in bringing a person deeply in touch with his own existence and in touch with others in a fundamental sense. It’s 1971. Sarton is nearly sixty and living alone in a restored rural New Hampshire farmhouse. There are the neighbors, sure, and the occasional visitor, as well as Sarton’s parrot, Punch, who seems always to be cold in his little gilded cage. Her cats are living elsewhere for the time being; later, Punch dies. The journal journeys between September and September, a period in which Sarton faced greater literary scrutiny following the publica

Nine months into the year recorded by May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, a stranger mails her the American psychologist Clark E. Moustakas’ 1961 study of loneliness, Loneliness. By her recollection, Sarton randomly opens its pages to this: I began to see that loneliness is neither good nor bad, but a point of intense and timeless awareness of the Self, a beginning which initiates totally new sensitivities and awarenesses, and which results in bringing a person deeply in touch with his own existence and in touch with others in a fundamental sense. It’s 1971. Sarton is nearly sixty and living a