Posted on by Asia Lenae

May Sarton on Silence, Solitude & the Significance of Doing Nothing

Most of us don’t have the capacity to be alone.  Some of us seek a romantic partner to fill the void of our incomplete soul; others of us distract ourselves with endless social obligations and busy schedules; still others of us are so desperate to escape our own company that we’ll settle for the most frivolous forms of socializing, be it superficial friendships or meaningless small talk at a bar.  But no one and nothing can spare us from the frightening fact that— fundamentally— we are alone.

Despite our terror of loneliness, solitude is vital to leading a rich, contented life.  Henry David Thoreau, who famously sequestered himself on Walden Pond, found solitude restorative and rejuvenating: “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.  To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating.”  Pablo Picasso believed that “without great solitude, no serious work is possible” while Marcus Aurelius asserted “nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.” Perhaps no other writer has plumbed the soul-stretching depths of solitude with more candor and courage than May Sarton.  In 1972, Sarton, a poet with no husband and no children, lived in self-imposed isolation in a sleepy New England village.  Her soul-searching Journal of a Solitude offers an illuminating glimpse into her observant mind and generous spirit.

Like most writers, Sarton struggled to maintain a balance between her exterior and interior life.  Without the drama and excitement of outward living— corresponding with friends, going on book tours, hosting dinners and attending occasionally glamorous, often uninteresting cocktail parties— her existence would be dull and not worth exploring.  But without time to reflect, life would disintegrate into incoherence and incomprehensibility.

For Sarton, solitude was salvation and sustenance.  In her diary, she could process the chaos of  everyday existence.  To be artists, we must— like Sarton— find a balance between life and writing, between action and introspection, between the demands of the day-to-day and the demands of the spirit:

“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 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.'”

What does it mean to be “productive”?  In our hurried hustle culture, productivity is getting things done; it’s getting results; it’s producing a concrete product.  The curse of capitalism is we become workers on an assembly line— our worth measured in terms of input and output.  Reduced to economics, our value is calculated in dollars and cents, our status determined by how much we contribute to the deranged hamster wheel of production and consumption.

However, in writing and in art, productivity doesn’t always look productive.  Sometimes productivity is playing and puttering; sometimes it’s pointless daydreams and blissful reveries; sometimes it’s sitting at your desk all day and not writing a single sentence you like.  When we feel as though we’ve squandered our day, we must remember that idleness is indispensable to creativity.  As inspiring, incandescent spirit Brenda Ueland once wrote, “The imagination needs moodling,— long, inefficient, happy idling.”  

Often times, we’re accomplishing a great deal when we appear to be “doing nothing.”  When we’re doing the New York Times crossword puzzle, our minds are actually pondering the puzzle of how to conclude our symphony; when we’re luxuriating in a bubble bath, solutions to once unsolvable problems bubble up unbidden from our subconscious.  Indeed, we usually get our best ideas— not when we’re at our desks, completely and utterly absorbed in a project— but when we’re doing something seemingly unrelated: going on a midsummer stroll, folding fresh laundry (One is reminded of Mozart, who said it was during promenades in the park that his ideas flowed most “abundantly”).

In a delightfully defiant passage, Sarton imagines what is (and isn’t) a waste of our time and challenges capitalistic notions of productivity:

“It is never a waste of time to be outdoors, and never a waste of time to lie down and rest even for a couple of hours.  It is then that images float up and then I plan my work.  But it is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show….Time wasted is poison.”

What makes life worth living?  In a November 11th entry, Sarton suggests living a contented life depends on having a higher goal, a mission, a purpose:

“We are whole or have intimations of what it means to be whole when the entire being— spirit, mind, nerves, flesh, the body itself— are concentrated toward a single end.”  

Sadly, many people— particularly women— don’t have enough open, obligation-free hours to “concentrate on a single end.”  They’re too busy juggling careers, changing diapers, carpooling their children to soccer practice.  Most women’s days revolve around the needs of their husband and children.  Rarely do they have time to pursue their own passions.  The result?  They feel aimless, adrift.  Without a lighthouse to guide them back to the shores of the self, many women float without a purpose or direction.  Much like Virginia Woolf, another accomplished diarist and feminist, Sarton laments:

“It is harder for women, perhaps to be ‘one-pointed,’ much harder for them to clear space around whatever it is they want to do beyond household chores and family life.  Their lives are fragmented…this is the cry I get in so many letters— the cry not so much for ‘a room of one’s own’ as time of one’s own.”

If you’re feeling disconnected from yourself, heed Sarton’s advice and carve out time of your own.  In the noise of everyday life, you might lose sight of who you are but in the silence of solitude, you’ll once again hear the whisperings of your own soul.  

Posted on by Asia Lenae

May Sarton on Why We Write & Why We Shouldn’t Worry About Worldly Definitions of Success

Why write?  In her legendary December 1976 essay “Why I Write,” the late great Joan Didion confessed, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.  What I want and what I fear.”  Writer, teacher and all around wonderful human being Brenda Ueland gave an even more poetic answer: “Because there’s nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.  Because the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.  And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it; i.e. share it with others?”

Few writers have pondered this perennial question more profoundly than poet, novelist, and dedicated diarist May Sarton.  In her timeless Journal of Solitude, Sarton records and reflects on her life during a single year at her quiet home in the idyllic woods of New Hampshire.  Written with a poet’s ear for rhythm and a philosopher’s insight, Journal of Solitude explores such themes as depression, despair, solitude, writing and the writing life.  

According to Sarton, many aspiring writers write for the wrong reasons.  Rather than focus on perfecting their craft, they worry about getting published.  They hunger for fame, fortune, success.  Their eyes glitter with grandiose visions of holding their New York Times best-selling book in their hands.  As Sarton writes in a September 17, 1972 entry, too many writers are obsessed with “making it” and buy into the myth of the overnight success:

“But it is troubling how many people expect applause, recognition, when they have not even begun to learn an art or craft.  Instant success is the order of the day; ‘I want it now!’  I wonder whether this is not part of our corruption by machines.  Machines do things very quickly and outside the natural rhythm of life, and we are indignant if a car doesn’t start at the first try.”

Human beings are impatient when we want something.  Rather than plant a seed and watch it grow, we dig it up every ten seconds.  “Why hasn’t my flower blossomed yet?” we whine exasperatedly.  But a plant can only grow if we pot it in rich soil, water it every so often, tend the weeds, and wait patiently.  

The same goes for writing.  We can’t hurry the process, we can’t demand that we produce “x” useable pages like factory workers on an assembly line.  A work is born in its own time.  Our lives unfold in divine time— not according to the ego’s rigid, unrealistic deadlines.  Sometimes it will take ten years to realize our artistic dreams, sometimes half a century.  But as Rainer Maria Rilke once told a young poet, “In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing.”

Though she knows “making it” isn’t the most important thing, Sarton still wants success.  Her masterpiece of introspection unflinchingly charts the challenging terrain of the artist’s life: the peaks of a perfectly-formed sentence, the valleys of rejection letters and ripped pages.  Despite her undeniable talent, Sarton doubts herself, finds herself debilitated by writer’s block and gets frustrated at her dismissal by critics.  Like any artist, Sarton dreams of one thing: recognition. 

After receiving a scathing review in the Sunday Times, Sarton descends into a pit of depression.  Indignant and dejected, she confesses to her diary:

“The darkness again.  An annihilating review in the Sunday Times.  I must have had a premonition, as I felt terribly low in my mind all weekend.  Now it is the old struggle to survive, the feeling that I have created twenty-four ‘children’ and every one has been strangled by lack of serious critical attention.  This review is simply stupid.”

Despite her disappointment, Sarton finds comfort in remembering why she writes.  It’s not for acclaim or applause, it’s not to earn the admiration of millions or the rubber stamp of approval from the New York Times.  Though she reveres solitude as a vital seedbed for her creativity, Sarton ultimately creates to cross the vast seas of seclusion and connect with other souls.  By expressing her small, singular life, Ms. Sarton hopes to capture something universal— in other words, help her readers feel less alone.

In a revelatory moment of self-awareness, Sarton realizes she’s become too preoccupied with worldly notions of success:

“I have become convinced since that horrible review (unimportant in itself) that it is a message,  however deviously presented, to tell me that I have been over-concerned with the materialistic aspects of bringing out this novel, the dangerous hope that it become a bestseller, or that, for once, I might get a leg up from the critics, the establishment, and not have once more to see the work itself stand alone and make its way, heart by heart, as it is diverted by a few people with all the excitement of a person who finds a wildflower in the woods that he has discovered on his own.  From my isolation to the isolation of someone somewhere who will find my work there exists a true communion.  I have not lacked it in these last years, and it is a blessing.  It is free of ‘ambition’ and it ‘makes the world go away,’ as the popular song says.  This is what I can hope for and I must hope for nothing more or less.”