Journal of a Solitude

On May Sarton's exploration of aloneness

I found May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude while aimlessly searching around on Thriftbooks a few years ago. I was an English major and am a lifelong reader, yet I’d never even heard of May Sarton, a prolific American novelist, poet and memoirist. Journal of a Solitude was published in 1973, when May was in her 60s.

It’s a beautiful work of nonfiction centered around her life at an old house called Nelson, where she lived intentionally alone. Public engagements related to her work and travels to see friends and partners pulled her away from what she felt was her “real life” alone at home. The book is, at its heart, a working theory on solitude, both the love of it and the challenge of it.

Solitude is inextricably woven in to the fabric of my life. It is the warp on which I weave the weft of art, friendships, family, romantic love, and writing. It’s a core need that has guided many of my major life decisions, such as moving to northern Minnesota where I imagined I’d find more solitude (instead I actually found a lot of friends, ha!) and choosing to be childfree. It goes beyond introversion, I think, and I’ve struggled to understand and describe it.

Sarton’s book offered words to describe this part of me that I couldn’t find myself. Maybe you, too, love and long for solitude. Or love someone who does. Below are some of my favorite quotes from Journal of a Solitude about being alone, little glimpses of deep understanding into love of solitude. Added emphasis in bold is my own.

“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 my 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 …”

“I have time to think. That is the great, the greatest luxury. I have time to be. Therefore my responsibility is huge. To use time well and to be all that I can in whatever years are left to me.”

“The value of solitude—one of its values—is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within.”

“My own belief is that one regards oneself, if one is a serious writer, as an instrument for experiencing. Life—all of it—flows through this instrument and is distilled through it into works of art. How one lives as a private person is intimately bound to the work.”

“In a period of happy and fruitful isolation such as this, any interruption, any intrusion of the social, any obligation breaks the thread on my loom, breaks the pattern.”

“We are one, the house and I, and I am happy to be alone—time to think, time to be. This kind of open-ended time is the only luxury that really counts and I feel stupendously rich to have it.”

“... boredom and panic are the two devils the solitary must combat.”

“I long for open time, with no obligations except toward the inner world and what is going on there.”

“There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center.”

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