May Sarton: Plant Dreaming Deep

How brief yet how full that full encounter between my new life and its first guests! So much greater, then, the sense of absence when the house and I found ourselves alone together after they had gone. It was my first experience of the transition back to solitude, the moment of loneliness, the shadowy moment before I can resume my real life here. The metaphor that comes to mind is that of a sea anemone that has been wide open to the tide, and then slowly closes up again as the tide ebbs. For alone here, I must first give up the world and all its dear, tantalizing human questions, first close myself away, and then, and only then open to that other tide, the inner life, the life of solitude, which rises very slowly until, like the anemone, I am open to receive whatever it may bring.


Solitude itself is a way of waiting for the inaudible and the invisible to make itself felt. And that is why solitude is never static and never hopeless. On the other hand, every friend who comes to stay enriches the solitude forever; presence, if it has been real presence, does not ever leave.


But fortunately he had a haven when the mood to paint was on him―the second floor of the abandoned schoolhouse. There he had installed a little wood stove; there he had great empty space and good light; there he he could take refuge from all the unfinished business at home and spend hours in front of a canvas. And there I used to find him at the end of the morning.


Like any real friendship―and this was a great one―it sprang out of mutual need and was nourished from mutual riches.


Quig was more complex than he seemed. Although he lived in a perpetual, if lively disorder in his own house, he loved ceremony. He was not a great drinker, but, as he often told me, what he loved what he loved was the ceremony around a drink, the fire lit, the flowers on the table, the enclosed peaceful hour at the end of the day, the good talk. We never met, we three, without feeling that something of moment had happened between us; we never talked without the talk turning to "real things" - relationship and all its mysteries, art and all its mysteries, the natural world and all its mysteries. For me to be with the Quigleys was to come home to the values with which I had grown up, values that often seemed anachronistic in the United States today. For one thing, the world we shared, in ceremony, was completely uncompetitive. Status - social or professional - had no place in it. We conversed like three Chinese philosophers about the things that really matter, and sometimes we had a good laugh about those that don't.

When I had a poem hot off the griddle, I read it to them. Poetry, like chamber music, thrives best on a few listeners, but those one or two are essential. The poem does not live until it has been heard. What would become of me that long winter if there had been no one to listen? Always I felt that whatever I had managed to say was being considered with the utmost attention. Always I felt that the intention, at least, had fallen on fertile ground. The response was in character. Mildred, always articulate, often carried the poem a step farther, gave it a surprising, original insight of her own which might send me back to make a revision. Quig reacted with that feeling silence which is the accolade every poet longs to receive. He was easily moved but never superficially moved, and utterance came hard to him at such moments. I must add to the life-giving silences of Nelson Quig's way of listening to a poem.


My stance had always been that I would go on growing and do better, both as a poet and as a novelist, in time. Now, quite suddenly, time seemed to shrink. The tide might even be ebbing, for all I knew, before I had tasted at the flood.

It became more necessary than ever to eliminate waste. "I wasted time and now doth time waste me" was no longer a beautiful phrase but a probing reality. During snow-bright days and the long evenings sitting by the fire or pacing the floor, I began to understand that for me "waste" had not come from idleness, but perhaps from pushing myself too hard, from not being idle enough, from listening to the demon who says "make haste." I had allowed the wrong kind of pressure to build up, that kind that brings frustration in its wake. I was helped by Louise Bogan's phrase, "Let life do it." But what kind of life?

Just how far and to what end would solitude take me? And how can one have the courage to shut life out when it knocks at the door? Already I was beginning to know a few of the people scattered over the hills around Nelson. Although in some ways remote, Nelson is only two hours from Boston, and even in winter there is a social life, a sophisticated one. Now and then I was invited out to dinner. I found these occasions intoxicating, for at them I not only learned something about the country, or about Nelson history, about hunting or fishing, and I suspect that I was the perfect listener too for many a tall tale. I was at the same time delighted and uneasy. If I began to accept invitations, I should soon be giving invitations myself, and the whole atmosphere of the house would be subtly changed. I was surprised to discover how strongly I felt about not having cocktail parties here, as if the house had already, in so short a time, begun to change me in wholly unexpected ways. So, as the pressure contained in a social life, however modest, made itself felt, it was an awkward time for me. How to refuse kindness, the open door, reject so much good will toward a stranger?

The answer did not come easy that first year, but I finally came to terms with it, and I have never regretted the decision I made then, when I had my back against the wall in so many ways. But at least it was my wall and I had chosen it, "no shelter but a grave demand." The answer became "no" to any purely social invitation, however tempting. The people I would choose to see, I would see, in a casual way that involves pure friendship without the necessity of accepting or returning formal invitations.

I am aware that I have shut myself out of a great deal of pleasure, but I had not come here for pleasure, and that was that. I might add that one of the miracles of Nelson is that everyone has understood. I used to think, in the years when I spent some time in Vouvray in France, and came to know the vine growers around Grace Dudley's house there, that I would never again find a place where I could be so taken for granted as a worker, in just the way a carpenter or a farmer who has a daily job to do is taken for granted. But here at Nelson I have found just that respect for the professional craftsman. It is only city people who turn up and think nothing of interrupting the day's work! No neighbor of mine here calls uninvited.

Through all these anxieties, hazards, losses, depressions, and moments of elation, I had a strong and life-enhancing support in the house itself. There was no day that strange, vivid winter not redeemed by some piece of magic. Music, flowers, books, letters from outside, the changing light, the marvelous silences―none except the last two were new to me, but all were now framed in a new way, to be experienced at a new depth, because of my isolation.

In some ways I had lived too rich a life and lived it too fast. What had looked for a while like a full stop was proving to be just the opposite, a chance for renewal, not so much through new life as through having the time and the chance to absorb what I already had in my pouch, so to speak.

― May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep