![]() “Then what do you search for?” And this is an embarrassing question. The very posture of search, the slow movement with the head down, seems to draw people. On a collecting expedition in the tide pools of coastal Mexico, Steinbeck considers what it is we really look for when we are looking:Īs always when one is collecting, we were soon joined by a number of small boys. That is what John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968) explores in some lovely passages from The Log from the Sea of Cortez ( public library) - his forgotten masterpiece that turns the record of an ordinary marine biology expedition in the Gulf of California into an extraordinary lens on how to think. “Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will,” Baudelaire wrote - something Newton embodied in looking back on his life of revolutionary discoveries, only to see himself appearing “like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” What we are really recovering from childhood in those moments of discovery and exaltation is a way of looking at the world - looking for a glimpse of some small truth that illuminates the interconnectedness of all things, looking and being wonder-smitten by what we see. Every day I am suddenly aware of something someone taught me long ago - or just yesterday - of some certainty and self-awareness that grew out of conflict with someone I loved enough to try to encompass, however painful that effort may have been.Ĭomplement with the Buddhist scholar and teacher Stephen Batchelor on the art of solitude, Emerson on what solitude really means, and a contemporary field guide to how to be alone, then revisit Sarton on gardening and creativity, how to cultivate your talent, how to live openheartedly in a harsh world, and her stunning poem about the relationship between presence, solitude, and love. I had a huge amount of life to think about and to digest, and, above all, I was a person by then and knew what I wanted of my life. I did not begin to live alone till I was forty-five, and had “lived” in the sense of passionate friendships and love affairs very richly for twenty-five years. I told her that I feel it is not for the young (she is only thirty-three). I gather she has some doubts about the solitary life. She wants to do a film on people who live alone, and will come next week to talk about her plans. Yesterday I had a letter from a young woman who is living alone, a film maker of some reputation. One August day, life brings Sarton a prompt to consider the art of living alone and the necessary preconditions for making of solitude not a resignation but a rapture: Solitude, like a long love, deepens with time.īut what solitude brings to a person is shaped by what the person brings to solitude. In her elder years, living alone on the coast of Maine and savoring a renaissance of creative energy after a long depression, Sarton returns to the subject of what solitude is and is not on the pages of her boundlessly rewarding journal The House by the Sea ( public library). It is especially not for those who hunger for another consciousness to validate their experience and redeem their reality. It is not for those who find silence shattering. It is not for those who romanticize its offerings of freedom and focus, but excise its menacing visitations of loneliness and alienation. ![]() Living alone can be deeply rewarding and deeply challenging. “There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone,” the young May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) wrote in her stunning ode to solitude - the solitude she came to know, over the course of her long and prolific life, as the seedbed of creativity. ![]()
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