May Sarton on Aging, Solitude and the Inner Life
“…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…I am open to receive whatever it may bring. It does not always bring happiness, but it always brings life of a special kind. I have waited, sometimes for years, for someone who did not come, whether human or angel. But part of the quality of my life…has been in the waiting itself…Solitude itself is a way of waiting for the inaudible to make itself felt. And that is why solitude is never static and never hopeless.
…I have a sense that the real flowering is still to come, and all I have experienced so far only a beginning. I have touched only the surfaces of the silences…they will take me deeper and deeper, I hope, to their own source, as I grow older….why, in this civilization, do we treat [growing older] as a disaster, valuing as we do the woman who “stays young”? Why “stay young” when the adventure lies in change and growth?
It is only past the meridian of fifty that one can believe that the universal sentence of death applies to oneself. At twenty we are immortal; at fifty we are too caught up in life to think about the end, but from about fifty-five on the inmost quality of life changes because of this knowledge. Time is suddenly telescoped. Life in and for itself becomes more precious than it ever could have been earlier…it is imperative to taste it, to savor it, every day and every hour, and that means to cut out waste, to be acutely aware of the relevant and of the irrelevant. There are late joys just as there are early joys. [In youth] the outer world is only an immense resonance for one’s own feelings. But in middle age, afternoon light marbling a white wall may take on the quality of revelation.
[There has been] the opening of a door into this new silence. And very subtly, in these last rich years what I value most has changed, for more and more I value the inward-turning of the life adventure.”
-May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep