{"id":132261,"date":"2019-05-20T12:00:50","date_gmt":"2019-05-20T11:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=132261"},"modified":"2019-04-25T11:06:45","modified_gmt":"2019-04-25T10:06:45","slug":"the-art-of-being-alone-may-sartons-stunning-1938-ode-to-solitude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/05\/the-art-of-being-alone-may-sartons-stunning-1938-ode-to-solitude\/","title":{"rendered":"The Art of Being Alone: May Sarton\u2019s Stunning 1938 Ode to Solitude"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThere is no place more intimate than the spirit alone.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u201cThe best things in life happen to you when you\u2019re alone,\u201d<\/em> artist Agnes Martin reflected<\/a> in her final years. \u201cOh comforting solitude, how favorable thou art to original thought!\u201d<\/em> wrote the founding father of neuroscience in his advice to young scientists<\/a>. The poet Elizabeth Bishop believed<\/a> that everyone should experience at least one prolonged period of solitude in life. For in true solitude, as Wendell Berry so memorably observed<\/a>, \u201cone\u2019s inner voices become audible [and] in consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives\u201d \u2014 an intuitive understanding of what psychologists have since found: that \u201cfertile solitude\u201d<\/a> is the basic unit of a full and contented life.<\/p>\n

But in the neutral state of aloneness, the psychoemotional line between solitude and loneliness can be as thin as a razor\u2019s edge and as lacerating to the soul. How to draw it skillfully in orienting ourselves to the world, exterior and interior, is what poet, novelist, and memoirist May Sarton<\/strong> (May 3, 1912\u2013July 16, 1995) explores in a beautiful poem she penned ten days after her twenty-sixth birthday, decades before she came to contemplate solitude in stunning prose<\/a>. Originally titled \u201cConsiderations,\u201d the poem was slightly revised and published the following year as \u201cCanticle 6\u201d in Sarton\u2019s second poetry collection, the altogether sublime Inner Landscape<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n