[…] 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 […]

For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been a collision. I feel too much, sense too much, am exhausted by the reverberations after even the simplest conversation.

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. This does not dismay. The dismay comes when I lose the sense of my life as connected … to many, many other lives whom I do not even know and cannot ever know. The signals go out and come in all the time.

I find that when I have any appointment, even an afternoon one, it changes the whole quality of time. I feel overcharged. There is no space for what wells up from the subconscious, those dreams and images live in deep still water and simply submerge when the day gets scattered.

The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become. It is necessary to be as exact and as circumspect as possible in order to tell the truth. But Z – so much younger than I – has not learned this discipline. She spills over and the effect is that of a lush flower that has gone to seed before it has come into its form, an effect of waste, not of richness.

aus: May Sarton: Journal of a Solitude