Journal of a Solitude

and believe and keep on believing without signs from me that I do love you and want you for my wife

Sometimes I long to spend the rest of my life doing just that—making things for people I love

I have identified with the perpetual hungerer after comfort, the outsider watching lighted windows.

I feel sometimes like a house with no walls.

I am so glad I don’t have to go out. A whole day before me in which to think and be!

I have said elsewhere that we have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can—if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough—be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being, what the hazards are of a fairly usual, everyday kind. We go up to Heaven and down to Hell a dozen times a day—at least, I do.

for to be able to give oneself one must have taken possession of oneself in that painful solitude outside of which nothing belongs to us and we have nothing to give.…

Poets have wronged poor storms: such days are best;

They purge the air without, within the breast.

What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.

“What do you want of your life?” and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, “Exactly what I have—but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.”

And it occurs to me that there is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much. It may be that I set my sights too high and so repeatedly end a day in depression. Not easy to find the balance, for if one does not have wild dreams of achievement, there is no spur even to get the dishes washed. One must think like a hero to behave l

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.