Sarton - At Eighty-Two: a Journal

At Eighty-Two

A Journal

May Sarton

For Maggie and Susan,

who helped me through this hard year

with unfailing verve and understanding

August 26, 1994

Authors Note

I N FORMER journals I have abided by my rule to add nothing to the days notation. But when I read the typed manuscript of the journal of the eighty-second year, which I had dictated, I felt a strong wish to enrich it here and there with afterthoughts, to make a kind of dialogue out of what had been a soliloquy. Ive enjoyed doing this, enlarging on a brief description that seemed to demand a little more in background or discussion. I hope it will give my readers pleasure now for the extra indulgence in explaining experience first on the pulse and then reflectively.

KAIROS

A unique time in a persons life;

an opportunity for change.

Sunday, July 25, 1993

I AM MORE and more aware of how important the framework is, what holds life together in a workable whole as one enters real old age, as I am doing. A body without bones would be a limp impossible mess, so a day without a steady routine would be disruptive and chaotic.

I tell myself, this marvelous blue ocean morning, that it is not ridiculous that I feel put upon if the framework gets tampered with, if I am kept waiting a half hour by a visitor, for instance, because I am ready for a visit but then use up the necessary energy by trying to be patient. These days I am rather impatient.

Yesterday the framework was done away with temporarily by Pierrot, who decided to stay out instead of sleeping on my bed with me as he usually does while I rest after lunch. He often lies on his back, a long sumptuous scarf of pale fur for me to stroke, and his purrs make me as relaxed as he is. Yesterday, for the first time in a year perhaps, he did not come, and I felt outraged, especially as he was outside meowing for his breakfast at 4:00 A.M. and, having devoured it, went right out to the field, burnished gold these days of drought, to hunt. But I had been awakened from sound sleep and never got it back.

I am reading Barbara Kingsolvers new book, Pigs in Heaven, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. I am happy for her sake, but this novel is not as good as the one before, Animal Dreams. What seemed like a marvelously human broadness of vision about all sorts of people in the earlier book becomes a bit like a cartoon. Irony replaces tenderness. America seen as a cartoon country may make you laugh, but it is not really a pleasure. The laugh hurts and maybe that is what she means.

Monday, July 26, 1993

P IERROT CAME yesterday afternoon and rested with me, so that lonely time is over. Absurd, but he is a key figure in my joy these summer days. The birds bathing ecstatically in the large pottery bowl on the terrace wall are another joy I could not easily do without, and the constant stir of wings in the air another.

Susan makes everything to do such fun, cooking delicious meals and looking appreciatively at a video with me. Yesterday and the day before it has been Jane Eyre, which Sue Hilsinger and Lois gave me for my birthday.

It is not quite as overwhelmingly wonderful as Dickenss Little Dorrit, which we saw for hours last week, but it is a far more limiting scene. What I enjoy most is being inside a great English country house. I have never actually experienced this except perhaps that weekend at Dorothy Wellesleys in the thirties. That was the real thing one longs for as a tourist being shown around dead-feeling rooms, and oneself unrecognized.

Ruth Pitter introduced me and arranged that I join her at Penns-in-the-Rocks for a weekend. One of the things that impressed me were the extraordinary bibelots, a small table in the drawing room covered with lapis lazuli small boxes, also the decoration over the fireplace in the dining room painted by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. I watched Cornish, the butler, with admiration. Lovely to hear Dorothy addressed as Your Grace. She looked at that time rather like the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland. I slept in the bedroom that Yeats had always slept in, enough to keep me awake hoping for a ghost. The next day Dorothy Wellesley did read from some of her poems, of which I have learned a few by heart.

Thought

I seem to hold thee like a dream

With pargeters hands, now light now dense,

My exquisite compound of sense,

My lifted water glittered on,

My form, my matter Plato knew.

Thou art a dream within a dream;

So I am quiet till my last day,

Capable now of air or clay,

Contesting neither holding either,

Content thou in my vision too;

Take thou the hard Platonic way.

For love one way is greatly told,

But greatlier far than men have seen,

Unless within a block of ice

Within a block of veriest green

Thought makes eternal sacrifice.

It is tragic to see a genius as she was deteriorating in old age. We had no wine at dinner because Dorothy was an alcoholic, drinking claret in her bedroom all day, but Cornish was persuaded to bring me a gin and tonic, thank goodness.

How often I thought of her and Wordsworths poem for the poet Chatterton: We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;/But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

Friday, July 30, 1993

T WO DAYS ago we had a tremendous time of joy and communion with three dear friends, Nancy and George Mairs and Susan Kenney. George is so expert at getting Nancy out of the car and into her special wheelchair it seems like an easy thing, but of course, it is difficult, and then the wheelchair has to go over the flat stones of the path and terrace and up two steps into the house. Nancy has MS and George has cancer, in remission now, but last year it was very bad, so they are a little like magicians making the impossible happen every day. What flows out to others is simply love, such warm, understanding love, one feels nourished and blissful.

Susan Kenney lost her beloved husband, Ed, eight months ago. For two years her life was given over to taking him back and forth from hospitals and the doctors hoping to find a cure or even at one time a diagnosis. It was a long hell.

We were all walking wounded except Susan, the youngest of us, and all writers except George. It is so rare for me to be with writers, writers I greatly admire and feel at home with. That was bliss also.

Champagne is the best drink to foster good conversation, and we created it together for almost two hours. I felt quite exhausted then, but fulfilled in some area of my being which is often rather bereft.

I dont suppose anything can happen as life-giving as this for a yearIll be thinking of it often.

Saturday, July 31, 1993

T ODAY A remarkable letter from Cathy Sander, the Wellesley student who was hired by Eleanor Blair to do odd jobs and became deeply involved and caring in the last two years. There is something so touching about that relationship between an eighteen-year-old and a ninety-six-year-old woman, blind and quite deaf, living alone, coming to the end of her strength. Cathy says in her letter:

You know, May, the most giving relationship Ive had my entire life was with Eleanor. I always felt so loved when I was with her. Eleanor really taught me how to love, to give of myself without asking in return, to love because love is beautiful not because I want love in return. Our love for each other just seemed to flow, giving and taking in turn. The hours I spent with her were among the best times in my life. Nothing was expected. Nothing was taken that was not offered.