diaries

May Sarton on Generosity

“Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you,” Annie Dillard wrote in her beautiful essay on generosity. “You open your safe and find ashes.” I feel this truth deeply, daily — for nearly two decades of offering these writings freely, I have lived by the generosity of strangers. It is especially gratifying to perpetuate the spirit of generosity if you have arrived at the ability to do so by way of struggle and privation. No one takes more joy in giving than those who come from little. That is what the philosopher-poet May Sarton (May 3,… read article …

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Terror, Tenderness, and the Paradoxes of Human Nature: How a Marmoset Saved Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Lives from the Nazis

The most discomposing thing about people capable of monstrous acts is that they too enjoy art, they too read to their children, they too can be moved to tears by music. The dissident poet Joseph Brodsky captured this as he contemplated the greatest antidote to evil, observing that “no matter how evil your enemy is, the crucial thing is that he is human.” Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry experienced it first-hand when a smile and a cigarette exchanged with an enemy saved his life while captive as a prisoner of war. In the spring of 1935, traveling through Nazi-occupied… read article …

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May Sarton on the Art of Living Alone

“The people we love are built into us.” …

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Henry James on Losing a Mother

“These are hours of exquisite pain; thank Heaven this particular pang comes to us but once.” …

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May Sarton on Writing, Gardening, and the Importance of Patience Over Will in Creative Work

“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone.” …

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Coleridge on the Paradox of Friendship and Romantic Love

On sympathy, reciprocity, and satisfying the fulness of our nature. …

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May Sarton on Grieving a Pet

“It is absolutely inward and private, the relation between oneself and an animal.” …

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An Introvert’s Field Guide to Friendship: Thoreau on the Challenges and Rewards of the Art of Connection

“We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship.” …

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May Sarton on How to Cultivate Your Talent

“A talent grows by being used, and withers if it is not used.” …

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Thoreau on Living Through Loss

“Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident.” …

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What the Heart Keeps When the Mind Goes: May Sarton on Loving a Loved One Through Dementia

On remaining in loving contact with the intangible, immutable part of the self. …

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May Sarton on How to Live with Tenderness in a Harsh World

“We have to keep the channels in ourselves open to pain. At the same time it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys.” …

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Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny by Papa: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Almost Unbearably Sweet Account of Sole-Parenting His Small Son

“Mercy on me, was ever man before so be-pelted with a child’s talk as I am! It is his desire of sympathy that lies at the bottom of the great heap of his babblement.” …

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The Unphotographable: Jack Kerouac’s Soaring Diary Entry About Self-Understanding and the Elemental Vastness of the Windblown World

Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see — who and what we are — to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called it “aesthetic consumerism” half a century before Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I offer The Unphotographable — Saturdays, a lovely image in words drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and transportive, depicting landscapes and experiences radiant with beauty and feeling beyond what a visual image could convey. …

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Mushrooms: Cellist Zoë Keating Brings to Life Sylvia Plath’s Poem About the Tenacity of the Creative Spirit

“Our foot’s in the door.” …

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Kierkegaard on How to Save Yourself

“I am, in the deepest sense, an unhappy individual who since my earliest days have been nailed fast to some suffering close to insanity.” …

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Virginia Woolf on the Courage to Create Rather Than Cater and the Remedy for Self-Doubt

“One must face the despicable vanity which is at the root of all this niggling and haggling.” …

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Loneliness and the Trinity of Creativity: Ada Lovelace, the Poles of the Mind, and the Source of Her Imaginative Powers

“Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds… may then with the fair white wings of Imagination hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live.” …

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A Chaos of Delight: Darwin on the Sublimity and Transcendence of Nature

“No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.” …

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Nathaniel Hawthorne on How to Look and Really See

“The mystery is revealed, and after a breath or two, becomes just as great a mystery as before.” …

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Life and Death and More Life: Leo Tolstoy on Science, Spirituality, and Our Search for Meaning

“A caterpillar sees itself shrivel up, but doesn’t see the butterfly which flies out of it.” …

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Keith Haring on Our Resistance to Change, the Dangers of Certainty, and the Root of Creativity

“To be a victim of change is to ignore its existence.” …

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June 3, 1947: The Young Jack Kerouac Coins “Beat” While Grieving His Father

“My conscience of life and eternity is not a mistake, or a loneliness, or a foolishness — but a warm dear love of our pour predicament.” …

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Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent on Our Existential Wanderlust

“Wander where you will over all the world, from every valley seeing forever new hills calling you to climb them, from every mountain top farther peaks enticing you… until you stand one day on the last peak on the border of the interminable sea, stopped by the finality of that.” …

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Bronson Alcott on the Meaning of Family and How Our Friendships Humanize Us: His Ecstatic Diary Entry Upon His Daughter Louisa May’s Birth

“The human being isolates itself from the supplies of Providence for the happiness and renovation of life, unless those ties which connect it with others are formed.” …

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