Last night Rosen called me. He was so warmly and genuinely worried about Dana that I wanted to throw my arms about him. He was also rather comforting and thinks, as I did originally, that it is emotional and extreme overtiredness—and says the spinal fluid test means nothing as long as everything else is normal (which it is, Dana says).
It is not really that I think Dana is going to die—next week or next year—but that night I faced the fact that he would die sometime and that I would have to live a long time without that understanding and communication that has become so precious to me. I suppose all one can do is to pass on that gift of understanding and communication to another generation.
This must go—love
A.
Decoration Day, May 30th, 1955
D.D.
Today has been warm and nostalgic. Saran, Faith* and Uncle departed in different directions. The rest of us picked up the pieces and ourselves a little. Con wrote a speech for Reunion; I cleared my study a little. Then—oh bliss!—I lay down for an hour and thought out letters to you.
It was good to see you looking better—looking very nice indeed, in the dark CAL shirt and the unicorn tie! But it was hard to talk and I felt I said only irrelevancies. But still it was nice to see you. I only felt you should not have to struggle with conversations like that. When one has not much strength, one should not have to make conversation. The touch of a hand or a smile is enough.
I felt today, during my nap, thinking with nostalgia of old Memorial Days, that next to the kind of lightning communication I have had, that kind of communication (the kind we have had lately) is like “shouting through a mattress with words of one syllable.”† In fact, I feel it has been shouting through two mattresses: the mattress of the exigencies of your illness, pain, hospitalization, anxiety, weariness, phenobarbital, routine; and also the equally thick mattress of my routine: pressure, weariness, and unreality.
It is sad, but it is of the nature of the two situations and it will not, I believe or hope, be forever—in either case.
You are better—not under such a hideous threat. This is all we must think of now, our gratitude at that. (Yes, I did pray too. Not beforehand really—I have not so much faith in the effectiveness of my petitions! But afterwards—in gratitude—the morning I knew you were all right.)
I must go to bed. C. is off until Saturday. Con and I will go to Englewood tomorrow. Friday I return to pick up the scraps.
Many thoughts—good night
Little House
July 4th, 1955 [DIARY]
“The way to resume is to resume. It is the only way. To resume.”‡ I find it hard. Here it is July 4th. The children are off to Camp. C. is off on a trip. I must begin to find myself again—and then the way forward—to work.
This long winter and spring after Mother’s death has been arid, though not entirely so. There has been no time to digest and assimilate what has happened to me: Mother’s death, the birth of Jon’s daughter, Dana’s illness (though he has recovered, he is somehow lost to me, almost like Mother’s loss). There has been no time to think out these things. The steam-roller of time, the business of life has pushed me on. The machine part of life has to go on—or rather, it has to be managed while in process of being turned off. Someone has to sit in the locomotive and pull the levers as it eases to a stop!
Darien
July 6th, 1955
Dearest Land,
I was so glad to get your first letter from Chilco.* (Your father is away.) But oh, the pace I sense in your letter: the backbreaking work, the newness of it, and the lack of being in training, which makes it even harder work than it is anyway.
I think back to the stories your father has told me of his first day’s work on a farm—or Jim, taking over a new job (and not able to ride!) on a ranch. And Jon, on that rolling tub on the Atlantic trip, in the storm with the explosives rolling around.† I suppose it is a kind of man’s coming of age. And one feels one should be able to take it if the others do. (Why, one thinks, is one so much tireder than the others? Because it is new and you are not yet used to it, or in training for it, like an athlete, trying to run a mile with no build-up. In two or three weeks it will not seem as hard.) I don’t know what the woman’s equivalent for it is. Perhaps, bringing home a new baby—with all the cooking, washing, diapers, housework, etc. and feeding the baby too.
In a way, also, I felt like this this winter, thrown into a job at Next Day Hill that was completely new to me, a job that seemed endless, like Hercules cleaning the giant’s stables. One goes to bed each night thinking, I am not equal to it. I shall never be able to get it done. But one learns—adapts—and becomes skilled.
You say: “I guess I’ll learn the hard way.” Maybe all learning is “the hard way.” It stretches us. But in another way, you do not have to learn “the hard way”—not as much as I have, or your father or Jon. This is because you are gifted with a marvelous adaptability. You “ride with the punches” better than they, or I. And you have, allied to this adaptability, a sense of the medium you live in. People: you like them, they like you. You make friends wherever you go; you will always. You will never be alone. Like a boat whose natural medium is water, you will be carried along and buoyed up by the medium. I sense that also in your letter: that you like the men and they like you, even though they are different from you. This is saying a great deal and you have done well to accomplish this.
You probably haven’t time even to read a long letter like this. I miss you. The news from the children is good, though Anne feels strange in the western atmosphere. Scott developed saddle sores the first day (“I’m goin’ down the roa-ad feelin’ bahad …”). Reeve is a duck in the right water.
I must run and get this in the mail. I wish you could come home before college. I can hear you swapping stories of your summer’s trials with Jim and Jon and Father.
[SUMMER 1955, DIARY]
… It is my time to lose my parents—all of my parents—not only my Mother & Father but all those who took the place of parents. But this is not abnormal—or tragic. This is life at its most normal. It is their time to go. It is our time to let them go—in good grace. How to meet it without this terrible tearing up of roots?
One must no longer be rooted in the Fathers. What then can one be rooted in—one’s children? Not exactly. One is the Big Tree oneself now—& others are rooted in you—find shelter in you. One can no longer look for shade, shelter, windbreak in others. One must provide it for others.
And yet—one needs roots of some kind. I find that losing one’s parents seems to rob one of the future. I do not think this is simply a question of one more outpost down between oneself and eternity. Because I felt this same “loss of the future”—with other deaths & blows. Little Charles—Elisabeth. It has more to do with shock—all the connections having been shaken & loosed. The present is isolated—unreal—unconnected (numb & plodding). (It has been this winter.) And the future is non-existent—directionless. This is because the strands are cut from the past. One does not quite know how to go ahead.
“Walk across—not down” is a stage direction given to actors & dancers. I have been walking down all winter—numb, plodding—completely divorced from past or future. But to “walk across” one must have a sense of direction—to know where one is going—what one wants to do—where one wants to go. Perhaps the first step in finding a direction is not to strain ahead toward it but rather to find out where one is. To have & to refind a strong sense of place—of location—of here & now—of balance & pleasure in the present moment. Not a plodding treadmill sense of the present—as I have had all winter & spring. But a motionless & erect sense of it—a sense of joy & pleasure in the immediate—a stopping to look at it—feel it.
This is what I feel like doing now. To have a sense of my house & in making it comfortable—beautiful—peaceful (creatively—as contrasted to the destructive tearing down of a house I have done all winter). Also—very strongly—to make Mother’s beautiful things fit int
o my house—where they can & as they can—differently—in a living sort of way.
Then to enjoy being alive again—to get up without a sense of pressure—or something that must be done—this day—this week. (The first weeks I was back from Englewood I still worked at this pressure—cleaning up, etc.) To swim before breakfast—to dress in shorts—bare-legged—& only scuffs on one’s feet. To eat on the porch! Unhurriedly. To do a little cleaning up each day.
To enjoy weeding my mint garden & my chives—for mint tea & vichyssoise. To enjoy eating—& plan for simple summer meals. To enjoy baths & taking time to cream my face—brush my hair—hard. To lie in the sun & experience & use eau de Cologne—& wear pretty summer dresses at night. To listen to music on the porch at night. I have moved the radio to the window. To read again—the George Sand–Flaubert letters—Delacroix’s journal—Marianne Moore’s essays. Not problem-reading, running along reading—“Walking Across” reading.
To go each day to my Little House. The wasps had built nests in the eaves; the grass had grown around the door & spiders had webs in my desk drawers. But I cut & sprayed & swept. Put up a new blind. C. has been cutting the trees for light, which helps a lot.
It is very hot now midday but I have found I can work on a card table on the bedroom porch—a different setting but possible. I cannot work in the study or my bedroom—too many spider webs, back to household duties—but the porch is free again. I can be my writing self here. I am very pleased about it.
Make the present creative—then perhaps I will find a sense of direction for the future.
Later
At night I read over for the first time since Mother’s death the whole of Dearly Beloved. The first chapters are crammed with introductions—descriptions—explanations. Strained, breathless & lacking in confidence & inevitable—they are self-consciously effortful & therefore lifeless. But it gets better—easier. Poetic interludes—good!
Little House
July 13th [1955] [DIARY]
We have just had nine days of intense heat-humidity and—for me—loneliness (I who long so to be alone!). It was a kind of let-down—a sudden let-down—the children and C. away, still masses of unpleasant jobs to do in the house, cleaning up of accumulations. I felt exhausted, uncreative and at loose ends. The heat and humidity and deadness of air made it impossible to do any but the most mundane physical jobs. (It is easier to push one’s body than one’s mind.)
Nothing one does seems to help. How does one get out of these states? Analyze it? I went down to Bucks County and saw Rosen and Dwight. I was happy he seemed easy and relaxed and warm and gay and I saw his new house and felt his joy and new security in it. Yes, it was good to do that. But when I came back to Darien I still was not lifted out of my Sargasso Sea. I did difficult jobs. The day after I got back from Bucks County I decided to go over and burn a lot of old papers: diary material, notes and letters about the time of and preceding the analysis. A hot job for a hot day: a solitary gloomy job, which made me feel even gloomier. The self-analysis and letters and copies to Rosen were not interesting or moving; I was glad to destroy them.
But the copies of my letters to Dana moved me and made me very sad. (He never keeps any letters and has destroyed all the originals.) Though they were the letters of a patient to a doctor, they were also full of beauty and wisdom, all the working out of my life, much insight that he helped me with and that finally made its way into Gift from the Sea. But also everything beautiful that I discovered or felt or saw—such a pouring out. I brought him all the flowers I found. “O to whom—to whom shall I present these flowers?” It was so easy to give them to him—and so safe—I suppose. My gloom and loneliness in rereading and destroying (I kept some for notebook or novel material) was the sense of loss of someone I could share all that with. I can no longer share the flowers with him. Partly because I have grown—and partly that he has retreated—from our mutual position. I know it is inevitable, but I mind, and I feel less creative because I have lost his ear, his marvelously subtle and welcoming perception and understanding. Perhaps the position is not lost, but shifted, and I have not yet discovered the new position, the new relationship.
I must give the flowers to the many—to writing—to books, not to the one.
Perhaps, it occurs to me, doctors are like artists in this: they also cannot give to “the one” because they must give to “the many.” Is it an excuse for not being able to give to “the one”?
Saturday, July 16th [1955]
Dearest Con,
The weather has changed—twice—since I wrote you so gloomily. First to cool, sunny and dry* and now to damp again—fog-horn going, humidity 95 percent. But in the meantime it has been a better week. I think the weather has a lot to do with one’s spirits if one is on the edge. Also, we are conditioned to summers’ being sunny, warm and dry (Maine again). Those foggy weeks were the violent exceptions that proved the rule and we rather enjoyed them by contrast.
I love your letters. They are a great joy to me because I think we are going through the same thing. It is all part of the adjustment to the new state. It cannot be creative. It is uncomfortable, hot or cold, humid or dry. “We are not supposed to like it.” It is part of learning to live again and enjoy it, which death blankets out temporarily. I think we just have to get through our summers and have our houses, our lives, and our bodies better on the other side of it. You, unfortunately, are living in pressure.
I saw Dana on his way to Newburyport. He seems much better and gayer and is going to write a review of a book, for SRL.† I think he is making, or will make, his adjustment to a new stage in life. (He will never be free but he will find a new way to forget his trap.) And I think I can also adjust to a new set of positions vis-à-vis him. Not lean too much—not expect too much. See his great quality for what it is. I feel it is like some gigantic Virginia Reel. We are back somewhere at the beginning again.
In and out the window
In and out the window
In and out the window
As we have done before—*
Stand and face your partners
Stand and face your partners
As we have done before!†
This week I have had CAL very pleasantly—some cleaning up and some swimming. He is busy and in good spirits—off again tomorrow. Also went to town to see Rosen and Jean Webster‡ for lunch. This was interesting: Rosen on schizophrenia. Sometimes he manages to be articulate and lets one in, accidentally, a little, to what he does or tries to do. This is probably clearer at times like this since it is not about oneself.
What I got was this: most doctors try to dynamite all the bridges between the conscious and the unconscious because they are afraid of the unconscious (shock treatment, drugs, etc.). Rosen is afraid of the unconscious too, but fascinated by it. He tries to (1) keep the bridge open, even the most tenuous bridge—make more bridges, (2) be more permissive than most doctors about schizophrenic behavior, (3) give them what they want so they don’t have to go on asking and asking for it in all those strange ways and strange words and images over and over again.
I also felt very strongly his love of and interest in all forms of life—wherever it may appear (curiously related to Schweitzer’s “reverence for life”). Cannot bear to blanket out life in any of its manifestations. This time I felt better after seeing him.
It seems to me, re your comments on the future (love or creative work giving a sense of it), that being in love obliterates the future (and the past). It simply wipes out all need for the future. This is enough. Or perhaps what it does is to make us see time less artificially. Past, present and future are all contained in it, all continuous. (This is also, incidentally, the sense of time in the unconscious. The unconscious, according to Rosen, has no sense of time; it is all co-existent.) It is like the movement in music called sostenuto.§ (How I love that movement and the word!) Creative work at its best also obliterates the future. So does sex, of course. The idea of creative work, like the idea of being in
love or the idea of what to eat for supper, gives one a substitute present and future. (When Mother was dying, you remember, we did not have or need a sense of the future. This was love, too. I sometimes think this period is reaction from that spiritual high and nostalgia for it—not so much for the past behind it.)
Well, so much for that rambling. I am struggling with the new air conditioner. It came yesterday and was installed. It was a very hot day and it took four hours to get the house cooled down from its noon-day heat. This morning we put it on early and I have been wearing a sweater and the windows are all fogged up and I have the light on!
Land writes it has rained every day in the mountains of British Columbia. They push three hundred head of cattle all day. It is very wet (“I guess I’ll learn the rough way”). What a life you lead out there!