At Seventy by May Sarton

Author:May Sarton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497685444
Publisher: Open Road Media

Thursday, October 21st

I GOT UP BEFORE FIVE, hoping to get a sense of time at my desk, but I did not make it up here till half past seven, after all. Now I have written two difficult letters, one to a friend who lost her father in the spring and has spent the summer recovering—living with nature and poetry. I have been thinking about her so much and wondering how she was, with, as she says, “a piece of my identity pulled away.” The other letter was to a young woman confined to a wheelchair who, with the kindest intentions, has been trying for a year or so to make me into a militant lesbian, sending books, referring me to Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, as though I had never heard of them, and in general treating me like a very old party in need of help. I find this rather hard to bear. I know that she is brave and handling her terribly restricted life with great courage and reaching out wherever she can to life. But I’m afraid I am not a viable subject for her to take on and redeem. It has its humorous side. The phrase she uses about me is “a foremother,” a foremother who has somehow not done what was expected of her and thus must be brought into the fold, chastised, and forgiven. I do not see myself in this light. It has been quite a burden to wrap up and send back books I already have and to have an unwanted burden of gratitude imposed on me, not her gratitude to me (she does not talk very much about anything I have written) but my gratitude toward her. Unfortunately the result has been that I feel badgered and she has become a source of irritation. I believe that our chief responsibility is not to change others for the better but to change ourselves.

The sky over the ocean was almost black early this morning and I liked it. It suited my mood, which is not rosy at the moment. Partly it is sheer fatigue. I have also been wondering why it is that Americans must insist on “equality,” not on the political scene where it is valid but in private relations where it is often not. I cannot imagine thinking even, let alone saying to Basil de Selincourt, Jean Dominique, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, or my teachers Anne Thorp and Katharine Taylor when I was a child, “We are equals”! I was too aware of all I had to learn from and through them, and I gladly gave them love and homage. If there are to be no distinctions between people, if achievement or simply a great wholeness of being, as in the case of Basil, is meaningless, since “we are all equal,” then what is life all about? And for me, at least, one of the most rewarding emotions is that of feeling in the presence of someone whom I admire wholeheartedly and from whom I know I can learn.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.