Perhaps Albert Camus was right in asserting that “there is no love of life without despair of life,” but this is a truth hard to take in and even harder to swallow when one is in the throes of depression. So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands. The value of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within … But the storm, painful as it is, might have had some truth in it. In another journal entry penned three days later, in the grip of her recurrent struggle with depression, Sarton revisits the question of the difficult, necessary self-confrontations that solitude makes possible:
Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone… Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. That is what is strange-that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. I look out on the maple, where a few leaves have turned yellow, and listen to Punch, the parrot, talking to himself and to the rain ticking gently against the windows. In an entry from September 15, 1972, Sarton writes: Out of these twelve private months arises the eternity of the human experience with its varied universal capacities for astonishment and sorrow, despair and creative vitality. Norton, 1993), Sarton records and reflects on her interior life in the course of one year, her 60th, with remarkable candor and courage.
This divine discontent, this disequilibrium, this state of inner tension is the source of artistic energy.”įew writers have articulated the dance between this “divine discontent” and creative fulfillment more memorably than the poet, novelist, essayist, and diarist May Sarton (1912–1995). A generation later, Humphrey Trevelyan, a British diplomat and author, argued that great artists must have the courage to despair, that they “must be shaken by the naked truths that will not be comforted.
“A great deal of poetic work has arisen from various despairs,” wrote Lou Andreas-Salomé, the first woman psychoanalyst, in a consolatory letter to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke as he was wrestling with depression.
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