![]() ![]() ![]() I’m definitely among those who were won over by Plant Dreaming Deep. As I said in the comments on my post on it, though, I didn’t find it idealizing: in the post itself I wrote, “Sarton’s story here is not of uninhibited bliss: there’s guilt and anxiety, as already mentioned, but also fear, hard work, and constant demands on her self-reliance.” Still, Journal of a Solitude did seem darker and more fretful. She kept this journal for a year and recorded both those heights and those depths. I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines. There is violence there and anger never resolved. Now I hope to break through into the rough rocky depths, to the matrix itself. “ Plant Dreaming Deep has brought me many friends,” says May Sarton early in Journal of a Solitude, “…but I have begun to realize that, without my intention, that book gives a false view.” She worried that she had given an overly idealistic picture of her life alone in her restored New Hampshire farmhouse, which she describes in Plant Dreaming Deep with such joyous lyricism: “the anguish of my life here - its rages - is hardly mentioned.” She wrote Journal of a Solitude as a counterweight: ![]()
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