Wandering idly through my mind’s library, pausing at books that I had read long ago, at those I remembered vividly and others that had receded from immediate recall, I realized that somehow, I had always been drawn to non-fiction. Essays, letters and diaries, memoirs, travel writing of the interior-monologue-George Schaller variety, biographies. Especially biographies. Months of evenings spent in the Delhi Gymkhana Club Library, in a special room devoted to biography, devouring the lives of Debussy, Michaelangelo, Toulouse-Lautrec, Nijinsky, Van Gogh, Isadora Duncan … even then, even in my early teens, there were far fewer biographies of women than of men. It’s not that I didn’t read fiction and poetry, of course I did, plays too, but it’s the non-fiction that abides.
Not surprising then, that the three books I’m going to talk about here are all non-fiction, read over the years, dipped into again every now and then, except for the one I read most recently, H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. I’m quite sure I’ll be re-reading this one, too, every now and again.
It must have been oh, more than thirty years ago, that I chanced upon May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude in the kind of bookshop that’s more or less disappeared now. It was in Chicago, near the University, by an author I didn’t know then. Why not, I thought, it sounded unusual, and indeed it was. May Sarton, poet and novelist, would retreat to her house in Maine every so often to recuperate from the world, to be by herself, read and write—and tend her garden. She socialized very little, met just a few locals, and used the space and time she now had to reflect on her life, in her journal. Her solitude allowed her to attend to the small things, the everyday wonders that were part of her life in Maine. It was in Journal of a Solitude that I first encountered an intelligence that could draw back from the simple therapeutic activity of planting, weeding, watering, pruning, and reflect on her own work. Gardening, Sarton said, was the kind of restorative she needed, the assurance that nature provided her of sowing and reaping, an assurance that often eluded her writing. Intellectual labour, she understood, needed leavening; trafficking in the outside world needed solitude. Her journal is a deep reflection on the value of solitude, and of the ordinary; a rumination on how she schooled herself into welcoming both.
I go back to her book again and again.
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