Saturday, August 16th

AT LAST I am living what I think of as my real life for the first time this summer. It may be that quite simply the clearer air has achieved this miracle, that really blue sea yesterday. I woke at four and had a good long restful think about everything, until six, when I got up. One of the things I thought about was Lois Snow’s A Death with Dignity, When the Chinese Came … a remarkable document about Edgar Snow’s death of cancer of the pancreas and the way in which his Chinese friends, including Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, helped in every conceivable way. We think of a communist country as depersonalized, making machines of men; so it is moving to read about what life is like in a Chinese hospital, where nurses and doctors are truly concerned about the human being, where the human has not simply become a ticketed disease. And of course in the Snow case all this was carried to its limit, as Mao sent two of his great specialists for cancer, four nurses, and two chauffeurs all the way to Switzerland to stay and help in every possible way in the last weeks. How rarely are true friends of any country cherished in this way!

How ironic that Nixon, responsible for Snow’s persecution as a Red in the bad old days, should write him a warm letter just before he himself went to China in that false blaze of glory, not earned and merely expedient.

This is the first book I have read in months that has given me a lift. It is possible, then, that the mechanics of dying, or even being seriously ill, need not be so isolating and so devastating for families, always kept in the dark about what is really going on. In China nurses and doctors work together (doctors even help nurses make beds) and every day there is an open meeting with all present, including the family, to talk about what is really going on and what can be done to alleviate pain.

I am so grateful to Mary Tozer for sending me this book and shall now order copies to send around. Let good news spread!

I got up at six and went down in my rubber boots to get some deep watering done at the roots of the azaleas and to pick flowers, with a lovely sense of time, early-morning time, able to do it slowly and enjoy it. I brought in sprays of cosmos, delphinium, marigolds, zinnias, a few early asters. I made a little bunch for the kitchen, all yellow and blue, with some Chinese forget-me-nots as well as bachelor’s buttons in it. The house feels worthy of flowers as the Withrows came to clean yesterday and all the withered petals that litter up the floor have vanished.

I had breakfast in bed, rejoicing in my sweet companions, Tamas waiting patiently beside the bed for a piece of toast and Bramble purring at my feet. She is away so much in summer, hunting in the field, that I treasure her rare visits. When I got up, I changed the sheets and put a laundry to soak.

And all this was accomplished with real happiness. Somehow a cloud has lifted in my inwardness. Perhaps it is partly that the piece on Rosalind is coming out. And also that I feel the book emerging at last as a whole. I am eager now to start on a preface.

Yesterday I had a letter from a young woman who is living alone, a film maker of some reputation. She wants to do a film on people who live alone, and will come next week to talk about her plans. I gather she has some doubts about the solitary life. I told her that I feel it is not for the young (she is only thirty-three). I did not begin to live alone till I was forty-five, and had “lived” in the sense of passionate friendships and love affairs very richly for twenty-five years. I had a huge amount of life to think about and to digest, and, above all, I was a person by then and knew what I wanted of my life. The people we love are built into us. Every day I am suddenly aware of something someone taught me long ago—or just yesterday—of some certainty and self-awareness that grew out of conflict with someone I loved enough to try to encompass, however painful that effort may have been.