Wednesday, January 21st

IT IS an awful effort to get going in the morning. Today I have allowed myself to be distracted by Park’s seed catalogue and now it is nine thirty with nothing done except having made out an order! I woke to a bright orange sunrise and a calm blue sea, determined to talk about the real things that are in my head these days. The first is death, not death itself, but dying and the fear of dying alone. Yet why? Everyone dies alone, however surrounded he may be by loving family and friends. I knew this for the first time when my mother was dying. I felt deeply what courage it took and how little by little she went farther away from us. In a way old age is the same … and I suppose one might think of old age itself as dying, for it too demands the giving up of one attachment to life after another. Toward what end? If one could think of it as a journey toward a real destination other than a total blank, everything might take on meaning again.

The other night on TV I saw and heard a Dutch woman doctor who has devoted her life to the dying. She is convinced from what she has actually witnessed that death is so beautiful that if pepole knew, there would be hundreds of immediate suicides … she even said that she was fearful of speaking about it. Her evidence is from patients who have crossed the frontier and come back. (Strangely enough, it is exactly what I imagined when I saw that amazingly anguished Lazarus at Chichester and wrote the poem—how terrible it was to have to “come back.”) For years I have not permitted myself to believe in anything but the improbable immortality I might achieve with my work, especially with the poems. But with the growing sense that man is going to destroy himself and the planet or may well do so in the future that hope was burned out. And my life lost its glowing center. If there is no further “life” and life on this planet as we live it about to be extinguished forever, even to works of art we believed would endure, then reason despairs. What keeps us going? I don’t know. I only know that I felt balm as tangible as a liquor moving through my veins when the Dutch doctor spoke glowingly of death not as the end of a journey into nowhere, but as the beginning of a new one. I realized with the force of her words and conviction how depressed I have been for months. It was a real lift.

What I have been experiencing lately is the sense that whatever I am to learn in the next years is not going to come from friends, that I am really more isolated than I could ever have imagined being … and of course it is partly through my own choice. Lately during this episode of flu I have realized how warming and cozy Nelson was by comparison with this great house in its stupendous landscape, glitteringly isolated. What I have chosen to do here is difficult, but I want to do it. Most of the time I am happy doing it. But there is no doubt that one pays a price in panic for extreme solitude, and lately the panic has swallowed up the joys, at least at moments.

My other preoccupation is and has been sheer constant pain at the violence and hatred that seems to be the chief motor power, the thing that makes people act in the world today. No doubt it has always been there, but now we know more and are confronted every day on the TV screen and in every newspaper by monstrous acts of vengeance perpetrated by human beings upon fellow human beings. Carol Heilbrun called last night and said apropos of this, “Yes, but it is better now because we do know.” But is it? The effect of the barrage of bad news seems to be to create more and more indifference and apathy. This business of violence can only be handled by me by examining and dealing with it through poetry. Is it laziness that keeps me from getting at it? I wonder sometimes whether the sea may not constantly defuse the intensity without which poetry is impossible for me.

Yesterday I saw a doctor and am now on an antibiotic. I just hope it will do the trick.