Sunday, February 8th

AFTER ANOTHER DAY entirely alone in the bleak cold, some sort of breakthrough that has been coming since Christmas happened. I think it had to. I wept torrents of tears—even the cat got up and came and looked down at me (I was in bed by nine), while Tamas licked my eyes frantically. But animals are not enough. I am simply too isolated and starved. And it is not the easiest thing to solve … there are people I could call, who would gladly come and have dinner if I invited them. But that becomes a great effort, breaks into my meditations, destroys all real work for the day; so it is not a solution. What I need is “family” and by that I mean a family on whom I could drop in sometimes, with whom I could share a meal informally, someone with whom I could go for a walk. Without Heidi, with whom I have lunch once a week, I would be absolutely desolate.

I hesitate to offer invitations far ahead, because what if I was at work on a poem suddenly? I feel I have to keep the channels uncluttered—that is my first responsibility. Vincent Hepp comes tonight. He is a person with whom I can talk about the great impersonal problems such as Israel, and I look forward to seeing him; yet this imminent visit has changed the color of the week in an absurd way. I have been “preparing” and that has taken time and energy. Only people who live alone, as alone as I am here in winter, can understand the agitation that “entertaining” even a single guest induces.

When I am depressed I realize very well that everything I do, such as tending the flowers, talking to the animals, walking with them, is a kind of wall against woe. A substitute, for what? For one person who would focus this beautiful world for me … and I think that that will not happen again. It some ways I do not want it to happen. I am beginning a new phase. Perhaps one must always feel absolutely naked and abandoned and desolate to be ready for the inner world to open again. Perhaps one has to dare that. This morning I feel better for having let the woe in, for admitting what I have tried for weeks to refuse to admit—loneliness like starvation.