All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.
It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.
Memorable Quotations: American Women Writers of the Past at Amazon
Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the We, and there is a paradox about personal love. Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The love responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry. Love is an affirmation; it motivates the yes responses and the sense of wider communication. Love casts out fear, and in the security of this togetherness we find contentment, courage. We no longer fear the age-old haunting questions; "Who am I?" "Why am I?" "Where am I going?"---and having cast out fear, we can be honest and charitable.
For fear is the primary source of evil. And when the question "Who am I?" recurs and is unanswered, the fear and frustration project a negative attitude. The bewildered soul can answer only: "Since I do not understand 'Who I am,' I only know what I am not." The corollary of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance and racial hate. The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war.
We wander, we question. But the answer waits in each separate heart---the answer of our own identity and the way we can master lonelieness and feel that at last we belong.
(This Week, December, 1948)
I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.
The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.
The theme is the theme of humiliation, which is the square root of sin, as opposed to the freedom from humiliation, and love, which is the square root of wonderful.