Free The House by the Sea by May Sarton

particulars. Very few young people observe anything except themselves very closely. Then the context—by that I mean all that one brings to an experience of reading and thinking and feeling—is apt to be thin for the young. And, to get to the nub, I guess what I am suggesting is that rarely is there enough of a self there .
    Norma wants to, and has already written a lot, on what she calls “Journal in Retrospect” to accompany her daily journal. (Incidentally I don’t believe one can write every day) and we are having a hassle over defining the terms. I feel there is a huge difference between autobiography (which her “Journal in Retrospect” is) and the journal. Autobiography is the story of a life or a childhood written, summoned back, long after its events took place. Autobiography is “what I remember,” whereas a journal has to do with “what I am now, at this instant.” I hope Norma can find a way to intertwine the two. Often a present experience brings back something out of the past which is suddenly seen in a new light. That, I think, works.
    Besides all this, last week also brought pages and pages of the bibliography of my work that Lenora Blouin has been working on for over a year. I must check it and am slowly unwrapping little magazines and anthologies that have not been unpacked since I moved. It is rather amusing to do all this, but not when I am quite as harried by other things as I am now.
    My first lecture is on Thursday at the University of New Hampshire. They want discussion afterward on what it is like to be a woman poet. So off we go again! I must put everything together this morning.

Wednesday, February 26th
    T HIS SPRING weather makes one dream … today great clouds shot through with light; so, just now, the ocean was dark with a long shining band halfway to the horizon.
    The Julian Huxley I knew and loved is beginning to emerge again after the shock of seeing him, old and crotchety, last October. Yesterday I had a letter from a Swedish friend who remembered us one summer before 1940 at Grundlsee in Austria: “One of the most vivid pictures I have is when, standing in a group of guests in front of the verandah where we ate, I saw you and Julian Huxley descending through the pine forest. You were both tall, slender, dark, beautiful, and radiating vigour and harmony—an impression I have never forgotten.” I read this with shame, startled into memory of the good times we shared, how time had silted them over!

Tuesday, March 4th
    R OSALIND GREENE is dead. Her grandson called me at ten last night to say that that long life (she was well into her nineties) has come to an end. There have been too many deaths lately and I feel the wind at my back as, one after another, my parents’ generation leaves the earth.
    â€œThey are all gone into the world of light,
    And I alone sit lingering here …”
    It’s not that I want to die myself, Heaven knows, but the basic pattern of a life changes radically when there is no one left, for instance, who remembers one as a child. Each such death is an earthquake that buries a little more of the past forever.
    Like Céline, Rosalind is bound into my childhood. Those summers at River Houslin on the salt marshes of Rowley! What happy memories! Chasing Jeannie, the goat, who so often escaped to the marsh; swimming in deep nooks when the tide was high; sliding down haystacks (forbidden!); being taught to ride on his polo ponies by Uncle Frank Frothingham; inventing horrible practical jokes to tease the older generation, Joy and Francesca (a few years older than Katrine and I)—I was enchanted by the Greene atmosphere, enchanted to be part of the family on holiday, to be taken in to the drama in which they lived, even enchanted by Rosalind’s coming each night to say a prayer with each child, although she was clearly “acting a part.” After all, she had dreamed of being an actress, and