The House by the Sea Read Online Free

wisdom of common speech, which we so often miss, speaks to us in the phrase, ‘He is growing old.’ We use it indiscriminately about those who are in truth growing into old age, into the final flowering and meaning of their lives, and about those who are being dragged into it, protesting, resisting, crying out against their inevitable imprisonment. Only to one who can say with his whole being, ‘Come, let’s away to prison,’ do the lines which follow apply.
    â€œ ‘We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage.’ We may think of Cordelia in this context as the old man’s inner child—the love and courage, the simplicity, and innocence of his soul, to which suffering has united him.”
    Growing old … what is the opposite of “growing”? I ask myself. “Withering” perhaps? It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it. But there is also an opposite to growth which is regression, in psychoanalytic terms going back to infantile modes of being. And maybe growing old is accepting regression as part of the whole mysterious process. The child in the old person is a precious part of his being able to handle the slow imprisonment. As he is able to do less, he enjoys everything in the present, with a childlike enjoyment. It is a saving grace, and I see it when Judy is with me here.
    Growing old is certainly far easier for people like me who have no job from which to retire at a given age. I can’t stop doing what I have always done, trying to sort out and shape experience. The journal is a good way to do this at a less intense level than by creating a work of art as highly organized as a poem, for instance, or the sustained effort a novel requires. I find it wonderful to have a receptacle into which to pour vivid momentary insights, and a way of ordering day-to-day experience (as opposed to Maslow’s “peak experiences,” which would require poetry). If there is an art to the keeping of a journal intended for publication yet at the same time a very personal record, it may be in what E. Bowen said: “One must regard oneself impersonally as an instrument.”

Monday, November 25th
    O N THE 21st I fasted to be in communion with the 250,000 who did so, especially students in New England. I have felt so strongly that we could not sit passively while so many starve in Africa and I have been miserable for weeks that Ford does nothing and Butz and the others more or less wrecked the food conference in Rome, when some positive action on our part might have lit the fire. It is not enough to send money all the time as we all do. Somehow one has to give part of oneself.
    It was a rainy miserable day and I had a lot of errands to do here and there. By noon I felt rather cross and by six P.M. I was counting the hours to morning! It was a very good experience and I mean to do it again.
    I have nightmares about us Americans, weighed down as we are by “things” and by excessive eating. I read yesterday that Americans eat fifty times the meat the British do, for instance. Overeating makes people logy in a different way from the apathy induced by too little nourishment, but I feel sure that it takes the edge off perception. Many of us are literally weighed down. Who can imagine hunger who has never experienced it, even for one day?

Friday, November 29th
    A PALE BLUE sea drifting off into the dusk. Raymond, my part-time gardener, came to hill up the roses. He teases me about not trusting him and it is true that by some magic sixth sense he does get things done—at the 11th hour! He rototilled the picking garden just before the snow, while I raked most of the leaves from under the big maple and the flower beds near it.
    It is the day after Thanksgiving. Judy is here, of course, and we had a fine Thanksgiving day. It was cold and windy so that the open fire in the cozy room seemed a necessity rather than a luxury. We had