After the Stroke by May Sarton Page A

tide rises and ebbs. So it is not silence but a soothing, comfortably peaceful sound.
    But here in the hospital I look out again on the line of trees which were leafless in April and are now rich and dense in their leaves, great green humps against the sky.
    I have been pretty depressed because it looked as though there were no avenue open from this plateau of illness I have lived on for months. But when Dr. Petrovich came in yesterday after lunch, he told me that there is still a last resort for which I would have to go to Massachusetts General for an operation that would readjust the heartbeat and make possible a pacemaker. So I have a new hope. Another few weeks, and maybe.…
    Yesterday I finished Frances Partridge’s last journal, Nothing Left To Lose. I hated so much to finish it and may read it again. A journal like this becomes a whole life one lives with, and in it I saw very well that what makes a good journal so moving is not the big events but tea in the garden or its equivalent.

York Hospital, Wednesday, June 25
    I feel drugged and exhausted today, but if it is the effect of the tranquilizer I am now taking three times a day with Amiodoroni, it is at least better than the previous nausea and pain.
    Outside I look out happily on the green mounds of the trees moving slowly in the wind—and a sky full of lovely wind clouds. The hospital is heaven, I am so tired. But I have nothing as good as Partridge to read. Helen Waddell is too long, and a newly translated South American novel Joan Palevsky sent a bit too much for me in my present mood.

Thursday, June 26
    Difficulty in breathing, so I have oxygen now but the heartbeat is still 110–120—and am very glad to be in the safe cocoon of the hospital again.

York Hospital, Sunday, June 29
    The second heart conversion was done about eight-thirty yesterday morning—again a success, and feeling so well all day, able to breathe and think of what life can be like again, if this time the conversion sticks. Heartbeat 84 this morning (it reached 130 after I got to the hospital).
    Yesterday I finished the biography of Helen Waddell—and am glad I had it with me. How she grew and “enlarged the place of her tent” yet remained always centered in a demanding and illuminating faith in an order in the universe, in a reason for what seemed often in her private life like deprivation. She says it often:
    The truth is that solitude is the creative condition of genius, religious or secular, and the ultimate sterilizing of it. No human soul can for long ignore “the giant agony of the world” and live except indeed the mollusc life, like a barricade upon eternity. (p. 297)
    And later in a letter to her sister Meg:
    Because if one loves, one really isn’t lonely; it is the unloving heart that is always cold, and has no fire to warm itself at. “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and he that loveth is born of God and knoweth God”. Don’t tell me there are theological explanations of it—that the love must be “in Christ.” He that loveth—knoweth God. Which means when the heart goes out to anything, it is, in that moment, close to God.

York Hospital, Monday, June 30
    A bad night, about three hours sleep because one hour after I was in deep sleep I was wrenched awake by a male nurse to take my blood pressure, etc. It was then eleven (a nurse had done it at nine-thirty). At one-fifteen I asked for another pill, maybe slept by three, and meanwhile went into a tail-spin of depression. To manage such a passive waiting life for so many months I have had to bury my real self—and now realize that bringing that real self back is going to be even more difficult than it was to bury it. The fact is that in this state of accidie there is nothing I look forward to, no one I long to see or be with—Bramble haunted me and her loss came back with great poignance. With her death some secret wild place in