Fifty Days of Solitude by Doris Grumbach Page A

thinking it would sound foolish, even somewhat mad. I thanked him again and closed the door, having preserved my solitude a while longer even as I was aware that I was not eager to.
    Jessamyn West ( Hide and Seek ): “The prohibition against solitude is forever. A Carry Nation rises in every person when he thinks he sees someone sneaking off to be alone. It is not easy to be solitary unless you are also born ruthless. Every solitary repudiates someone.”
    The rebel against solitude arose in me when Harry appeared at the door. I realized that I was not so sure about my desire to be alone. And I was surprised by my willingness (fought off reluctantly) to have company. Perhaps I was not so good at living this way as I believed.
    P RAYER: Deciding to say Evening Prayer at the end of my days alone in addition to the Morning Prayers I had always read, I found a short prayer at the back of the Book of Common Prayer that I loved, and learned, and said aloud every night as I lay in bed looking across the whitened and featureless cove and the frozen reach: “O Lord, support me all the day long, until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and my work is done. Then in thy mercy grant me a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.”
    Those were wonderful phrases—shadows lengthen, the fever of life over, the world hushed, work done, holy rest. Unlike so many other prayers, not hallowed names, kingdoms to come, and grace, righteousness, the power and glory forever and ever, the resurrection and the life; but instead safe lodging and peace at the last.
    For days I considered the secular and earthly contents of the prayer. I thought about Simone Weil who wrote a profound essay on the nature of the Lord’s Prayer. Should I be granted the boon of knowing when my last day on earth comes, I hoped I would have the strength (and the memory) to say it to myself, over and over, until the last moment.
    Thinking of Simone Weil, the saintly Jewish philosopher who hesitated on the threshold of Christianity, I took down my copy of Gravity and Grace which she wrote almost fifty years ago. With the kind of luck that had marked most of my reading during the fifty days, I opened to this: “Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your isolation. The day, if it ever comes when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse.”
    This was reassuring to come upon. Not any affection but true affection (which I was parted from for the time being but hoped to return to when my walkabout was over) was not likely to disturb the interior solitude I cherished and feared, in a way, to abandon.
    A NOTE from Molly Sholes who owns a blueberry farm in Rockport reminded me that when she was visiting us here she was the ideal early-morning guest. She came downstairs in her bathrobe, nodded to me as I sat reading at the kitchen table, took a cup of coffee from the Braun maker, and went silently upstairs to her bedroom to think and do paperwork for her second, elective job as selectman for her town, she told me later. There was something almost holy about the silence of early morning. It became even better when, without discussing it, it was shared by a house guest.
    A DAY began with a fine winter sunrise, a long view of the distant horizon slowly taking on color, the sky growing brilliant with yellow streaks transmuted into red, even a royal purple. As I watched, the fully lighted blue-and-white day arrived and the pale yellow-from-sun snow shone like polished ivory. This was the way every good day began. Inevitably the coffee tasted better than it had on a morning full of fog and then snow, and words arrived on the page with some ease, even occasional grace.
    The evening always managed to continue the benign sense that the sunrise had provided. There were still possibilities