"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
— William Carlos Williams

"On April 8, 1974, as I was skimming through The New York Times, I read a headline that caught my attention: The Rewards of Living a Solitary Life, by May Sarton. I had no idea who May Sarton was, but I knew that I was a lonely graduate student at Columbia University, with thoughts of becoming a Catholic priest or a Peace Corp volunteer, neither of which, of course, defined my own inexplicable turmoil.

"At twenty-three, I had no way of knowing what Sarton meant when she wrote in the newspaper that day: 'Alone we can afford to be wholly whatever we are, and to feel whatever we feel absolutely. That is a great luxury.'

"Luxury? I didn't think that a celibate life or a year living in a foreign country helping people build mud hunts would be a luxury, so I didn't take Robert Frost's advice: I chose the road most traveled. I took a job right after college, married well, raised three children, worked steadily for thirty-two years as a high school English teacher and school administrator, and all along the way I grappled with the savage crocodile of loneliness that snapped at my feet again and again.

"We struggle with two selves: the public self among our wives and husbands, friends and children, and the private self arguing with that contentious being looking back at us in the mirror.

" 'Why isn't marriage enough?' we ask. 'How is it that the love of our children doesn't satisfy?' we think. 'I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody,' we say, as we imitate Marlon Brando in his famous role as a failed prizefighter in the fabled film On the Waterfront.

"Too often when we are tired or discouraged, we fall into loneliness, and then all the demons of failure or lost dreams creep in and attempt to strangle us.

"Many years after I found that essay in the newspaper, Fred Rogers and I became close friends, and he introduced me to May Sarton. May, Fred, and I sat together on the famous swing on Mr. Rogers' porch in his make-believe television neighborhood, and ever since that moment, May and I were friends. For ten years we corresponded, shared our published books, and understood the demands of each other's regular life pressing upon our writer's ego.

"I visited May a number of times at her home in York, Maine, a house that sat up on a small hill overlooking her famous garden and the Atlantic Ocean.

"It was May Sarton who cooked for me my first live lobster. We drank wine together, and as she drove me to a restaurant, she said, 'Look, Christopher, all the lilies of the valley. There!' And she pointed to the side of the road. 'How I love the lilies of the valley.'

"I remember May telling me how grateful she was to the poet Archibald MacLeish. 'He was very kind to young writers, and I swam with him in his pond at his home in Conway.'

"May loved her cats, her correspondence, her lovers, her friends, especially Juliett Huxley. She loved Yeats, and she loved me. We sat on her couch many times and read poetry to each other: things she had just written, things I had just written. She wanted to know about my wife and children, and she encouraged me to keep writing, often saying in her letters that she longed for news from me and hoping that I had a little time for myself to write.

"May was delighted that my parents were born in Belgium because she too was born in Belgium, and remembered the lush, European clouds against the blue, blue sky. May also loved that my birthday was August 3 because that was the day of her mother's birth.

"The wonderful Jewish philosopher Martin Buber wrote, 'I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human face looking at me.' And my favorite poet, William Carlos Williams, wrote in his famous poem 'Danse Russe': 'I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so.'

"May Sarton — poet, novelist, essayist, feminist — helped me resist the temptation to abandon loneliness. She wrote in the newspaper that day, 'Alone one is never lonely: the spirit adventures.'

"And yes, I agree that a writer's life demands, in part, a monastic environment, but he also needs fresh lobster, the whisper of his lover beside him, the dance, the Belgian clouds, swimming in Conway, lilies of the valley.

"We are all contenders, battling the secluded self in the midst of the spirit's adventure."