Since my graduate-school days, severe and chronic insomnia has held me hostage for days on end, and during this time, I've tried every remedy. Over the years of sleepless nights, my greatest solace has always been literature, because the true torment of insomnia is solitude: We have no choice but to spend the late, uninterrupted hours alone with our own thoughts. A book, however, can offer another voice in the darkness, ready to soothe a restless mind.
These novels and essays contemplate such encounters with the self; even when we're the only person stirring between sundown and dawn, they remind us that we have company in our loneliness.
Sarton's aptly titled Journal of a Solitude records the personal and professional preoccupations of a queer, middle-aged writer from her voluntary isolation in the remote village of Nelson, New Hampshire, where she's retreated in hopes of 'cracking open the inner world again.' Her attitude toward solitude is strikingly ambivalent, as her freedom from social and professional obligation is tempered by daily confrontations with the inner demons from which there is no distract.
Collection
[
|
...
]