Flowers For Socrates

by Nona Blyth Cloud

For some writers, leaving the comforts of “civilization” for a simple life does wonders for their work. Henry David Thoreau is the best-known example of a writer doing more productive work out in the woods.

When I was born, my parents were living at the end of a long dirt road in the middle of the Arizona desert because there was a housing shortage in Phoenix, so my early childhood years were very isolated. The weekly trip to the library was a big event, and the beginning of my lifelong passion for the written word. Even after we moved “into town,” my family spent a lot of summer vacations camping.

I do have breath-taking memories of the beauty of the natural world that I wouldn’t have if we’d never hitched up a tent trailer to our old Rambler station wagon, and gone off on the roads less traveled. Still, it was a pretty comfortable way to see the U.S.A. and Canada compared to those hardy souls trekking up mountains in hiking boots while carrying all their gear on their backs.

You will note that my wonderful back-to-nature memories are pretty much in the past tense. I am a city dweller, with a deep appreciation for hot showers, washing machines and Internet access.

But it does resonate for me when May Sarton (1912-1995) writes in her Journal of a Solitude: “There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.”

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