“She was not happy, … and when life looked dark and barren without, she went away into that inner world of deep feeling, high thought, and earnest aspiration; which is a never-failing refuge to those whose experience has built within them

‘The nunnery of a chaste heart and quiet mind.’ ”

(The passage concludes, as above, with a paraphrase of Richard Herrick’s poem “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars.”)

— Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience

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Beautiful words. Beautiful thoughts.

They express what I myself always do when depressed, and am now doing (which is why the words seem so to speak to me).

Someone has let me down.

I retreat to that inner world and it sustains me. Now and always.

I always have my books. Writing. Solitary pursuits of the mind.

Others may scoff and invent baseless caricatures of a Silas Marner.

Cruelty becomes them.

— Roger W. Smith

    May 26, 2018