Growing old is certainly far easier for people like me who have no job from which to retire at a given age. I can’t stop doing what I have always done, trying to sort out and shape experience. The journal is a good way to do this at a less intense level than by creating a work of art as highly organized as a poem, for instance, or the sustained effort a novel requires. I find it wonderful to have a receptacle into which to pour vivid momentary insights, and a way of ordering day-to-day experience (as opposed to Maslow’s ‘peak experiences,’ which would require poetry). It there is an art to the keeping of a journal intended for publication yet at the same time a very personal record, it may be in what E. Bowen said: ‘One must regard oneself impersonally as an instrument.’ – The house by the sea, a journal, May Sarton