There is a writer, May Sarton, who says, in the opening paragraph of a book called Journal of a Solitude, about her time spent living in a cottage in rural New Hampshire, “I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my ‘real’ life again at last. That is what is strange ― that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life, unless there is time alone in which to explore what is happening or what has happened.”