Another excerpt from Joyce Carol Oates's book...

"It's just a turn--and freedom, Matty!"

A niece of Emily Dickinson would recount how the poet one day took her upstairs to her bedroom in the Dickinson house in Amherst, Massachusetts and made a gesture as if locking herself in with her thumb and forefinger closed upon an imaginary key. Just a turn. And freedom.

So with us all, I think. The precious room-of-one's-own. The private place, the sanctuary.To rephrase a famous remark of Robert Frost, our private places are those that, when we seel entry, we are never turned away.


Maybe Joyce Carol Oates referred to the thoughts expressed above by Emily Dickinson, when she wrote...

Does it matter which entrance you use, to enter a walled garden? Once you are inside, and have closed the door.