Breakthrough on Nantucket

Post office in the Nantucket village of Siasconset, on the eastern end of the town/island. Nicknamed “Sconset,’’ it’s where Alice Killer spent a few cold-weather months in 1962-63 as she sought to better understand herself and change her life.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Philosopher, with a PhD, and writer (mostly as a kind of memoirist) Alice Koller, who died July 21 at 94,  was the author of two books that continue to have a following.  These are An Unknown Woman and The Stations of Solitude. Parts of them recall, slightly, Thoreau’s Walden.

Ms. Koller may have often been an impossible person to be around for long. And so her painfully reached decision, in lieu of  the suicide she considered, to hereafter live, but  alone, and stop wasting time and energy trying to meet her own outdated or false expectations, and those of others,  was good for all concerned. She came to the decision in winter of 1962-63 while living alone, except for her German Shepherd puppy, on the easternmost shore of Nantucket, an experience that’s the core of An Unknown Woman. That dog, Logos, and her two other dogs that followed played key roles in her life, becoming her family.

Her rigorous self-analysis as she explored the sources of her misery has lessons for everybody seeking to live with more integrity, independence and creativity, though few will want to emulate her life, which had much poverty and other challenges, some caused by things out of her control and some by her own eccentricity and willfulness. Oddly, her self-involvement doesn’t come across as narcissism but rather as honest, hard-working attempts, informed by curiosity, to come to terms with the reality of her past and present.

Ms. Koller was also a fine writer about nature – the landscapes, creatures and weather -- in the various places she lived, from the moors and beaches of Nantucket to the woodsy exurban towns where she mostly lived afterwards.

One of “Sconset’s’’ old cottages. At least one of them dates back to the late 17th Century.