Artist and Thinker Rockwell Kent’s Century-Outdated Meditations on Artwork and Life Throughout Seven Months on a Small Alaskan Island – The Marginalian

Not usually — a handful of occasions in a lifetime, if you’re fortunate — you come across a piece of thought and feeling — a guide, a portray, a tune — that turns into a fountain to which you come back many times, and which returns you to your life refreshed every time.

For me, The Little Prince has been one, and Leaves of Grass, and I Put a Spell on You, and Spiegel im Spiegel. Wilderness (public library) by the painter, printmaker, and thinker Rockwell Kent (June 21, 1882–March 13, 1971) is one other. (Ample gratitude to George Dyson for bringing this soul-slaking treasure into my life.)

Within the final days of August, within the final months of the world’s first international struggle, whereas the Spanish Flu pandemic was savaging civilization, Kent arrived on a small island in Resurrection Bay off the coast of Alaska, trying to find the final word. He was thirty-six, dispirited and destitute, as captivated with his artwork and as pained by the world’s indifference to it as Walt Whitman had been when he self-published Leaves of Grass at that very same age, from that very same precarious place, intimate with the identical depths of melancholy, buoyed by the identical reverence for all times.

Drawing on that have, Kent would later formulate the closest factor to a private credo:

Typically I believe that nevertheless a lot I draw or paint, or nevertheless properly, I’m not an artist as artwork is mostly understood. The summary is meaningless to me save as a fraction of the entire, which is life itself… It’s the final which issues me, and all bodily, all materials issues are however an expression of it… We’re half and parcel of the large plan of issues. We’re merely devices recording in numerous measure our specific portion of the infinite. And what we take up of it makes for character, and what we give forth, for expression.

Kent arrived at this unusual life in artwork by way of an unusual path. His mother and father had pressured him to channel his expertise right into a sensible, worthwhile profession in kind and performance, however he had dropped out of Columbia College’s structure program to dedicate himself to the work of kind and feeling, transferring to a rugged island off the coast of Maine. He constructed himself a small home there and spent his days in solitude — studying Emerson and Tolstoy, and portray; laboring as a lobsterman, and portray. Immersed in Haeckel’s inception of ecology, he grew enchanted with the interwoven lifetime of nature; immersed in Thoreau’s journals, he absorbed the need “to stay intentionally” in wild locations the place he might discover and nurture his inside wilderness — these lush and desolate landscapes of the soul, from which all artwork is born.

So it’s that, in his late twenties, Rockwell Kent voyaged to Newfoundland within the hope of creating a communal artwork college with a good friend within the untrammeled northern wilderness. The hope crumbled in opposition to actuality, however the Nice North solid a everlasting enchantment. He returned 4 years later, in 1914, this time together with his spouse and three youngsters, simply because the world was coming unworlded by the Nice Conflict.

In a small-town group the place the notion of an artist was alien and suspect, the large-spirited, liberal-minded Kent was quickly accused of being a German spy. Pushed away, the household needed to make the lengthy voyage again — Kathleen pregnant with their fourth little one, the opposite three ailing with whooping cough.

However the northern wilderness saved calling to the artist’s soul:

I crave snow-topped mountains, dreary wastes, and the merciless Northern sea with its laborious horizons on the fringe of the world the place infinite house begins. Right here skies are clearer and deeper and, for the larger wonders they reveal, a thousand occasions extra eloquent of the everlasting thriller than these of softer lands.

4 years later, on the peak of his wrestle to assist the rising household, Rockwell Kent returned to Alaska within the hope of resuscitating his spirit and his means to, fairly merely, go on.

“By no means did I enter upon any course with such a way of necessity, of responsibility, as drives me into this Alaska journey,” he informed Kathleen.

Fatherless himself because the age of 5, having inherited nothing greater than his father’s silver flute, which he carried in all places, he voyaged to the Far North together with his nine-year-old son, additionally named Rockwell, and his silver flute. “We got here to this new land, a boy and a person,” he wrote, “solely on a dreamer’s search; having had imaginative and prescient of a Northern Paradise, we got here to seek out it.”

They got here with one duffle bag filled with the warmest garments they owned and one heavy trunk stuffed with books, paints, and provisions. Sprawling throughout three diary pages, Kent’s stock contains these necessities:

• 8 lbs. chocolate
• 1 gal. peanut butter
• 4 pots
• 2 pillows
• 10 lbs. lima beans
• 10 lbs. white beans
• 100 lbs. potatoes
• 1 broom
• 6 lemons
• 6 agate cups
• 4 agate plates
• 4 agate bowls
• 5 lbs. salt
• 6 Ivory cleaning soap
• 2 cans dried eggs
• 1 tea kettle
• 12 candles

These they dropped at Fox Island, welcomed there by an aged Swede named Olson, who had arrived way back prospecting for gold; having failed to seek out any, and having been dismissed by the mainland townspeople as a “loopy outdated man, he had made a house on the small and remoted island, tending to 2 pairs of blue foxes and 4 goats. Kent discovered Olson to be “a kind-hearted, genial outdated man with an enormous retailer of data and true knowledge,” a person of “deep expertise, sturdy, courageous, beneficiant and delicate like a toddler,” a “eager thinker [who] by his vital observations provides his discourse a high quality dignity.”

Father and son set about changing Olson’s goat-house into a house. On both facet of the log cabin, Kent — a wonderful carpenter from a younger age — constructed two lengthy wall-to-wall cabinets: one to carry their provisions, the opposite for paints, toys, garments, and the flute. Within the far nook, he constructed a bookshelf for his or her miniature library — sustenance for thoughts and spirit, as very important because the canned items they’d carried throughout the landmass and rowed throughout the icy strait of Arctic waters. Among the many books had been The Iliad and The Odyssey; Robinson Crusoe and the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen; a guide of Indian philosophy and a literary historical past of Eire; a pure historical past of the ocean and a fundamental medical handbook; William Blake’s poems and Lifetime of Blake — the biography with which Anne Gilchrist had wrested Blake from obscurity a era earlier to ascertain him as a artistic icon for generations, celebrated by Patti Smith as “the loom’s loom, spinning the fiber of revelation,” and casting upon Kent a spell of “intense and illuminating fervor.”

Regardless of these marginal comforts, the cabin remained a ramshackle construction invaded by the fundamental chilly. Kent tried calking the gaping openings between the logs with dried moss, however the moss by no means managed to dry sufficient for insulation underneath the interminable rain. Certainly, from the second they set foot on Fox Island, father and son waded right into a world dominated by rain, an Anne Sexton form of rain. Of their first seventeen days, a single cloudless dawn greeted them. “Will probably be a wierd life with out the expensive, heat solar!” Kent lamented in his journal. The absence of the solar — like every absences of cherished heat and radiance — made its uncommon returns all of the dearer, aglow with ecstasy:

Ah, the evenings are lovely right here and the early mornings, when the times are truthful! No sudden springing of the solar into the sky and out once more at night time; however so gradual, so circuitous a coming and a going that almost the entire day is twilight and the quiet rose colour of morning and night appears virtually to fulfill at midday. We look via our tiny western window at dawn and see past the bay the numerous ranges of mountains, from the somber ones on the water’s edge to the distant glacier and snowcapped peaks, lit by the far-off solar with the loveliest gentle possible.

However by early November, the unremitting gloom started eclipsing the sparse ecstasies of sunshine:

Endlessly, day after day, the journal goes on recording a dreary monotony of rain and cloud. Who has ever dwelt so solely alone that probably the most residing issues in all of the universe about are wind and rain and snow?

As the times grew shorter and shorter and the weeks unspooled into months, the climate turned a type of instructor. In an entry penned the day after the deepest snow and the coldest chilly snap on the report — “the chilly very many levels beneath zero” — Kent exclaims within the diary: “Such delicate climate!” It was nonetheless far beneath freezing, however not almost so far as the day past — a research within the delight of contrasts, the identical contrasts that give form and texture to artwork and life.

Finally, he arrives at a type of existential acceptance, as relevant to the weather as to the ever-shifting climate system that’s life itself:

I’ve discovered to anticipate nothing of the climate however what it provides us.

We create our personal climate, he intimates in an entry from the clutch of February:

Somewhat snow, slightly rain, however altogether a pleasing day. It’s all the time nice after I paint properly.

All through the journal, Kent interpolates so naturally between the fundamental and the existential, between remark and contemplation — nowhere extra so than on this reflection on the totality of his wilderness expertise:

These are the occasions in life — when nothing occurs — however in quietness the soul expands.

Kent quickly finds a brand new form of liberation within the quiet expanse — freedom not solely from the bustling tumults of the warring current, however from the totality of any collective human tradition, which may so ossify id and change into a straitjacket for the soul:

So little can we really feel ourselves associated, right here on this place, to anybody time or to any civilization that at a thought we and our world change into whom and what we please.

Father and little one change into, in the way in which solely artwork and nature afford us, unselfed — not individuals, scarred with identities and ideologies, however fields of grateful consciousness. They go berry-picking alongside the coast of Resurrection, skate on the pond “frozen laborious and thick,” and watch the killer whales play within the cove by their cabin, “their horrible, mysterious, black arms that beat the water with a sound like cannon.”

Recording these encounters with the fundamental, Kent’s diary entries learn like prose poetry, as any totally attentive and pure-hearted remark of nature all the time does — deeply affecting but unaffected, contemporary from the supply. One mid-October night, after quoting from reminiscence a lullaby verse by a German poet born 100 years earlier, Kent exults:

The night time is gorgeous past thought. All of the bay is flooded with moonlight and in that pale glow the snowy mountains seem whiter than snow itself. The total moon is sort of straight above us, and shining via the tree tops into our clearing makes the outdated stumps fairly pretty with its quiet gentle. And the forest round is as black because the abyss.

The next night, a completely completely different guise of magnificence:

To-night the solar set within the utmost splendor and left in its wake blazing, fire-red clouds in a sky of luminous inexperienced.

And the next:

The moon has risen and illuminates the mountain tops — however we and all our cove are nonetheless within the deep shadow of the night time. It’s most dramatic; the spruces about us deepen the shadow to black whereas above them the stone faces of the mountain glisten and the sky has the brightness of a form of day.

In one other entry:

From our toes the cliff dropped in a V-shaped divide straight right down to the inexperienced ocean; and at its base the bottom swell curled, broke white and eddied. The jagged mountains throughout shone white in opposition to black clouds, — what peaks! enormous and sharp just like the enamel of the Fenris-Wolf.

It’s not possible to position oneself amid such staggering magnificence — “it’s so lovely right here at occasions that it appears laborious to bear,” Kent writes — and never want to reverence it, to channel it, to enlarge it and add to the world’s retailer of marvel with one’s personal creations. And so, one chilly October day seven weeks after alighting to Fox Island, Kent data:

We got here residence and had dinner. I lower extra wooden and eventually, after one month right here on the island, I PAINTED. It was a silly sketch, however regardless of, I’ve begun!

He feels “the goddess Inspiration returning” and shortly the floodgates of his artistic drive rush open:

After the morning’s wooden chopping I labored laborious on my footage. I’m now eventually totally launched upon my work with small footage going properly. That’s each a reduction and a priority to me. Any longer my thoughts can by no means be fairly free.

In a passage that captures each true artist’s savage and stressed devotion to their artwork — the type Beethoven conveyed in his letter of recommendation to slightly lady longing to be an artist, the type on the coronary heart of Martha Graham’s beautiful notion of “divine dissatisfaction” — Kent writes one October day two months after his arrival:

Right this moment was a day of laborious work for me. I lower wooden, baked bread and painted on three canvasses… Over to-day’s portray I’m stuffed with satisfaction; it will likely be equalled by to-morrow’s despair over the exact same footage.

He turns into a channel for the majesty round him, seeing in it a mirrored image of his personal worldview, mirroring it again to the world within the work nature attracts out of him:

A splendidly lovely day with a raging northwest wind. I need to someday honor the northwest wind in an excellent image because the embodiment of fresh, sturdy, exuberant life, the enjoyment of each younger factor, bearing power on its wings and the need to triumph.

Immersed in “the profound and attribute winter silence of the out-of-doors,” a grateful gladness slips over him every time the wind components the curtain of clouds:

It’s no little factor to have one’s work on a day like this out underneath such a blue sky, by the foaming inexperienced sea and the fairy mountains.

From the outset, Kent decides that if his artwork is to ever be proven in civilization, the exhibition should be titled “Work of Paradise” — an homage to his love for his son and for his son’s love of the wilderness: “I do know nothing in all life extra lovely than the proper perception of Rockwell in his Paradise right here,” Kent writes in a single entry. It’s a paradise construct of what his literary hero Hermann Hesse, writing in the identical period on a unique landmass in a completely completely different panorama, known as “the little joys” — these smallest atoms of aliveness. Kent data:

Mornings we rise up collectively and undergo a set of Dr. Sargent’s workouts, do them with nice power. Then we go bare out-of-doors… It doesn’t matter what the climate is we go calmly out into it, lie down within the drift, lookup into the sky, after which scrub ourselves with snow. It’s the best tub on the earth.

At some point, wanting across the ramshackle goat-house that’s now his residence, stuffed with books and wind, stuffed with a person’s work and a toddler’s love, Kent observes:

I don’t see why individuals want higher properties than this.

In an entry from the height of winter, he contemplates how such easy life in harsh situations can so salve and enlarge his artistic spirit:

Now we have… turned out of the overwhelmed, crowded means and are available to face head to head with that infinite and unfathomable factor which is the wilderness; and right here we have now discovered OURSELVES — for the wilderness is nothing else. It’s a form of residing mirror that provides again as its personal all and solely all that the creativeness of a person brings to it… and if we have now not shuddered on the vacancy of the abyss and fled from its loneliness, it’s due to the wealth of our personal souls that crammed the void with imagery, warmed it, and gave it speech and understanding.

Punctuating this give up to the grandeur of nature and soul are numerous quotidian tragicomedies. Violent wind sweeps in via the cracks within the cabin and powders Kent’s drawing desk with snow. The chilly grows so ferocious that his fountain pen and paint freeze stable, the foxes’ meals freezes stable, the water pails freeze stable ten toes from the booming range. One in every of Olson’s goats — “foolish-faced Angoras” — eats the broom, then breaks into the home, leaving “containers, pails, sacks of grain, cans, rope, instruments, all lie piled in confusion in regards to the ground.” Such happenings solely foment Kent’s deep-souled reflections on life:

The place little occurs and the gamut of expression is slim, life continues to be stuffed with pleasure and sorrow. You’re stirred by easy happenings in a quiet world.

That simplicity turns into a portal to immensity. In consonance with poet Elizabeth Bishop’s insistence on why everybody ought to expertise at the very least one lengthy interval of maximum solitude in life, and together with his modern Hermann Hesse’s perception into the destiny-sculpting worth of hardship and solitude, Kent writes:

Today are fantastic however they’re horrible. It’s thrilling… to mirror that we’re completely lower off from all mankind, that we can’t, on this raging sea, return to the world nor the world come to us. Boundaries should safe your isolation so as that you could be expertise the total significance of it. The romance of an journey hangs upon slender threads. A banana peeling on a mountain prime tames the wilderness. A lot of the glory of this Alaska is within the data I’ve that the following bay — which I’ll by no means select to enter — is uninhabited, that past these mountains throughout the water is an enormous area that no man has ever trodden, a horrible ice-bound wilderness.

And but, as a lot as nature would possibly gladden human nature, it’s our nature additionally to lengthy for love and reference to our fellow beings. After twenty weeks of such excessive isolation, in an entry penned within the pit of winter, in a sentiment acutely relatable to any twenty-first-century one that has anguished to see an e mail go unanswered or to observe the three dots on their cellphone blink and disappear, Kent writes:

It’s terribly miserable to have your coronary heart set upon that mail that doesn’t come.

His suicidal melancholy returns:

I really feel like making no report of today. I take pride solely of their fast passage.

After which, identical to that — prefer it all the time does and we all the time neglect it does — dawn comes for the darkish night time of the soul, the curtain of melancholy open, and he grows porous to magnificence once more, wakeful to the sunshine of aliveness:

The day has been superb, delicate, truthful, with snow in all places even on the bushes. The snow sticks to the mountain tops even to the steepest, barest peaks portray all of them a spotless, dazzling white. It’s a wonderful sight… There by no means was so lovely a land as this!

Finally, confusions about time come up. His solely timepiece — a greenback watch handed right down to Olson by its earlier proprietor — stops working. Father and son start residing by animal intuition: They rise at dawn, have a immediate breakfast — all the time the identical: oatmeal, cocoa bread, and peanut butter — then eat solely when hungry as they immerse themselves within the day’s work and within the residing world round them, noticing, noticing, and turning these noticings into artwork; within the evenings, Kent performs the flute for little Rockwell and reads to him (however not tales about kings and queens, which the boy tells his father he dislikes as a result of “they’re all the time marrying and that form of stuff”), till they “go to mattress with none notion of the hour.” A typical entry reads:

Laborious, laborious at work, little play, not an excessive amount of sleep. The wind blows ceaselessly. Rockwell is perpetually good, — industrious, variety, and joyful. He reads now fairly freely from any guide. Drawing has change into a pure and common occupation for him, virtually a recreation — for he can attract each a critical and a humorous vein. At this second he’s ready in mattress for some music and one other Andersen fairy story.

With time so elusive, they lose observe of the date. There are sensible penalties: The steamer to and from Seward — the “New York of the Pacific” — runs on a spare and strict schedule, on which they rely for his or her mail and provisions. There are poetic penalties, too: Not sure when to rejoice little Rockwell’s tenth birthday, they designate a best-guess day, on which Kent begins educating his son to sing and presents him together with his sole, valuable current — “an inexpensive little one’s version” of a well-liked pure historical past encyclopedia. It so delights the boy with its depictions of his beloved wild animals that he decides, a era earlier than Borges, to start writing and drawing an encyclopedia of imaginary beasts.

Kent grows aware of how these spare gladnesses — books and nature, freedom and love — are the fundaments of life, and all the remainder is noise. One thing quickens in him underneath the situations of this new life — so spartan, so primal — and deconditions the habits of thoughts by which civilization bridles the spirit:

Right here within the supreme simplicity of life amid these mountains the spirit laughs at man’s concern with the type of Artwork, with new expression as a result of the outdated is outworn! It’s man’s personal poverty of imaginative and prescient yielding him nothing, in order that to avoid wasting himself he should trick out in new garb the outdated, outdated commonplaces, or exalt to be materials for artwork the hitherto discarded trivia of the thoughts.

There are days too quick and darkish to color, too bleak to entry the aliveness from which artwork springs — days when “the spirit didn’t work.” However there are additionally days, rosaries of them, that consecrate Kent’s portray with a state of complete circulate:

It’s weeks since I’ve stopped my work even for a stroll. On this “out-of-doors life” I see little of out-of-doors.

5 months into this Fox Island life, having “struck a high quality stride,” Kent settles right into a peculiar artistic routine:

Throughout the day I paint out-of-doors from nature by the use of fixing the types and above all the colour of the out-of-doors in my thoughts. Then after darkish I’m going right into a trance for some time with Rockwell subdued into absolute silence. I lie down or sit with closed eyes till I “see” a composition, — then I make a fast notice of it or possibly give an hour’s time to perfecting the association on a small scale. Then when that’s completed I’m care free. Rockwell and I play playing cards for half an hour, I get supper, he goes to mattress.

Time and again, it’s nature — so rapid, so alive, so numinous — that turns into the portal to this trance, leaving him with a magnified capability for artwork and a clarified lens on life:

One night time, one midnight out on the black waters of a Newfoundland harbor, the million stars above, and on the wretched vessel’s deck the horde of half-drunk, soul-starved males saying their passionate farewells, — on the boring plain of their life a flash of lightning revealed an abyss; — this night time on the nonetheless, darkish cove of Resurrection Bay, rimmed with wild mountains and the wilderness, sturdy males about you, mad, loosened speech and winged, prophetic imaginative and prescient, — God! however sane daylight seeing appears to the touch however the white, laborious floor of the place life is hidden.

And so, seven months into his seek for the hiding-place of life, Kent writes:

This lovely journey of ours has come to an finish. The enchantment of it has been full; it has possessed us to the final. How lengthy such happiness might maintain, such quiet life proceed to replenish the total measure of human needs solely a protracted expertise might train. The nonetheless, deep cup of the wilderness is potent with knowledge. Solely to have tasted it’s to have moved a lifetime ahead to a finer youth… Now we have discovered what we would like and are due to this fact clever. As graduates in knowledge we return from the college of the wilderness.

On March 18 — their final day within the wilderness, and the final days of the world’s first winter after the tip of the struggle — Kent writes:

Fox Island will quickly change into in our reminiscences like a dream or imaginative and prescient, a distant expertise too fantastic, for the total liberty we knew there and the deep peace, to be remembered or believed in as an actual expertise in life. It was for us life correctly, serene and healthful; love — however no hate, religion with out disillusionment… Ah God, — and now the world once more!

However as he reentered the world, with its falsehoods and human ferocities, Kent carried the wilderness with him, its indelible imprint on his soul. Trying again on his time in Alaska, he wrote:

In residing and recording these experiences I’ve sensed a contemporary unfolding of the thriller of life. I’ve discovered knowledge, and this new knowledge should in a point have received its means into my work.

And certainly it did. The 2 New York exhibitions of his work that adopted his return from Alaska had been artistically and financially triumphal, sparking a brand new chapter of solvency for him and Kathleen, and liberating him eventually to dedicate himself wholly to artwork. Timed with the second exhibition, the publication of his Alaska journal was heralded by England’s most esteemed tradition journal as “probably the most outstanding guide to come back out of America since Leaves of Grass.” (An epoch earlier, the English — a lot due to Anne Gilchrist’s impassioned advocacy — had been early to acknowledge Whitman’s genius when his personal nation derided and dismissed him.)

When the primary exhibition of his Alaska drawings was being mounted, the gallery engaged one in all New York’s preeminent artwork critics to compose the introduction for {the catalogue}. He wrote to Kent to be taught extra about how this time within the wilderness formed his inventive observe. Kent responded with a letter so beautiful, so vibrant together with his genuine spirit, that it was printed because the introduction as an alternative. In it, he wrote:

It has all the time been laborious for me to grasp myself, to know why I work and love and stay. But it’s lucky that such issues discover a means of caring for themselves. I got here to Alaska as a result of I like the North. I crave snow-topped mountains, dreary wastes, and the merciless Northern sea with its laborious horizons on the fringe of the world the place infinite house begins. Right here skies are clearer and deeper and, for the larger wonders they reveal, a thousand occasions extra eloquent of the everlasting thriller than these of softer lands.

Whereas elsewhere in New York Edna St. Vincent Millay was composing her now-iconic sonnet that begins with “My candle burns at each ends,” to be printed months later, Kent displays on the attract of the Nice North’s elemental brutality, on the magnetic distress within the “gloom of the lengthy and lonely winter nights,” and writes:

At all times I’ve fought and labored and performed with a fierce power, and all the time as a person of flesh and blood and surging spirit. I’ve burned the candle at each ends and might solely marvel that there was left even a slender taper glow for artwork.

And so this sojourn within the wilderness is in no sense an artist’s junket in quest of picturesque materials for brush or pencil, however the struggle to freedom of a person who detests the petty quarrels and bitterness of the crowded world — the pilgrimage of a thinker in quest of Happiness! However the wilderness is what man brings to it, no extra. If little Rockwell and I can stay in these huge silences beside the heartless ocean, perched excessive up on the height of the earth with the wind all about us, if we are able to stand right here and never flee from the phobia of vacancy, it’s as a result of the wealth of our personal souls warms the mountains and sea, and peoples the good desolate areas. For the time we glance into ourselves and usually are not afraid. We discover right here life, true life — life wealthy, resplendent, and full of affection. Now we have discovered to not worry future however to stay for the heaven that may be made upon earth.

With the gap of 11 years, Kent appeared again on the expertise to seek out in it the kernels of a bigger reality — private and common, humanistic and more-than-human. (Some essential calibration for the ahistorical bristling trendy readers usually expertise at our ancestors’ word-choices: Ladies weren’t but residents and would lastly win the precise to vote two months after the artist’s return from Alaska, which was not but a state and wouldn’t be for an additional forty years; the phrase “man” was each the unexamined common pronoun — to stay so till Ursula Okay. Le Guin so exquisitely unsexed it two generations later — and a mirrored image of what was virtually potential and culturally permissible for girls’s entry to impartial journey and wilderness adventuring.) Kent writes within the introduction of the second version of Wilderness:

The thought that was born to me within the quietness of that journey — that within the wilderness, in uneventful solitude, males for companionship should discover themselves — has come to be for me the reality. Possibly the one reality I do know.

Go, younger males to develop clever and clever males to remain younger, not West nor East nor North nor South, however anyplace that males usually are not. For all of us want, profoundly, to keep up ourselves in our important, God-descended manhood in opposition to the forces of the day we stay in — to be eventually much less merchandise of a tradition than the makers of it. There, in that wilderness so anciently unchanged it may need seen 100 cultures flower and die, there notice — it’s essential to — that what’s you, what feels and fears and hungers and exalts, is historical because the wilderness itself, wealthy because the wilderness and kin to it. And of these historical values of the soul, Artwork via all its fashions of utterance, regardless of all of them, regardless of the turmoil of this age, regardless of New York and Harlem, metal and jazz, proclaims above the riot of Godlessness that there, in Man, eternally, is all of the very a lot man ever knew of God.