Of Time and the River

Sweet Jesus, has it been two weeks since I’ve had anything to say or time to say it? Back soon, for it’s not that I’ve had nothing to say. It’s merely that the River has been at flood, pulling and sucking as I try to make my way across and I’m not even sure where or why I’m going, only that I have to cross, that the urge to cross the Mississippi and follow the Missouri was not an aberration of nineteenth century society’s geography but the impulse deep in us all that carried us from the first man’s savannas to the very edges of the world.

I promise dispatches from the far country by the next boat. Until then:

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

From: Of Time and the River, by Thomas Wolfe

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