Monday, November twenty-fifth.
It rages from the northeast! The bay is a wild expanse of breakers. They bear into our cove and thunder on the beach. A mad day and a wild night. And Seward is as far off as ever! It is now my hope that a steamer will go to Seward before me. Olson finds by his diary that none has been seen to go there for two weeks. I began two new pictures to-day trying for the first time to paint after dark. My lamp is so inadequate in this dark interior—it burns only a three-quarter inch wick—that I can work only in black and white. But I’ve laid in the whole picture in that way. Rockwell spends several hours a day out-of-doors exploring the woods, searching out porcupine trails and caves. It is weeks since I have stopped my work even for a walk. In this “out-of-doors life” I see little of out-of-doors. It’s a blessing to me to have to saw wood every day.
“GO TO BED”
I finished Coomeraswamy’s “Indian Essays” to-day, an illuminating and inspiring book. Coomeraswamy defines mysticism as a belief in the unity of life. The creed of an artist concerns us only when we mean by it the tendency of his spirit. (How hard it is to speak of these intangible things and not use words loosely and without exact meaning.) I think that whatever of the mystic is in a man is essentially inseparable from him; it is his by the grace of God. After all, the qualities by which all of us become known are those of which we are ourselves least conscious. The best of me is what is quite impulsive; and, looking at myself for a moment with a critic’s eye, the forms that occur in my art, the gestures, the spirit of the whole of it is in fact nothing but an exact pictorial record of my unconscious living idealism.