Tuesday, November nineteenth.
A dreary, dreary, a weary day. But I’ve worked or somehow been ceaselessly busy and now I’m about ready for my nightcap of reading and bed. Four canvases stretched and primed stand to my credit and that alone is one day’s work in effort and conquered repugnance. What a tedious work. My Christmas letters are written, nearly all of them. And as Christmas draws near it seems more and more impossible without home and the children. It will be a huge make-believe for one of our family here!
ROCKWELL’S DREAM
There’s a big storm at sea from the look of the water and the sound of the wind. And the rain falls drearily and on the roof it rattles. From the tall trees the great drops fall like stones; they beat to pieces, little by little, the paper roof, and now when the rain is hardest we hear the drip, drip of the water on the floor. But we are comfortable—so what of it all.
I read “Big Claus and Little Claus” to Rockwell to-night. That’s a great story and we roared over it. Rockwell doesn’t like the stories about kings and queens, he says, “They’re always marrying and that kind of stuff.” Just the same Rockwell himself has his life and marriage pretty closely planned,—the journey from the East alone, the wife to be found at Seattle to save her carfare—and yet not put off as far as Alaska, for there they don’t look nice enough,—and then life in Alaska to the end of his days. And I’m to be along if I’m not dead,—as I probably shall be, he says.
I have just finished the life of Blake and am now reading Blake’s prose catalogue, etc., and a book of Indian essays of Coomeraswamy. The intense and illuminating fervor of Blake! I have just read this: “The human mind cannot go beyond the gift of God, the Holy Ghost. To suppose that Art can go beyond the finest specimens of Art that are now in the world is not knowing what Art is; it is being blind to the gifts of the Spirit.” Here in the supreme simplicity of life amid these mountains the spirit laughs at man’s concern with the form of Art, with new expression because the old is outworn! It is man’s own poverty of vision yielding him nothing, so that to save himself he must trick out in new garb the old, old commonplaces, or exalt to be material for art the hitherto discarded trivialities of the mind.
Wednesday, November twentieth.
To-morrow we hope to get off—although it still storms. There’s a terrific sea running but even such a sea would trouble us less than the chop of the north wind. The wind above all else is to be feared here.