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I, too, live in this ordinary world. I was born into it. Indeed, most of my education was intended to make me feel comfortable within it. Why that enterprise failed is another story. Such failures happen, and then, like all things, are turned to the world’s benefit, for the world has a need of dreamers as well as shoemakers.
And this is also true. In creative work—creative work of all kinds—those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.
Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.
In truth, the work itself is the adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is about.
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
Who are they? For me they are Shelley, and Fabre, and Wordsworth—the young Wordsworth—and Barbara Ward, and Blake, and Basho, Maeterlinck and Jastrow, and sweetest Emerson, and Carson, and Aldo Leopold.
“Hitch your wagon to a star,” he advised. “The drop is a small ocean.” “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” “We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.” “Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree.” “The soul makes the body.” “Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view,”
the anguish of knowing nothing for sure about the construct of the universe, or about the existence of a moral order within it—anything that would clarify its seemingly total and imperial indifference toward individual destiny.
All the questions that the spider’s curious life made me ask, I know I can find answered in some book of knowledge, of which there are many. But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus. The world is not what I thought, but different, and more! I have seen it with my own eyes! But a spider? Even that? Even that.
