“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.”
— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River
* Title suggested by that of a Siri Hustvedt novel.
See also Blazon in this journal.