I've been all day reading a 1960 biography of Thomas Wolfe whose four huge novels I devoured during my Freshman year at the University of Arizona. My other enthusiasm that year was Maxwell Anderson's play, Winterset. All of which goes to show that I was about the age and emotional development of a college freshman. I still remember the enthusiasm with which I attacked those giant books and surfed along, borne on the tide of words, and in love with America, too, as he was.
I still remember the shock with which I met my introduction to the concept that language was inadequate to the expression of all human experience. Deep in my heart, I still really think that mastery of language will enable all thought and experience to be expressed. . . this is just the hopeful thought of a lifelong reader.
Tonight on my beloved Vox, they are playing Haydn's Creation, along the beauiful strains of which I have been carried back to the early 1980s when I sang with a junior college choir and got a great deal of really fine choral music incorporated into my body and my soul. So tonight I am filled with longings for the past and gladness that I have know what I have known.
And now my trip to Greece is becoming part of that unreachable past. But I (big smile) have my little book of ink sketches.
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