\n
\n\t\t\tNot often \u2014 a handful of times in a lifetime, if you are lucky \u2014 you come upon a work of thought and feeling \u2014 a book, a painting, a song \u2014 that becomes a fountain to which you return again and again, and which returns you to your life refreshed each time.
\nFor me, The Little Prince has been one, and Leaves of Grass, and I Put a Spell on You, and Spiegel im Spiegel. Wilderness (public library) by the painter, printmaker, and philosopher Rockwell Kent (June 21, 1882\u2013March 13, 1971) is another. (Ample gratitude to George Dyson for bringing this soul-slaking treasure into my life.)
\nMoonlight, Winter by Rockwell Kent. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
\nIn the last days of August, in the last months of the world\u2019s first global war, while the Spanish Flu pandemic was savaging civilization, Kent arrived on a small island in Resurrection Bay off the coast of Alaska, searching for the ultimate. He was thirty-six, dispirited and destitute, as passionate about his art and as pained by the world\u2019s indifference to it as Walt Whitman had been when he self-published Leaves of Grass at that same age, from that same precarious place, intimate with the same depths of depression, buoyed by the same reverence for life.
\nDrawing on that experience, Kent would later formulate the closest thing to a personal credo:
\nOften I think that however much I draw or paint, or however well, I am not an artist as art is generally understood. The abstract is meaningless to me save as a fragment of the whole, which is life itself\u2026 It is the ultimate which concerns me, and all physical, all material things are but an expression of it\u2026 We are part and parcel of the big plan of things. We are simply instruments recording in different measure our particular portion of the infinite. And what we absorb of it makes for character, and what we give forth, for expression.
\nThe Vision by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
\nKent arrived at this uncommon life in art via an uncommon path. His parents had pressured him to channel his talent into a practical, profitable career in form and function, but he had dropped out of Columbia University\u2019s architecture program to devote himself to the work of form and feeling, moving to a rugged island off the coast of Maine. He built himself a small house there and spent his days in solitude \u2014 reading Emerson and Tolstoy, and painting; laboring as a lobsterman, and painting. Immersed in Haeckel\u2019s inception of ecology, he grew enchanted with the interwoven life of nature; immersed in Thoreau\u2019s journals, he absorbed the will \u201cto live deliberately\u201d in wild places where he could find and nurture his inner wilderness \u2014 those lush and desolate landscapes of the soul, from which all art is born.
\nSo it is that, in his late twenties, Rockwell Kent voyaged to Newfoundland in the hope of establishing a communal art school with a friend in the untrammeled northern wilderness. The hope crumbled against reality, but the Great North cast a permanent enchantment. He returned four years later, in 1914, this time with his wife and three children, just as the world was coming unworlded by the Great War.
\nIn a small-town community where the notion of an artist was alien and suspect, the large-spirited, liberal-minded Kent was soon accused of being a German spy. Driven away, the family had to make the long voyage back \u2014 Kathleen pregnant with their fourth child, the other three ill with whooping cough.
\nBut the northern wilderness kept calling to the artist\u2019s soul:
\nI crave snow-topped mountains, dreary wastes, and the cruel Northern sea with its hard horizons at the edge of the world where infinite space begins. Here skies are clearer and deeper and, for the greater wonders they reveal, a thousand times more eloquent of the eternal mystery than those of softer lands.
\nThe Star-Lighter by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
\nFour years later, at the peak of his struggle to support the growing family, Rockwell Kent returned to the North in the hope of resuscitating his spirit and his ability to, quite simply, go on.
\n\u201cNever did I enter upon any course with such a sense of necessity, of duty, as drives me into this Alaska trip,\u201d he told Kathleen.
\nFatherless himself since the age of five, having inherited nothing more than his father\u2019s silver flute, which he carried everywhere, he voyaged to the Far North with his nine-year-old son, also named Rockwell, and his silver flute. \u201cWe came to this new land, a boy and a man,\u201d he wrote, \u201centirely on a dreamer\u2019s search; having had vision of a Northern Paradise, we came to find it.\u201d
\nUntitled by Rockwell Kent. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
\nThey came with one duffle bag stuffed with the warmest clothes they owned and one heavy trunk full of books, paints, and provisions. Sprawling across three diary pages, Kent\u2019s inventory includes these essentials:<\/p>\n
8 lbs. chocolate
\n1 gal. peanut butter
\n4 pots
\n2 pillows
\n10 lbs. lima beans
\n10 lbs. white beans
\n100 lbs. potatoes
\n1 broom
\n6 lemons
\n6 agate cups
\n4 agate plates
\n4 agate bowls
\n5 lbs. salt
\n6 Ivory soap
\n2 cans dried eggs
\n1 tea kettle
\n12 candles<\/p>\n
These they brought to Fox Island, welcomed there by an elderly Swede named Olson, who had arrived long ago prospecting for gold; having failed to find any, and having been dismissed by the mainland townspeople as a \u201ccrazy old man, he had made a home on the small and isolated island, tending to two pairs of blue foxes and four goats. Kent found Olson to be \u201ca kind-hearted, genial old man with a vast store of knowledge and true wisdom,\u201d a man of \u201cdeep experience, strong, brave, generous and gentle like a child,\u201d a \u201ckeen philosopher [who] by his critical observations gives his discourse a fine dignity.\u201d
\nFather and son set about converting Olson\u2019s goat-house into a home. On either side of the log cabin, Kent \u2014 an excellent carpenter from a young age \u2014 built two long wall-to-wall shelves: one to hold their provisions, the other for paints, toys, clothes, and the flute. In the far corner, he built a bookshelf for their miniature library \u2014 sustenance for mind and spirit, as vital as the canned goods they had carried across the landmass and rowed across the icy strait of Arctic waters. Among the books were The Iliad and The Odyssey; Robinson Crusoe and the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen; a book of Indian philosophy and a literary history of Ireland; a natural history of the ocean and a basic medical handbook; William Blake\u2019s poems and Life of Blake \u2014 the biography with which Anne Gilchrist had wrested Blake from obscurity a generation earlier to establish him as a creative icon for generations, celebrated by Patti Smith as \u201cthe loom\u2019s loom, spinning the fiber of revelation,\u201d and casting upon Kent a spell of \u201cintense and illuminating fervor.\u201d
\nCabin Window by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
\nDespite these marginal comforts, the cabin remained a ramshackle structure invaded by the elemental cold. Kent tried calking the gaping openings between the logs with dried moss, but the moss never managed to dry enough for insulation under the interminable rain. Indeed, from the moment they set foot on Fox Island, father and son waded into a world ruled by rain, an Anne Sexton kind of rain. In their first seventeen days, a single cloudless sunrise greeted them. \u201cIt will be a strange life without the dear, warm sun!\u201d Kent lamented in his journal. The absence of the sun \u2014 like any absences of cherished warmth and radiance \u2014 made its rare returns all the dearer, aglow with ecstasy:
\nAh, the evenings are beautiful here and the early mornings, when the days are fair! No sudden springing of the sun into the sky and out again at night; but so gradual, so circuitous a coming and a going that nearly the whole day is twilight and the quiet rose color of morning and evening seems almost to meet at noon. We glance through our tiny western window at sunrise and see beyond the bay the many ranges of mountains, from the somber ones at the water\u2019s edge to the distant glacier and snowcapped peaks, lit by the far-off sun with the loveliest light imaginable.
\nDay by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
\nBut by early November, the unremitting gloom began eclipsing the sparse ecstasies of light:
\nEndlessly, day after day, the journal goes on recording a dreary monotony of rain and cloud. Who has ever dwelt so entirely alone that the most living things in all the universe about are wind and rain and snow?
\nAs the days grew shorter and shorter and the weeks unspooled into months, the weather became a sort of teacher. In an entry penned the day after the deepest snow and the coldest cold snap on the record \u2014 \u201cthe cold very many degrees below zero\u201d \u2014 Kent exclaims in the diary: \u201cSuch mild weather!\u201d It was still far below freezing, but not nearly as far as the previous day \u2014 a study in the delight of contrasts, the same contrasts that give shape and texture to art and life.
\nNight by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
\nEventually, he arrives at a sort of existential acceptance, as applicable to the elements as to the ever-shifting weather system that is life itself:
\nI have learned to expect nothing of the weather but what it gives us.
\nWe create our own weather, he intimates in an entry from the clutch of February:
\nA little snow, a little rain, but altogether a pleasant day. It\u2019s always pleasant when I paint well.
\nThroughout the journal, Kent interpolates so naturally between the elemental and the existential, between observation and contemplation \u2014 nowhere more so than in this reflection on the totality of his wilderness experience:
\nThese are the times in life \u2014 when nothing happens \u2014 but in quietness the soul expands.
\nLone Man by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
\nKent soon finds a new kind of liberation in the quiet expanse \u2014 freedom not only from the bustling tumults of the warring present, but from the totality of any collective human culture, which can so ossify identity and become a straitjacket for the soul:
\nSo little do we feel ourselves related, here in this place, to any one time or to any civilization that at a thought we and our world become whom and what we please.
\nFather and child become, in the way only art and nature afford us, unselfed \u2014 not persons, scarred with identities and ideologies, but fields of grateful awareness. They go berry-picking along the coast of Resurrection, skate on the pond \u201cfrozen hard and thick,\u201d and watch the killer whales play in the cove by their cabin, \u201ctheir terrible, mysterious, black arms that beat the water with a sound like cannon.\u201d
\nRecording these encounters with the elemental, Kent\u2019s diary entries read like prose poetry, as any fully attentive and pure-hearted observation of nature always does \u2014 deeply affecting yet unaffected, fresh from the source. One mid-October evening, after quoting from memory a lullaby verse by a German poet born 100 years earlier, Kent exults:
\nThe night is beautiful beyond thought. All the bay is flooded with moonlight and in that pale glow the snowy mountains appear whiter than snow itself. The full moon is almost straight above us, and shining through the tree tops into our clearing makes the old stumps quite lovely with its quiet light. And the forest around is as black as the abyss.
\nThe following evening, a wholly different guise of beauty:
\nTo-night the sun set in the utmost splendor and left in its wake blazing, fire-red clouds in a sky of luminous green.
\nAnd the following:
\nThe moon has risen and illuminates the mountain tops \u2014 but we and all our cove are still in the deep shadow of the night. It is most dramatic; the spruces about us deepen the shadow to black while above them the stone faces of the mountain glisten and the sky has the brightness of a kind of day.
\nIn another entry:
\nFrom our feet the cliff dropped in a V-shaped divide straight down to the green ocean; and at its base the ground swell curled, broke white and eddied. The jagged mountains across shone white against black clouds, \u2014 what peaks! huge and sharp like the teeth of the Fenris-Wolf.
\nVictory by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
\nIt is impossible to place oneself amid such staggering beauty \u2014 \u201cit is so beautiful here at times that it seems hard to bear,\u201d Kent writes \u2014 and not wish to reverence it, to channel it, to magnify it and add to the world\u2019s store of wonder with one\u2019s own creations. And so, one cold October day seven weeks after alighting to Fox Island, Kent records:
\nWe came home and had a good dinner. I cut more wood and at last, after one month here on the island, I PAINTED. It was a stupid sketch, but no matter, I\u2019ve begun!
\nHe feels \u201cthe goddess Inspiration returning\u201d and soon the floodgates of his creative force rush open:
\nAfter the morning\u2019s wood cutting I worked hard on my pictures. I\u2019m now at last fully launched upon my work with small pictures going well. That\u2019s both a relief and a concern to me. From now on my mind can never be quite free.
\nIn a passage that captures every true artist\u2019s savage and restless devotion to their art \u2014 the kind Beethoven conveyed in his letter of advice to a little girl longing to be an artist, the kind at the heart of Martha Graham\u2019s exquisite notion of \u201cdivine dissatisfaction\u201d \u2014 Kent writes one October day two months after his arrival:
\nToday was a day of hard work for me. I cut wood, baked bread and painted on three canvasses\u2026 Over to-day\u2019s painting I\u2019m filled with pride; it will be equalled by to-morrow\u2019s despair over the very same pictures.
\nHe becomes a channel for the majesty around him, seeing in it a reflection of his own worldview, mirroring it back to the world in the paintings nature draws out of him:
\nA wonderfully beautiful day with a raging northwest wind. I must sometime honor the northwest wind in a great picture as the embodiment of clean, strong, exuberant life, the joy of every young thing, bearing energy on its wings and the will to triumph.
\nNorth Wind by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
\nImmersed in \u201cthe profound and characteristic winter silence of the out-of-doors,\u201d a grateful gladness slips over him each time the wind parts the curtain of clouds:
\nIt is no little thing to have one\u2019s work on a day like this out under such a blue sky, by the foaming green sea and the fairy mountains.
\nFrom the outset, Kent decides that if his art is to ever be shown in civilization, the exhibition must be titled \u201cPaintings of Paradise\u201d \u2014 an homage to his love for his son and for his son\u2019s love of the wilderness: \u201cI know nothing in all life more beautiful than the perfect belief of Rockwell in his Paradise here,\u201d Kent writes in one entry. It is a paradise build of what his literary hero Hermann Hesse, writing in the same era on a different landmass in a wholly different landscape, called \u201cthe little joys\u201d \u2014 those smallest atoms of aliveness. Kent records:
\nMornings we get up together and go through a set of Dr. Sargent\u2019s exercises, do them with great energy. Then we go naked out-of-doors\u2026 No matter what the weather is we go calmly out into it, lie down in the drift, look up into the sky, and then scrub ourselves with snow. It\u2019s the finest bath in the world.
\nOne day, looking around the ramshackle goat-house that is now his home, filled with books and wind, filled with a man\u2019s paintings and a child\u2019s love, Kent observes:
\nI don\u2019t see why people need better homes than this.
\nIn an entry from the peak of winter, he contemplates how such simple life in harsh conditions can so salve and enlarge his creative spirit:
\nWe have\u2026 turned out of the beaten, crowded way and come to stand face to face with that infinite and unfathomable thing which is the wilderness; and here we have found OURSELVES \u2014 for the wilderness is nothing else. It is a kind of living mirror that gives back as its own all and only all that the imagination of a man brings to it\u2026 and if we have not shuddered at the emptiness of the abyss and fled from its loneliness, it is because of the wealth of our own souls that filled the void with imagery, warmed it, and gave it speech and understanding.
\nPunctuating this surrender to the grandeur of nature and soul are various quotidian tragicomedies. Violent wind sweeps in through the cracks in the cabin and powders Kent\u2019s drawing table with snow. The cold grows so ferocious that his fountain pen and paint freeze solid, the foxes\u2019 food freezes solid, the water pails freeze solid ten feet from the booming stove. One of Olson\u2019s goats \u2014 \u201cfoolish-faced Angoras\u201d \u2014 eats the broom, then breaks into the house, leaving \u201cboxes, pails, sacks of grain, cans, rope, tools, all lie piled in confusion about the floor.\u201d Such happenings only foment Kent\u2019s deep-souled reflections on life:
\nWhere little happens and the gamut of expression is narrow, life is still full of joy and sorrow. You\u2019re stirred by simple happenings in a quiet world.
\nBowsprit by Rockwell Kent, 1930. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
\nThat simplicity becomes a portal to immensity. In consonance with poet Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s insistence on why everyone should experience at least one long period of extreme solitude in life, and with his contemporary Hermann Hesse\u2019s insight into the destiny-sculpting value of hardship and solitude, Kent writes:
\nThese days are wonderful but they are terrible. It is thrilling\u2026 to reflect that we are absolutely cut off from all mankind, that we cannot, in this raging sea, return to the world nor the world come to us. Barriers must secure your isolation in order that you may experience the full significance of it. The romance of an adventure hangs upon slender threads. A banana peeling on a mountain top tames the wilderness. Much of the glory of this Alaska is in the knowledge I have that the next bay \u2014 which I may never choose to enter \u2014 is uninhabited, that beyond those mountains across the water is a vast region that no man has ever trodden, a terrible ice-bound wilderness.
\nAnd yet, as much as nature might gladden human nature, it is our nature also to long for love and connection with our fellow beings. After twenty weeks of such extreme isolation, in an entry penned in the pit of winter, in a sentiment acutely relatable to any twenty-first-century person who has anguished to see an email go unanswered or to watch the three dots on their phone blink and disappear, Kent writes:
\nIt is terribly depressing to have your heart set upon that mail that doesn\u2019t come.
\nHis suicidal depression returns:
\nI feel like making no record of these days. I take pleasure only in their quick passage.
\nGo to Bed by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
\nAnd then, just like that \u2014 like it always does and we always forget it does \u2014 daybreak comes for the dark night of the soul, the curtain of depression open, and he grows porous to beauty again, wakeful to the light of aliveness:
\nThe day has been glorious, mild, fair, with snow everywhere even on the trees. The snow sticks to the mountain tops even to the steepest, barest peaks painting them all a spotless, dazzling white. It\u2019s a marvelous sight\u2026 There never was so beautiful a land as this!
\nEventually, confusions about time arise. His only timepiece \u2014 a dollar watch handed down to Olson by its previous owner \u2014 stops working. Father and son begin living by animal instinct: They rise at daybreak, have a prompt breakfast \u2014 always the same: oatmeal, cocoa bread, and peanut butter \u2014 then eat only when hungry as they immerse themselves in the day\u2019s work and in the living world around them, noticing, noticing, and turning those noticings into art; in the evenings, Kent plays the flute for little Rockwell and reads to him (but not stories about kings and queens, which the boy tells his father he dislikes because \u201cthey\u2019re always marrying and that kind of stuff\u201d), until they \u201cgo to bed without any notion of the hour.\u201d A typical entry reads:
\nHard, hard at work, little play, not too much sleep. The wind blows ceaselessly. Rockwell is forever good, \u2014 industrious, kind, and happy. He reads now quite freely from any book. Drawing has become a natural and regular occupation for him, almost a recreation \u2014 for he can draw in both a serious and a humorous vein. At this moment he\u2019s waiting in bed for some music and another Andersen fairy tale.
\nWith time so elusive, they lose track of the date. There are practical consequences: The steamer to and from Seward \u2014 the \u201cNew York of the Pacific\u201d \u2014 runs on a spare and strict schedule, on which they rely for their mail and provisions. There are poetic consequences, too: Unsure when to celebrate little Rockwell\u2019s tenth birthday, they designate a best-guess day, on which Kent begins teaching his son to sing and presents him with his sole, precious present \u2014 \u201ca cheap child\u2019s edition\u201d of a popular natural history encyclopedia. It so delights the boy with its depictions of his beloved wild animals that he decides, a generation before Borges, to begin writing and drawing an encyclopedia of imaginary beasts.
\nZarathustra and His Friends by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
\nKent grows acutely aware of how these spare gladnesses \u2014 books and nature, freedom and love \u2014 are the fundaments of life, and all the rest is noise. Something quickens in him under the conditions of this new life \u2014 so spartan, so primal \u2014 and deconditions the habits of mind by which civilization bridles the spirit:
\nHere in the supreme simplicity of life amid these mountains the spirit laughs at man\u2019s concern with the form of Art, with new expression because the old is outworn! It is man\u2019s 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.
\nThere are days too short and dark to paint, too bleak to access the aliveness from which art springs \u2014 days when \u201cthe spirit didn\u2019t work.\u201d But there are also days, rosaries of them, that consecrate Kent\u2019s painting with a state of total flow:
\nIt is weeks since I have stopped my work even for a walk. In this \u201cout-of-doors life\u201d I see little of out-of-doors.
\nFive months into this Fox Island life, having \u201cstruck a fine stride,\u201d Kent settles into a peculiar creative routine:
\nDuring the day I paint out-of-doors from nature by way of fixing the forms and above all the color of the out-of-doors in my mind. Then after dark I go into a trance for a while with Rockwell subdued into absolute silence. I lie down or sit with closed eyes until I \u201csee\u201d a composition, \u2014 then I make a quick note of it or maybe give an hour\u2019s time to perfecting the arrangement on a small scale. Then when that\u2019s done I\u2019m care free. Rockwell and I play cards for half an hour, I get supper, he goes to bed.
\nAgain and again, it is nature \u2014 so immediate, so alive, so numinous \u2014 that becomes the portal to this trance, leaving him with a magnified capacity for art and a clarified lens on life:
\nOne night, one midnight out on the black waters of a Newfoundland harbor, the million stars above, and on the wretched vessel\u2019s deck the horde of half-drunk, soul-starved men saying their passionate farewells, \u2014 on the dull plain of their life a flash of lightning revealed an abyss; \u2014 this night on the still, dark cove of Resurrection Bay, rimmed with wild mountains and the wilderness, strong men about you, mad, loosened speech and winged, prophetic vision, \u2014 God! but sane daylight seeing seems to touch but the white, hard surface of where life is hidden.
\nSuperman by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
\nAnd so, seven months into his search for the hiding-place of life, Kent writes:
\nThis beautiful adventure of ours has come to an end. The enchantment of it has been complete; it has possessed us to the very last. How long such happiness could hold, such quiet life continue to fill up the full measure of human desires only a long experience could teach. The still, deep cup of the wilderness is potent with wisdom. Only to have tasted it is to have moved a lifetime forward to a finer youth\u2026 We have learned what we want and are therefore wise. As graduates in wisdom we return from the university of the wilderness.
\nOn March 18 \u2014 their last day in the wilderness, and the last days of the world\u2019s first winter after the end of the war \u2014 Kent writes:
\nFox Island will soon become in our memories like a dream or vision, a remote experience too wonderful, for the full liberty we knew there and the deep peace, to be remembered or believed in as a real experience in life. It was for us life as it should be, serene and wholesome; love \u2014 but no hate, faith without disillusionment\u2026 Ah God, \u2014 and now the world again!
\nBut as he reentered the world, with its falsehoods and human ferocities, Kent carried the wilderness with him, its indelible imprint on his soul. Looking back on his time in Alaska, he wrote:
\nIn living and recording these experiences I have sensed a fresh unfolding of the mystery of life. I have found wisdom, and this new wisdom must in some degree have won its way into my work.
\nWoman by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
\nAnd indeed it did. The two New York exhibitions of his paintings that followed his return from Alaska were artistically and financially triumphal, sparking a new chapter of solvency for him and Kathleen, and liberating him at last to devote himself wholly to art. Timed with the second exhibition, the publication of his Alaska journal was heralded by England\u2019s most esteemed culture magazine as \u201cthe most remarkable book to come out of America since Leaves of Grass.\u201d (An epoch earlier, the English \u2014 much thanks to Anne Gilchrist\u2019s impassioned advocacy \u2014 had been early to recognize Whitman\u2019s genius when his own country derided and dismissed him.)
\nWhen the first exhibition of his Alaska drawings was being mounted, the gallery engaged one of New York\u2019s preeminent art critics to compose the introduction for the catalogue. He wrote to Kent to learn more about how this time in the wilderness shaped his artistic practice. Kent responded with a letter so exquisite, so vibrant with his authentic spirit, that it was printed as the introduction instead. In it, he wrote:
\nIt has always been hard for me to understand myself, to know why I work and love and live. Yet it is fortunate that such matters find a way of caring for themselves. I came to Alaska because I love the North. I crave snow-topped mountains, dreary wastes, and the cruel Northern sea with its hard horizons at the edge of the world where infinite space begins. Here skies are clearer and deeper and, for the greater wonders they reveal, a thousand times more eloquent of the eternal mystery than those of softer lands.
\nWhile elsewhere in New York Edna St. Vincent Millay was composing her now-iconic sonnet that begins with \u201cMy candle burns at both ends,\u201d to be published months later, Kent reflects on the allure of the Great North\u2019s elemental brutality, on the magnetic misery in the \u201cgloom of the long and lonely winter nights,\u201d and writes:
\nAlways I have fought and worked and played with a fierce energy, and always as a man of flesh and blood and surging spirit. I have burned the candle at both ends and can only wonder that there has been left even a slender taper glow for art.
\nAnd so this sojourn in the wilderness is in no sense an artist\u2019s junket in search of picturesque material for brush or pencil, but the fight to freedom of a man who detests the petty quarrels and bitterness of the crowded world \u2014 the pilgrimage of a philosopher in quest of Happiness! But the wilderness is what man brings to it, no more. If little Rockwell and I can live in these vast silences beside the heartless ocean, perched high up on the peak of the earth with the wind all about us, if we can stand here and not flee from the terror of emptiness, it is because the wealth of our own souls warms the mountains and sea, and peoples the great desolate spaces. For the time we look into ourselves and are not afraid. We find here life, true life \u2014 life rich, resplendent, and full of love. We have learned not to fear destiny but to live for the heaven that can be made upon earth.
\nUntitled by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
\nWith the distance of eleven years, Kent looked back on the experience to find in it the kernels of a larger truth \u2014 personal and universal, humanistic and more-than-human. (Some necessary calibration for the ahistorical bristling modern readers often experience at our ancestors\u2019 word-choices: Women were not yet citizens and would finally win the right to vote two months after the artist\u2019s return from Alaska, which was not yet a state and wouldn\u2019t be for another forty years; the word \u201cman\u201d was both the unexamined universal pronoun \u2014 to remain so until Ursula K. Le Guin so exquisitely unsexed it two generations later \u2014 and a reflection of what was practically possible and culturally permissible for women\u2019s access to independent travel and wilderness adventuring.) Kent writes in the introduction of the second edition of Wilderness:
\nThe thought that was born to me in the quietness of that adventure \u2014 that in the wilderness, in uneventful solitude, men for companionship must find themselves \u2014 has come to be for me the truth. Maybe the only truth I know.
\nGo, young men to grow wise and wise men to stay young, not West nor East nor North nor South, but anywhere that men are not. For we all need, profoundly, to maintain ourselves in our essential, God-descended manhood against the forces of the day we live in \u2014 to be at last less products of a culture than the makers of it. There, in that wilderness so anciently unchanged it might have seen a hundred cultures flower and die, there realize \u2014 you must \u2014 that what is you, what feels and fears and hungers and exalts, is ancient as the wilderness itself, rich as the wilderness and kin to it. And of those ancient values of the soul, Art through all its fashions of utterance, despite them all, despite the turmoil of this age, despite New York and Harlem, steel and jazz, proclaims above the riot of Godlessness that there, in Man, eternally, is all the very much man ever knew of God.<\/p>\n