120.

[from a sacred saturday morning]

the best bits from, "Place in Fiction," by Eudora Welty

mutual understanding in the world being nearly always, as now, at low ebb, it is comforting to remember that it is through art that one country can nearly always speak reliably to another, if the other can hear at all. art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, indeed, but truth. and the art that speaks most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.

from the dawn of man's imagination, place has enshrined the spirit; as soon as man stopped wandering and stood still and looked about him, he found a god in that place; and from then on, that was where the god abided and spoke from if ever he spoke.

naturally, it is the very breath of life, whether one writes a word of fiction or not, to go out and see what is to be seen of the world. for the artist to be unwilling to move, mentally or spiritually or physically, out of the familiar is a sign that spiritual timidity or poverty or decay has come upon him; for what is familiar will then have turned into all that is tyrannical.

it seems plain that the art that speaks most clearly, explicitly, directly and passionately from its place of origin will remain the longest understood. it is through place that we put out roots, wherever birth, chance, fate or our traveling selves set us down; but where those roots reach toward - whether in America, England, or Timbuktu - is the deep and running vein, eternal and consistent and everywhere purely itself, that feeds and is fed by the human understanding. the challenge to writers today, i think, is not to disown any part of our heritage. whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tried. whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. it is only the vision that can be new; but that is enough.

yes, yes...that is enough.