O TO be free of the turmoil of life, to purify our souls of the poisons it has left in us, cleanse ourselves of its spots and blemishes, take our stand somewhere beyond the tumult and look back, pondering, remembering!

This impulsive yearning often flares up in us and impels our minds to go seeking. Is there not, somewhere, a place of refuge and repose? Must not such a place exist as the logical complement to life, the goal toward which all this travail must lead?

As our cold thought disintegrates this metaphysical ideal and even shows that the notion of another world and of heaven itself is contradictory and empty, we set about constructing less pretentious havens of retreat: some day we will retire from business, from politics, from the quarrels and ambitions of active life, and pass a comfortable old age with a few friends and many books and the people we love about us, smiling serenely as we think of the toils and troubles of the years. But then these more modest ideals also crumble under our fingers. The peace we sought is full of pains and worries. Old age is a tormented waiting upon Death, or at best (if we are really fortunate) work—work which continues, it may be at a slackened pace, the work we have always done.

And nevertheless that yearning rises in us eternally, and it must therefore have some meaning: it cannot be wholly vain. The images it suggests, in fact, are symbols, or myths, of something attainable, or even, perhaps, of something already attained or experienced.

On reaching the constellation of Gemini in his journey through Paradise, Dante let his eyes fall upon the planets and heavenly bodies below him; and far, far away, lost among the stars and small in the distances, he spied our Globe—“that tiny stretch of earth that fills us with such bitterness.” And Carducci, a latter-day child of Dante, once said in confidence to a friend: “My soul is weary of writing! My mind embraces—and pities!—the Universe in a flash. Why should it be damned therefore to the penal servitude of composition?” At that moment, in that flash, the poets had really risen beyond the world, beyond life: the yearning they felt and which we all feel was for a passing second realised. (Only for a second? Of course, because all realisation is momentary in instants that quickly pass). And back they came to the world again, the one to his bitter stretch of earth, the other to the toil that bound him to the furrow. They came back to the world—but always to find in it the means and instruments for rising above it: the resources of Thought, and the resources of Art, that is.

The haven of refuge, the idyllic peace, the care-free liberty of self-indulgence, fancied circumstances in which life will no longer afflict us with the bitter-sweets of struggle, but will become detached from us and reduced to a mere spectacle, are unattainable only because they are duplicates and imaginative distortions of the reality wherein we actually soar beyond life and are able to look down or back upon it as a spectacle. For heaven is a reality, but it is here on this earth as an ever-present aspect of the Spirit’s activity. In Art and in Thought we are free of the turmoil of life, purified of its poisons, cleansed of its spots and blemishes. In Art and in Thought we escape from the tumult into a haven of refuge and repose.