Here in Nova Scotia I am alone again. From the house where I live I can look across granite rocks to the ocean, which now is calm and flat in the sun. I live here all alone where glacier-scraped boulders have assumed unbelievably interesting forms, and already I have painted a few of them, and I know there are many more left to paint and that new compositions will occur as long as I wish to continue the kind of painting I have done here.
It is also pleasant to work with my hands and I have quite a lot of such work to do, for when I came here I took over an old cottage and for several weeks lived in it and hardly noticed the drip of fog and rain through parts of the roof. But the habit of living as well as one can was too strong, and after a time I began to make repairs. Now I enjoy being a carpenter. So during the days I paint or hammer nails into boards and in the nights I read a little and have lately begun to write. Even in the old days I used to come to Nova Scotia. It was half outside the world; I could feel for a time that my painting was all that mattered and staying here made me seem better than I really was.
I have not made a recluse of myself to spite anyone, not even to spite my old ambitions. I came here to live because I could think of no other place to go, and I live alone because I suddenly discovered that no one was left with whom I could stand living or who would live with me. And there was a job I had to finish. If I stayed here away from cities and people who reminded me of myself and my old friends, meeting only the inhabitants of the out-ports who exist almost without machines, I had a conviction I would sometime be able to finish that job. And then, perhaps, start living properly once again.
This will to live, which has nothing to do with reason but is founded merely in experience, was the only dignity I had left when I came here. There is no mystery about my past life; we lived hard and tried to change the world by thinking about it, and were beaten from the start by attempting the impossible. Being a painter, I see the form and rhythm of things before I see anything else. Now I want to create, in a book, something of the form and rhythm of the most rapid transition from one era to another that mankind has ever known. Whether this is possible, whether I can freeze a durable form out of a state of flux, I don’t know. If I succeed I may rid myself of the past, not by burying it but by recreating it and giving it a separate life of its own. At least it should not be too difficult to set down what happened to my friends and myself as though it had happened to other people, for I see us all vividly, as though I were a stranger looking back from a long distance. The stress of our lives and ideas seem to me now to have been a pattern of our time. In ourselves, perhaps, is the form in the flux of things. We were not agents in a drama and we never changed things with our decisions, but we very consciously were participants in the ritual that is history.
Here in Nova Scotia the sight and sound of breaking water, the sense of space that goes far away to the horizon and whitens down to an unpaintable colour at the sea-rim, have made what happened to me when I was in the United States and Europe seem proportionate; this, and the stir of the ocean in constant flux and sometimes the roar of a storm smoking inland so fast that the spume flies a mile or more over the ridge like driving snow, and the birds wheeling and plunging, and often sheer quiet and the passionless absolute of moveless form. This kind of solitude can make a man sane. It may not make him warm or eager to do things, but at least it can make him sane.
Last week we had a storm here. The breakers were thirty feet high and I saw some women standing on the rocks looking out to sea at the fishing boats riding home. The boats went up and down valleys of water and I could see that the men were bailing hard, but they all came in and anchored, and when I went over the wet rocks to the haven I saw ten fishing boats hauling on their cables, and some of the men going up the ridge with the women. At that instant the sun broke out, a rainbow lifted over the sea and the grey water took on colours; soon the whole coast was glowing. I watched, and felt a peculiar pleasure because I had seen a pattern completed and because I knew that the fishermen had survived the storm.