Maria Popova at The Marginalian:
Not often — a handful of times in a lifetime, if you are lucky — you come upon a work of thought and feeling — a book, a painting, a song — that becomes a fountain to which you return again and again, and which returns you to your life refreshed each time.
For 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–March 13, 1971) is another. (Ample gratitude to George Dyson for bringing this soul-slaking treasure into my life.) In the last days of August, in the last months of the world’s 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’s 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.
more here.
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