I'm thinking of the life of Robert Penn Warren, whose mind roamed the Universe. Wonderfully for us, he brought much of that expansive view back to his nest and condensed it so artfully. I see Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jack London in much the same way.
Warren found a workshop for his art, wherever he hung his writer's hat. He could look out his window, seeing what there was to behold in the physical world, but he could look far beyond in the imaginary world where he saw a life and career of Huey P. Long and a fatal crisis for Floyd Collins and the Black Patch Wars of his birthplace.
Although I do not claim the ability of Robert Penn Warren, I at least have vision into the imaginary world. Imaginary and fictional are not synonyms. All fictions are imaginary, but all imaginations are not fictions. I can sit in my nest, looking at the woods going down the hill and through the wintry trees to the snow covered hill beyond. But I can also see the ponga forest near Whangerei Falls on the North Island of New Zealand, where Lin and I tred the boardwalks among the tops of the tree ferns. I can see the sea cliffs of Molokai from a helicopter. I can see the tomb of Charles Darwin in Westminster Abbey. I can see what that hillside at home will look like when the dogwoods will bloom.
Last spring, Lin and I visited Mark Twain's estate in Hartford, Connecticut. It was grand, sitting on a hill looking across the countryside, but it was meager compared to that which Samuel Langhorn Clemens saw from that apex. His mind would impoverish any nesting place. If he were resting on the shore of Marin, west of Tamalpais, overlooking the Farallons, he could, and would see, much farther than that.
The mind never rests, but as the body rests, the mind expands throughout the foreign and domestic, the true and the could be true, the near and far lands.
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