Read Online Falling Through Space by Ellen Gilchrist - Free Book Online

carried me to a lot of drunken fraternity parties and disappeared into the destiny of cocktail clothes.
    Now, some years later, I walked in and out of my living room past the beautiful painting that I was trying to make up my mind to buy. It was the first work I had seen by the American realist Ginny Crouch Stanford, who later would become my friend and paint the brilliant paintings which would become my book covers, and the story of that damn cobbler’s bench kept pounding in my head, a moral tale if there ever was one.
    Finally I gave in. I wrote a check and mailed it off and the painting was mine. I think I should note that I was properly appalled that I could so easily become the proprietor of another person’s work and ran out and wrote a will leaving the painting to the painter at my death.
    It is still my favorite painting. It keeps getting closer to me. It hung for many years above a fireplace. Then above a baby grand piano. Now it is beside my bed, on a wall that looks out upon a lake. “Those eyes,” people say when they look at it, meaning the beautiful, haunting face of the young black-haired girl who leans in the painting against a marble statue of an angel. “My God, those eyes.”
    â€œI know,” I answer. How long that painted look has lasted and never lost its power to charm and amaze.
    Once I made that initial plunge into buying art, the rest was easy. I didn’t buy another pair of high-heeled shoes for years. I didn’t buy cocktail clothes or new placemats or recover the sofa. My money was spent on paintings and pieces of sculpture and pottery and photographs. By the time I left New Orleans and went to live in a simple light-filled house in the Ozark Mountains, the only things I cared enough about to pack up and take with me were these beautiful individual products of other minds and hands. For seven years I lived alone in a small frame house on a mountain and hardly ever bothered to lock the door. Anybody that wanted to steal the things in that house would have been someone I wanted to meet. I don’t think I ever lost sight of how fortunate I was to spend my days and nights surrounded by the best moments of some of the best minds of my culture.
    Finally, I had accumulated too much wonder. I was in danger of becoming a museum curator, which is a fine occupation but not a good thing for a writer, who needs to travel light and stay flexible.
    So I have gone into phase two of my fascination with art. I have started giving it away. I am fortunate in having three sons who also love beautiful things, and among them I am able to keep many walls and flat surfaces covered with art in various cities in the southeastern part of the United States. I lend them paintings and photographs and they lend them back to me. I will turn a corner in one of my children’s houses and there is a painting I bought one snowy January day in Boulder, Colorado, or, I’ll enter a room in an apartment and there is a piece of pottery from the day I discovered the famous Calabash potters of Fayetteville, Arkansas.
    Life will not give us everything we want. It will not give us happiness, or “the seven Visigoth crowns in the Cluny Museum,” as Elinor Wylie once wrote. But it may give us “a very small purse, made of a mouse’s hide. Put it in your pocket and never look inside.”
    Art civilizes and makes clear. Living with art is charming, in the old sense of the word. The art object draws you into it, does a little dance for you, calls up, praises, sings. God Love Artists, my daughter-in-law once wrote to me on a postcard from the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit of Picasso. They Make It Right.

    T HE NEW ORLEANS PHOTOGRAPHER Clarence Laughlin was a friend of mine. He was a genius. Genius can not be dissected or understood. It can only be loved and celebrated and wondered at.
    Clarence was a New Orleanian and proud of that fact, but in his heart I think he was always a