W

To be an individual is to be misunderstood, and to be a leading individual is to be misunderstood widely.  For understanding glides along paths paved with belonging.  And to belong is to conform, somehow or another.

To be an individual is, then, is partly to starve for want of others.  But to belong is to drown in others, as ice drowns in water.  Neither the mountaintop nor the sea is good for us - we must live in town.

But there, we must have rooms, apartments with doors that shut.  We must structure ourselves, careful above all to cohere, but to differentiate ourselves into the parts whose individuation matter, then associate in the ways for which belonging is no fatal loss.  (This is the mighty secret of church music, and even in some degree of popular music - it has a strength apart from any excellence as music, being music that binds.)

And then, if we have the talent for it – and this was W– R–'s great talent – we bring others into solitary conversation, and weave the scrim of privacy through which soulful, individual revelations may be shown and known, known as intelligence knows itself to be: the congellation of spirit.

Oh, but hide not your light under a bushel, if light you have!  This was R's great failing, and he knew it, and he spent his life trying to repair it, but ineffectually because the paths to earthly mountaintops were repellent to him.  He tried instead to make his own mountain, but he was not tectonic, he was spiritual.

No candle, by burning, ever raises itself up, but only, slowly, burns itself, down.