Last night I had one of the very important visual experiences of my life. It was late, 11:30, when I looked out the studio window and was struck by the somberness of what I was able to see. I went out, then called Raoul (Raoul Middleman, an artist friend), and we stayed for over an hour. Standing our small ground at the edge of the sea, we seemed isolated from the Sound of Sleat, the Sleat Peninsula, and the sky and cloud above it. The vision was intensely real, yet it was the most powerful abstraction--Nature a cold, stately presence, remote and unconcerned, beyond man's definitions, his identifications, his attempts at understanding, oblivious to his emotion. Man could only be irrelevant in the face of this implacable event, this dark and light of eternal death. Everything about the Sound of Sleat that I might have remembered, every color, shape, or form, the identity of sky, land, or water, was destroyed and replaced by those events, which I can only call the unearthly light, the dark, dark rich beyond the black, the mass of grey, and the deep shimmering of a streak below, a presence more powerful, more beautiful, more seductive, more real than man's fantasies of poetry or joy or the damnation of his days.

This abstraction of the sea and sky and Sleat--I was possessed by it, wanted to walk into it, to disappear into it I was exhausted afterward. There was no color I could define: The greys were not grey, the silver was not silver, the blacks were not black. It was all light and darkness. Believe me, I have seen eternity, and it is frightening and it is most beautiful, more beautiful and more powerful than any man or any woman or the works of either.