We Children Sat Transfixed Before That Moon

The University Of South Carolina Has Always Played A Role In My Life And The Intellectual Life Of South Carolina.

Charleston Has A Landscape That Encourages Intimacy And Partisanship. I Have Heard It Said That An Inoculation To The Sights And Smells Of The Carolina Lowcountry Is An Almost Irreversible Antidote To The Charms Of Other Landscapes, Other Alien Geographies. You Can Be Moved Profoundly By Other Vistas, By Other Oceans, By Soaring Mountain Ranges, But You Can Never Be Seduced. You Can Even Forsake The Lowcountry, Renounce It For Other Climates, But You Can Never Completely Escape The Sensuous, Semitropical Pull Of Charleston And Her Marshes.

Do You Think That Hemingway Knew He Was A Writer At Twenty Years Old? No, He Did Not. Or Fitzgerald, Or Wolfe. This Is A Difficult Concept To Grasp. Hemingway Didn't Know He Was Ernest Hemingway When He Was A Young Man. Faulkner Didn't Know He Was William Faulkner. But They Had To Take The First Step. They Had To Call Themselves Writers. That Is The First Revolutionary Act A Writer Has To Make. It Takes Courage. But It's Necessary

We Wait For The Tortoises To Come. We Wait For That Lady Who Walks Them. That’s How Art Works. It’s Never A Jackrabbit, Or A Racehorse. It’s The Tortoises That Hold All The Secrets. We’ve Got To Be Patient Enough To Wait For Them.

The Safe Places Could Only Be Visited; They Could Only Grant A Momentary Intuition Of Sanctuary. The Moment Always Came When We Had To Return To Our Real Life To Face The Wounds And Grief Indigenous To Our Homr By The River.