We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them . . . . Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.
—Walt Whitman
At some point in my life I got tired of keeping things to myself. Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 2, movements 1 and 2. The gospel of summer. That unearthly spot on the mountain above the mouth of Provo Canyon where I sit and look out at the valley and imagine it flooded with water. You can go there: just take University Avenue all the way north to the canyon, then follow it not so far to where Mt. Timpanogos Park lies plateaued on the left with a parking lot. Park. Climb up the hill. The further you go, the better the view.
Are good things better shared? Or are they better in secret? I feel like Walt Whitman, and the author of The Song of Solomon: it’s as if I am a witness to something astonishing and beautiful and I can’t help but speak. I think, to some extent, all writers are like this. To write is to commit an act of optimism, an act of love.
Inscape is not a secret. This issue is small, beautiful, and precious, but it is for you and all others who are greedy for life and the world, and are, like the overambitious Carlos Argentino Daneri in Borges’ story “The Aleph,” interested in the pursuit of writing it all down. All you need to know before settling into these pages is that this is a work of love, love for the world around us: for its old women, its sonatas of thunder, its lime-green things and flowers tucked between, its resin-sticky hands, its air-conditioned and cold office parties, those moments of negotiation between husbands and wives, those vulnerable hours in the salon chair, the boring, the startled, the numinous, and otherwise worthy of our attention. Read and know the love that was poured into this issue of Inscape.
Drew Rupard