EPILOGUE

THE ARTIST’S WAY

IN ENDING THIS BOOK, I yearned for a final flourish,
some last fillip of the imagination that would sign the book.
This was a small and harmless conceit, I felt—until I
remembered the number of times I have enjoyed a painting
and been distracted by the outsized artistic signature of its
maker. So, no final flourishes here.
The truth is that this book should probably end with an
image from another book. As I recall it, and this may be my
imagination and not my memory at work, an early edition of
Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain featured a
mountain on its book jacket—the seven-story mountain, no
doubt.
Maybe it did and maybe it didn’t. I read the book many
years ago, a precocious twelve-year-old. What I conjure
now is a mountain of Himalayan proportions with a path
winding upward to its height. That path, a spiral path, is how
I think of the Artist’s Way. As we pursue climbing it, we
circle back on the same views, over and over, at slightly
different altitudes. “I’ve been here before,” we think, hitting
a spell of drought. And, in a sense, we have been. The road
is never straight. Growth is a spiral process, doubling back
on itself, reassessing and regrouping. As artists, our progress