UD‘s many quotations from poets and philosophers who lived on Key West begin to constitute a new field of study. Call it Key Western Civ.
Merrill, Bishop, Stevens, MacLeish, and now John Dewey (the paragraph below is from Art and Experience) — all of these islanders evoke the tireless quest for intensified life, and describe artistic creation and aesthetic experience as our supreme paths toward the clarity, exultation, presentness, and sense of inner unity that constitute intensified life.
“To the being fully alive, the future is not ominous, but a promise; it surrounds the present as a halo. It consists of possibilities that are felt as a possession of what is now and here. In life that is truly life, everything overlaps and merges. But all too often we exist in apprehensions of what the future may bring, and are divided within ourselves. Even when not overanxious, we do not enjoy the present, because we subordinate it to that which is absent. Because of the frequency of this abandonment of the present to the past and future, the happy periods of an experience that is now complete because it absorbs into itself memories of the past and anticipations of the future, come to constitute an aesthetic ideal. Only when the past ceases to trouble, and anticipations of the future are not perturbing is a being wholly united with his environment and therefore fully alive. Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reenforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what is now.”