From East to West, the Stars

Outside West College, the first hall built at my alma mater – then located in West Township, MA – stands Hopkins Memorial Gate. It’s taboo to go through before graduating, but I often did anyway because it was a pain to go around without walking over icy grass or perpendicular sidewalks. Maybe that’s why I barely remember passing through it during Commencement, in line with tradition. Oops. The gate features an aphoristic poem that now serves as college motto:

Climb High
Climb Far
Your Goal
The Sky
Your Aim
The Star

Its enthusiasm for youth complements the old motto, E liberalitate E. Williams, armigeri.

Seven to ten years later, while studying near Palo Alto, CA at “the Cornell of the West,” I took a weekend trip down to Carmel-by-the-Sea. Bringing along a girlfriend from NYC, I really wanted to see Eyvind Earle’s paintings at gallery21. Eyvind (eye-vind) Earle led a full career but is best known for illustrating the expressionistic backgrounds in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959). Earle was the central coast’s best appreciator (apart from Robinson Jeffers[^1]), and a fellow NY transplant who repeatedly painted views of the Santa Lucia range rolling down to meet the Pacific. The gallery owner told me that Earle worked like a mystic, hanging all his WIPs around the studio and working on them simultaneously, one touch at a time. ADHD, I first thought, but cohesiveness I now recognize. A poem was displayed in the gallery’s front window:

Starting from nothing
to where we are,
is farther than the farthest star.

And farther than the farthest star,
is where we are going from where we are.

– Eyvind Earle, 1979

Youthful hubris gives way to aged wisdom, and the world keeps turning. Earle’s poem was beside this painting:

[1] For coming back to: Jeffers’s “Meditation on Saviors,” in Cawdor and Other Poems (1928).