December 9, 1932

For three days it has been bitterly cold, the thermometer hovering around 30 below or worse. This morning it is slightly warmer, just 24 below at my door, clear and still and the wind a little to the south of west. It might clear up and get warmer by noon. Today as yesterday the sun dogs are riding on either side of the sun, two verticle shafts of light, purplish brown on the side toward the sun, gradually paling into white brilliance at the outer edge, comrades of the cold. The smoke rising from the chimneys on days like this is almost beautiful. The other night hiking back from Pete's, it was quite lovely seeing the smoke illumined by the lights of town.

The last week has been more or less miserable. I am still exploring the depths of my mind strange as that may seem. As I look back over my diary of other years, it is a wonder that there is anything more to find out. Now I have tumbled to a new idea, painting, and realize (for the time being) that I should have been an artist, and interpreter of nature. As I read about the men who have gone in for landscape painting I know that here are men who feel about the beauties of the out of doors exactly as I do. It is their dream to interpret their impressions, moods, or whatever you want to call it on canvas. After all that is all that I have ever wanted to do. To me beauty is everything, I see it wherever I go and am sick an heart that I cannot take it with me. The printed word is so inadequate, description so terribly discounted, that after all there seems to be little there for me. Of course there are scenes that can be painted with words far better than with pictures but in writing you have to give up so much that to you is beautiful for its own sake. The funny part of it is that I never discovered this before. Here I have gone for thirty three years, guessing slightly and groping but never dreaming that this might be it. Last year down at Detroit I had the first inkling of it and I never quite got over it. I resolved then that once I got back to Ely that I would start in. So far all I have done is read and that at least has been pleasant. What means more to me than anything else in life is mood and feeling. I know that I can see and that I feel with the best of them. The stumbling block is technique. At that Gaugin didn't start until he was 35. If I start in now with my spare time, in a few years I will surely know something about it and by the time I am forty, who knows but that I will be able to at least paint something for myself. If I never accomplish anything worth while at least it will lead to a greater appreciation of art and landscaping and it will give me some pleasure of that I am certain. Photography never did appeal to me for as Harrison says, it is nothing but our own visual perception that really is beautiful.

Here I am on a side track again. When will I ever discover the ultimate happiness. Once it was writing, now painting. What will actually happen is that I will stay on here teaching, amusing my self with occasional painting, writing, fishing trips and hunting expeditions not to forget the Border Lakes [Outfitting Co.]. My teaching has not been half bad this year and next with final elimination of my high school class it will be better. What an inconstant devil I am. How I wish I could finally arrive at some definite decision as to where my best faculties lie. It may be that I am not actually interested in anything but roaming the woods and living like a savage, and what is so wrong about that?