4th rv a traveler's memoirs- on a Greyhound 3

        on a Greyhound

                  3.

With his head leaning against the window of the running bus,

he looked out at the lights of a remote city, saying to himself:
Hey, Moon !

You have to throw your hat 
full of the shells you collected throughout the summer .
For what, on earth, the city is Portland
that I happened to spend summer twice?
No more for the city.
Next time will the place be the Time Square of New York
which is familiar to me, or the Mediterranean sea side ?
No. No more for Portland. 
Baikal Lake in Siberia will be possibly the next point!
But how can I forget the pebbles of reminiscences
Collected in the summer in Portland as below"
"You are inspiring!", that Lau whispered ?

More than anything else I love words themselves . 
I I don't understand what I am and why I am on a long journey like this.

And why I am inclined so easily to lose myself to such emotional passages

as below:

'......the handkerchief of eternal nostalgia waving toward the deep blue sea',
' ......a walking shadow muttering to himself words with no verbal meaning',
'the first grey of dawn', or 'the beauty of impermanence',
 '.....sunlights of the autumn descending diagonally
on the boughs of trees standing by the path in the forest.'

Greyhound kept on dashing into the darkness and

his monologue continued:
 You know, I will never forget the right moment

when a simple line was catching my eyes:

'Art is ardent confession.'

It was Rouault's, a French painter.

Since then, the short words of the painter came to be a guide for my writing.

For it hit me at the moment I got stuck in a series of questions:
'Could I write a poetic prose?,
'How can I get a sort of writing I would be satisfied with?',
or 'what style of writing could  I be good at?'
It was really fortunate for me to meet this guide of the line of the painter.
Probably without the simple and pure words as a guide,

I couldn't have a mind to do writing like this!
Anyway writing is in a sense like the work of sculpture.

Sculptors cutting the raw material of marble have a burning desire

to have their dreams of images visualized into a form of art. 
For this they would often have to go on a long trip to an exotic land.

And, after returning home with the raw mass for writing, 

they kept themselves isolated in their solitary caves to be absorbed in

wrestling with it to visualize the images in their minds into forms of art.

  

On the unfamiliar road of prairies of North Dacoda or Minnesota,

his eyes are again turned to the night view outside.

The sky above the horizon side is coming down this way to him.

Greyhound is dashing more deeply into the darkness.

Averting his eyes a little upward, he see the numerous stars,

listening to them whisper secretly between them.

At the sight of the stars above, suddenly he is reminded of

'a night with stars twinkling', the painting of Van gogh.

'Wow!! Unbelievable,' he muttersd to himself.

All of a sudden the painting arouses awakens inside him a feeling

that his soul was souring into the cluster of the stars there on the night sky,

whispering an advise:
At the end of this journey,
with stars no more in sight,
be ready to greet the first grey dawn
of your writing coming nearer