oct 29 - The great art critic, John Ruskin, once said that people seemed not to know that there was the world's best art gallery in the sky every moment, and on some days the exhibitions change through all periods and styles. Where I live, the early morning is almost always and inevitably the crisp blues of the Early Renaissance in the Florence hills, the Fra Angelicos and the Piero della Francescas. Later in the morning, like yesterday, everything becomes the heavier blues of a Dutch landscape. A bright noon is almost always one of those hot blue Moroccan Matisses. Yesterday, around 2:30, the high sky was filled with altocirrus clouds going one way, low cirrus going another, and some high jets with their contrails going a third, and we were all for five minutes in a drippy Jackson Pollock. Most sunsets, teetering on the edge of garish, are Turners, inevitably; but last night, the sky was darkly violet, holding the light and the impending darkness together, and so it was the last brooding Mark Rothkos. And the pale black night sky in the city closes down on Edward Hopper and his lonely cast of characters.

And then sometimes, as Andrei Bolkonsky discovers as he lies dying on the battlefield of Borodino in War and Peace, it is just the sky. "How could I have never seen it before, this sky, this infinite, this secret openly displayed of the unfathomable mystery of things?" (p.t.)