FORTY-FOUR DAYS: THE GENIUS OF AUTUMN

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My dear friends,

When you start with one hundred days, there is something fateful about going under fifty. You are no longer beginning. You are ending. Last week we had our first frost of the season. We now have forty-four days until the end of the year.

The sunny days and cool nights have nipped the trees here into such colors as I have never seen in these Tidewater latitudes. Our maples are often spectacular, most especially the sugar maple, which is here at the southern extremity of its range. But also our many beeches and sycamores and tulip trees have quickened to a feelingful golden amber. Most surprising this year have been the oaks, which normally hold tight to their russet leaves deep into our mild winters. This year, the oaks are inexplicably brilliant, ranging from deep red to bright orange to gold-streaked. It is as though the genius of the oak forest chose to put off his tattered coat and exalt for once in the achievement of old age—

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence.

We are working each day now on securing the trees and millwork for our frame. It is a sensitive business, and we are running just narrowly in advance of necessity. Still, we are to a person pretty touchy about trees. We are trying this way and that to avoid the indignity of industrial intrusion into our precious forests, on however small a scale. Trees must be taken, of course, even for a 14-foot-square frame. I suppose the surrender of even a single tree is suffered as an occasion for general mourning by we who live so largely estranged from the harmonies of life and death. "Old age hath yet his honour and his toil." We have our frame to build and our work to accomplish. But oh it is hard to take an old tree.

Today I attach the President's Report from our autumn board meeting, introducing the change on our website from a mission of "A Deeper Home" to "Build Your Own World." And I pause to remember a dear friend.

Yours always,

Michael

The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.

IMAGES
Den Belitsky: Autumn Forest Ancient Tree, Adobe 125285680

QUOTATIONS
”Soul clap its hands and sing. . . “ William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium" 1928

THE INNERMOST HOUSE FOUNDATION
PRESIDENT’S REPORT TO THE ADVISORS

October 25th, 2021

Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. . . All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

This autumn’s report will be brief. Our ongoing weekly updates now serve to keep us all abreast of progress on our building project. Our curricular and teaching work at William & Mary is commenced. Pandemic restrictions continue to relax, and we begin to receive visitors again in Williamsburg. Our finances remain sound. Our volunteers increase. Our online courses and events expand. Our website continues to grow and diversify, so that we now represent a widely various resource to the like-minded everywhere.

BUILD YOUR OWN WORLD

Today I wish to discuss a single subject, the present motto and subtitle on our website: “Build Your Own World.” Formerly that subtitle was: “A Deeper Home,” also taken from Emerson. We certainly represent that deeper home still, and always shall. As director Chris Nelson remarked years ago, when he first heard the title “Innermost House,” he assumed we meant the soul. That is tellingly true, so that our Innermost House may be best understood to correspond with the Inner Citadel of Marcus Aurelius, the Divine Abode of Buddhism, the Innermost Room of the Gospels, the Interior Castle of St. Teresa, or indeed with the mythic Walden of Henry Thoreau. It is the condition of interiority itself, the microcosm of the world we call the soul.

The change from “A Deeper Home” to “Build Your Own World” represents a shift from being and seeking to building and communicating, now acted upon directly in the form of our place-renewal and curriculum-building projects. At the present and for the immediately foreseeable future, I expect to direct most of our energy and resources into those two parallel courses of material and intellectual development. Together, they constitute the foundation of a call to engagement, at once inwardly among our members, locally in the Tidewater community, and outwardly to our readers in the larger world.

The last two years of political upheaval, global health crisis, and violent cultural change—all digested through many searching conversations among directors, advisors, and friends—reinforce to me the necessity of a radical approach to our philanthropic mission. Radical, that is, in the original sense of “going to the root.” The very idea of philanthropia itself is radical. The word was coined into the Greek by Aeschylus in his Prometheus Bound to signify the consciousness-altering gift of fire to men. There perhaps was never a change in all human time on earth so radically consequential as the domestication of fire. A fire on the hearth, a fire in the mind, these are most radical of things. If we would serve the philanthropic purpose for which we were constituted five years ago, I do not think we can afford to be easily reconciled with the conventionalities of cultural fashion.

To “build your own world” is not an invitation to success in this world, but an exhortation to create another world entirely. Ordinarily, our ideas of success assume an inescapable ubiquity of the ordinary world we happen to occupy, whatever that world may be. But the Stoics made no such assumption. Nor did the Buddhist elders or Hebrew patriarchs or early Christians. Nor did the medieval monastics, or, for that matter, the American founders or the Concord transcendentalists.

They each in their own way sought to “build their own world,” both inwardly and outwardly, and the measure of their success is the extent to which we remember the worlds they made. When I was young, I supposed that self-reliance meant only a determined relying on one’s own efforts, and of course, in some essential way, that remains true. But last month I turned sixty-five and feel I have earned the right to be young no longer. Now I perceive that our efforts determine only a small part of our individual destinies, that the world we accept as all-that-is determines the rest, imperceptibly but fatefully. The Hiawathas and Tecumsehs of this life, the Eleanors and Elizabeths, the Leonardos and Newtons and Bachs, the Douglasses and Lincolns and Muirs and Kings are doubtless born into every age. It must be so. But the extent to which they are realized in their natures depends to a most unfashionable degree on the world they believe themselves to occupy. And today it seems we no longer believe we occupy individual souls in a world of bodily and spiritual nature.

Therefore, I do not think we can accomplish anything more important than modeling what it means to build your own world, particularly where that world is the Deeper Home of interiority. It is a radical recontextualization of individual effort that is required if our transcendental work is to be realized. That will mean uniting as a society of solitudes behind identifiable projects, now just within reach. It will mean building and documenting and communicating what it means to say, “the individual is the world.”

Michael Lorence, President

IN MEMORIAM

Three years ago this week we lost our dear friend and Foundation director, Clint Wilson. Clint passed away between San Francisco and Williamsburg traveling to our autumn board meeting. He believed in beautiful possibilities.

Many of you never had the chance to meet Clint. He was a marvelous person. Clear-sighted and large-souled, visionary and practical at once, he was as solid as a mountain. He was a model of a man, really. Yet he was among the most quietly modest people I have ever known. Over the course of a distinguished professional career, he served his beloved California Wine Country in many roles as business founder, civic leader, faithful friend, and champion of lost causes, at last leading in the successful effort to preserve over 100,000 acres of undeveloped land in wild Sonoma County.

Clint was among the very few who knew the original Innermost House Conversation. He believed in the possibility of our “dream too wild.” He passed out of this life in that belief. He was always traveling toward a better world.