The last time I saw him I cherish. He talked about his new grandson and showed us drawings in a studio he had just built to extend his workday. We sat with a drink in the sunny living room he had added to the house which, when he moved to it during the war, had been a broken-down farm-worker’s cottage. I knew my man, and I asked him, “Now that you’re eighty, you must know the secret of life. What is the secret of life?” With anyone else the answer would have begun with an ironic laugh, but Henry Moore answered me straight: “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do!”

Henry Moore’s work was the high road of art, and the “something you cannot possibly do” was to be the greatest sculptor who ever lived and know it. What did it have to do with directing the bronze-founder’s flatbed trailer through a narrow lane past Irina’s garden to a twenty-five-foot plaster cast? Or with sitting in front of Z-Cars moving a soft pencil over a pad? Not all a person’s work is the high road, even if that person is Henry Moore. Even Henry Moore must hurry to finish work on a plaster, to roll it under cover as the thunder starts; must pay his taxes; must get to the train on time. What exactly is the sculptor’s work? Surely it is not his or her work to submit to the photo session or to come up with words of thanks for the queen when she bestows the Order of Merit. These are trivial by-products of the task to be a sculptor better than Donatello. How do you express the task? What is common to it, what is the general nature of the consciousness that undertakes it? Henry interviewed spoke of “form-knowledge” and “form-experience.” Certainly his eye, or more accurately his hand, made concrete and beautiful the shapes and volumes of the world’s material, following forms of the creation.

My own high road is to make poems better than Dante, Homer, and Virgil, not to mention folks closer to home like Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, and Kinnell. My own day’s work, on the best day, does not directly confront this task for more than two hours, or rarely three. When I head for the airport parking lot, on my way to read my poems at Pocatello, I pay the task’s mortgage as I display the materials of the task. But flying to Idaho I am not accomplishing anything. More clearly—because more like and most ridiculously unlike—I do not confront Milton or Tu Fu when I compose a headnote for an essay collection used in composition classes:

John McPhee (b. 19xx) grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, where he now resides. After working for Time, McPhee joined the staff of the New Yorker for which he crafts his meticulous …