Nor do I contend with Edward Gibbon when I revise these words, in horror and humiliation over my stereotypical formulae and graceless rhythm:

John McPhee (b. 1931) lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where he was born and attended the University. He began as an anonymous journalist of fact, writing for Time, and has become the maestro of a factual music composed for the New Yorker …

In truth … I love the revising and the messing about. Granted that this work is not the work I care most about, it resembles my work; then what is my work?

Six years ago I spent seven weeks away from the desk as Jane and I talked our way through China and Japan for USIS. I knew I would miss work; it had been eleven years since I had taken more than a day or two away, when Jane and I moved house from Michigan to New Hampshire. I figured it might be good for my work—this enforced interruption in an exciting pursuit—and that I would return full of beans. (It happened: manic energy once jet lag flew away.) For seven weeks of travel I wrote nothing except one hundred and four postcards, a literary form I have never mastered. Toward the end I felt desk-energy accumulate, not as desire to write about China and Japan, not as desire to address a particular topic or return to a particular poem, but simply as desire to work with words again. Our last public day before flying home we visited the Hokkaido Historical Museum in Sapporo, and the generous director himself took us around—busy like all Japanese; compact or dense with things to accomplish; pointing out among other historical relics farm implements that were identical to the pitchforks and scythes that my grandfather and I used forty years before, during the war with Japan. The director took us to lunch and after noodle soup asked an embarrassed favor. His English was excellent; he pulled from his pocket a sheet of paper on which he had typed two lines of English, a caption he needed to supply for a photograph. Would we check grammar and idiom?

Sure enough he had omitted an article expected in English; I supplied it, with a caret. Then I saw that the second of his two short sentences would sound better turned around, with the verb at the end; then I saw that I could combine the two sentences into one complex sentence, saving a third of the words and making the style more condensed and elegant … I was in heaven! On a plastic tabletop in Sapporo I moved language to and fro, playing with words, changing their order or position and altering nuances of vocabulary, syntax, rhythm, … for what purpose? Oh, to make it better—though I would be hard put to explain or prove my comparative.

The arts do not duplicate each other by analogy; nor do I claim to resemble Henry Moore in ability or even in ambition—but let me assert that Moore’s equivalent to my Hokkaido caption is the perception and manipulation of forms, shapes, and volumes. When Moore saw granite poking through the ground in woods, his eyes took the stone in, texture and weight. I watched him as he spoke sometimes, holding a pebble’s weight in his stubby fingers, rolling it back and forth, loving it and taking it in through the nerves under his skin. I watched him absently rearrange objects on a table—ashtrays, boxes, pencils—and alter their relationships in space. When he looked at a sheep or a cloud; or at salt and pepper shakers on a supper table; or at an elephant’s skull; or at the founder’s flatbed trailer; or at the photographer’s Nikon, he saw edges and shapes and weights. Form-perception filled the constant breathing moments of his dedicated life.