The Sphinx and the Milky Way: Selections from the Journals of Charles Burchfield

I first clapped eyes on Charles Burchfield's paintings of slumped houses and ecstatic, vibrational landscapes at an exhibition in New York; though painted long ago, they felt uncannily close to me, and I was jolted to realize he was born in Ashtabula, Ohio, not far from my mother’s family, and grew up in Salem. Most people see Ohio as a nowhere land (it is a place that has been wholly denuded and reshaped by settlers, with old trees and untouched places rare and precious), but there is a beauty here, and Burchfield saw it; Ohio was a landscape that stayed with him. He wrote some 10,000 pages over 54 years of journaling, and the editor Ben Estes has gone through and truffled out an assortment of gems, presented here as fragments alongside reproductions of paintings—Burchfield writing about the shifting sky or the hum of telegraph wires or the sparkle of dewy grass or dandelions: … it is as difficult to take in all the glory of a dandelion, as it is to take in a mountain, or a thunderstorm.