Spencer Heath Archive

Item 863

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath on the road between Baltimore and New York

December 1, 1955

 

Original is in item 860.

Poets put things marvelously, like Tennyson with his little flower in the wall, and Longfellow in his poem called “Builders:”

All are architects of fate,

Working in these walls of time;

Some with massive deeds and great,  

Some with ornaments of rhyme.

 

Nothing useless is, or low;

Each thing in its place is best;

And what seems but idle show

Strengthens and supports the rest.

 

Now that is a clumsy, poetic forecasting of more efficient than we knew in crude architecture. You could say, too, that crude architecture, that is, crudely utilitarian architecture, administers to the animal body, and by its utilitarian functioning, it maintains a given degree of biological success in life, or holds us at a given economic level. But it does not administer to the creative spirit in man. It only staves off the disintegration that goes on where the creative spirit is not in operation — or that can go on there, but which cannot go on throughout the cosmos as a whole. Because those things of less reality must always disappear while those things with greater reality, possessing a greater element of duration, or time, must always prevail.