Winston Churchill came through town not long ago, in spirit but also quite in the flesh, though at one remove, for we were given the chance to inspect a variety of things he had fashioned with his own hands. This soldier-statesman-journalist-historian, whose stupendous energy led him to set courses of brick walls when he ran out of other projects, in his midforties took up painting, and what came through town was an exhibition of some fifty or sixty of his works.
As you might expect, Churchill approached his canvases with the same exuberance and passion he spent on oratory, politics, and war. It was thrilling to stand, as it were, in the presence of this elemental force, and all the more thrilling to share the experience with K., my friend the poet, who knows all about passion and exuberance.
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