"When I was in the army, many years ago, I was an infantryman, and in the course of what I saw, and did, and came to understand, I was broken. Sometime after I had returned to the United States and my life had resumed, I rounded a corner in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and saw a painting I had known all my life but which I had not until that moment been able to understand. This was Winslow Homer’s masterfully restrained portrait of a veteran returning to his fields. The generation touched by fire in the Civil War understood the great import of this painting, they knew why the veteran had his back turned to the painter, why he was alone, why he worked in utter quiet, why the light was so clear, the scene so tranquil. After years of war and destruction, they understood, and after having passed this painting for the first time as a man, so did I.
As if there had never been a Gettysburg, an Antietam, or a Chancellorsville, the light struck the soil and the wheat grew. The world was the same. The essential rules had not changed. Devastation had not triumphed. The veteran could return to his fields, and the answer to his tentativeness was that, as if by a miracle, they were now even richer than he had remembered them."
by Mark Helprin
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