Among my dreamy pastimes is to recreate artists from their work. Any maker, I imagine, is reaching to be rescued from oblivion. Their painting, song, or poem is a coded plea: This is who I am, o save me from the dark! The greater the maker, the more urgent and distinctive their plea. Lesser makers may be typical of their moment, interchangeable with others, therefore less prized; but if we did not seize Bach, say, or Caravaggio or Dickens, if we let them vanish, their matchless spirits would be lost, for no one resembles them. Only Shakespeare could make what Shakespeare made when he was on his game.

Conjuring a character from their effects isn’t as farfetched as it sounds. Who are we but our choices? How do we know anybody except by reconstructing them from the clues they’ve left? Any work of art brims with revelations about the preferences, values, concerns, fears, and affections of its maker. This is truer since the Renaissance, when art began its evolution from collective to individual expression. Great artists made Greek temples or Gothic cathedrals, but they were speaking for their community, not their peculiar selves. Beethoven sought to immortalize Beethoven.

Our scientific age frowns on such a personal approach to art as speculative, unsystematic, romantic, preposterously promoting consumers of art to a rank almost equal to its makers. What nerve to assert T.S. Eliot needs me to survive! But he does. For if I and others don’t read and reread him, his voice will vanish. The competition for attention intensifies. New makers pilfer attention from their forbears. We have only so much time.

I feel for old makers both analytically and mystically. Shakespeare’s words say something, but his rhythms, metaphors, juxtapositions, music say more, just as body language, gestures and hesitations may reveal personalities more thoroughly than what people say or do. I fancy a beloved maker is addressing me individually. My Shakespeare is not yours. The Bard had this Carll weirdly in mind.

In recent years I’ve been revisiting old friends more than forming new relations. I agree with the Sarah Orne Jewett character who remarked, “Yes’m, old friends is always best, ‘less you can catch a new one that’s fit to make an old one out of.” With old friends, I can compare present and prior involvements and wonder at the evolution of our relation. I am not the same. Neither are they.

Ask to be introduced to any of my beloved makers and I’ll tell you, with surprising specificity, who they were “deep down,” beneath appearances, what made them tick. But how can I be so sure, you may ask; this is fantasy, not fact, stitched together from a few hunches and partial facts – all made up.

You’d be right, of course. I do not know them – any better than I know anybody. All intimacies are imaginary. I love the Jane I have in mind, from whom the real Jane differs in ways I can scarcely imagine. I know Jane pretty well, but every day she varies, showing new aspects, in a new slant of light. That is the joy of love, to always be discovering, revising, seeing new.

I love my beloved makers more fiercely than most living persons, for they have given me more of themselves, of their longings, and listened more attentively to mine. They have made time for me, heard me out, responded to my doubts and joys with their own. I do not differentiate between loved ones who live and those who live in their works. Love is love.