Welcome to Quarry Hill's Blog!
Quarry Hill Creative Center in Rochester, VT, founded 1946 by Barbara and Irving Fiske, is Vermont's oldest alternative community and at one time was probably also its largest. In the 60s -80s, as many as 90 people lived here.
It was and is visited each year, often in summer (but in every season, really) by visitors from all over the world.
We welcome interesting and creative people who are peaceful, bring no weapons, don't believe in hitting children or killing animals, and enjoy the beauty of Vermont and of themselves.
Most of us do not adhere to any particular dogma or religion, though many do find Eastern philosophy closest to our own thought (some of us are also members of the Quakers/Society of Friends).
We value the individual, particularly people who are energetic and have a sense of humor.
Visitors are welcome-- and prospective residents, too. There are some places for rent, others for sale. If interested, get in touch!
And, please follow the Blog and comment whenever you like!
"The symbol is the enemy of the reality, and the reality is ever one's true guide, true friend, true companion, and true self." Irving Fiske, 1908-1990
The upward-reaching light of the human imagination, inseparable, it often seems to me, from the core of reality at the heart of all things.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Blake is one of the great heroes of Quarry Hill, and always seemed to be like another uncle or cousin to me when I was a child. That he had no body didn't matter: his presence in our lives, and in the large sunny (in spring and autumn, chilly) living room of the Farmhouse, he always seemed to be just around a corner.
He died on my birthday, August 12, but years before I was born. I am sure that my arrival on that day gave my being more ...gravitas? than if I had been born on some ordinary day. But on the other hand, having a body or not having one didn't seem to be the most important thing in my family. (Not that they didn't admire the beauty and joy of the body, Blake-style). Yet, one's intellectual position, point of view, or posture, as Irving liked to call it, was surely more important than whether one was "dead" or "alive." For the intellectual choices we make are immortal.
"We do die, but we don't die poetically, so to speak," Irving once said.
I often think these days of Blake's
Children of a future age
Reading this indignant page
Know that in a former time
Love! Sweet Love! was thought a crime.
Unhappily, William Blake, it seems that the wheel turned all the way around again for the present. Such a quasi-enlightened time did exist for a little while... and now we live again in a most puritanical society.
These things do tend to shift, though. There may yet be such a "future age."
Some of the above from my memoir in process, "Prospero's Daughter."