The modern artist is not only aware of the contours of our general deprivation, and willing, like everybody else, to yearn for what is missing, but unlike everybody else, he insists that this emptiness, this sense of unexpected vacancy, is the very condition of creativity. Nor of all the consolations offered to those engaged in art is there any one greater than that of being able to commit oneself to a meaning which can be found exclusively in the heart of absence. Childlike, and without a proper dignity, the artist insists upon the insubstantial, on the character of metaphor to provide what existence falls so modestly short of: sufficiency, fullness, plenitude. Of course to the man of substance this is all air - plenitude consisting for him of nothing more than a large unself-conscious dose of increase. The failure is one of comprehension: not to understand the human character of air.