Compensation For What Has Been Lost
Do you remember your first taste of toasted marshmallow?
Was not that a divine sensation? The taste of honeyed sweetness, when toasted over a fire, presented a range of taste-counterpoint from the light toast to a dark char. A poetic tension of sweet and a hint of bitter, was indescribable, 
delicious. The work/art of toasting a marshmallow, and then the tasting can be a seminal point, a rite of passage in the ascending arc of development to mature adulthood. Difficult to do well, acuity of vision, tactile registration of heat, connoisseurship, all come into play to roast a marshmallow.
This is a beginning of art, a practice that is self-justifying, it’s own reward. Especially in today’s world, the perfection of this type of practice, may be a lifeline, a tether to the real that stands alone, incomparable with anything else.
In an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost. Men/women feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince. Consequently their interest in the imagination and its work is to be regarded not as a phase of humanism but as a vital self-assertion in a world in which nothing but the self remains, if that remains.
— excerpt essay, The Relations Between Poetry and Painting by Wallace Stevens p. 171
