And what we make of it he leaves mostly to us. It would be easy, from his own eloquent prose, to get the impression that his vision is essentially moral, or from what has been written about him that his images were elegy or prophetic lament. But none of those things seem to me the final effect of his art. Things change, after all. We live our lives, each of us with differing but usually deep attachments to place or to an idea of place, while forces larger than our lives are changing those places faster than we live them out. There may be places in America, old neighborhoods in Cincinnati or Buffalo, the hilly farm country of southern Missouri, the red dirt and pine forests of southeast Mississippi, that have not changed much in our lifetime. But for most Americans change and loss are part of the landscape we hold in mind and have anesthetized ourselves to. Many of the forces of change have been destructive. Some, at least, have made a possible life for people excluded from the pastoral romance of an earlier republic. It’s our task to make of this as we can what we can. But first we have to be able to see it.