How small man is before the face of nature. Have you ever stopped to wonder about that? Until a certain moment, I hadn’t either — not until I beheld with my own eyes all the beauty and majesty of Mother Nature. Our human burdens are nothing compared to the forces that fill the Valley of Dreams.
At dusk I strayed into one of the great forests — at such an hour you feel so profoundly uneasy and wretched that a shiver never ceases to run down your body. The forest itself and the very air here are steeped in deep antiquity. This place rejects man. Most likely, this wood grew and lived by its own laws — laws in which no place or role was ever meant for us. Here, man does not exist, and never has — not the man we are accustomed to feeling ourselves to be. Here, man remains only an unnoticed, tiny addition to all that already exists around him. Everything is alien and hostile to him — and not the other way round, as we are wont to believe.
Such was the scene I happened to witness in the Valley of Dreams. And one day I put it onto canvas — so that I might show it to you.
