"Tor House and Hawk Tower are buildings in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, home of poet Robinson Jeffers and family from 1919 to 1999.
The two structures, often referred to jointly as Tor House, are generally believed to have played a crucial role in the development of Robinson Jeffers as a poet, and have inspired many a visitor, for example, Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog:
"Tor House is a poem-like masterpiece. It may express more direct intelligence per square inch than any other house in America."
"Jeffers named it "Tor" House after the type of ground on which the house was situated, a granite outcrop that might have been known as a "tor" in southwest England. He described the land he chose as the site for the house as being like a "prow and plunging cutwater” of a ship. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_House_and_Hawk_Tower
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_House_and_Hawk_Tower
" The woodwork was completed by a paid carpenter in 1925. Jeffers named the tower Hawk Tower, purportedly after a hawk that appeared often while he was building the tower, but stopped appearing after he finished construction.
He appeared to adopt the hawk as his symbol at the time, placing Una's symbol (a unicorn) above her 2nd floor door and a hawk above the door to his third-floor lookout."
*&%^$#@&^%$#***
"Jeffers coined the word inhumanism, the belief that mankind is too self-centered and too indifferent to the "astonishing beauty of things."
In the famous poem "Carmel Point," Jeffers called on humans to "uncenter" themselves.[2] In "The Double Axe,"
Jeffers explicitly described inhumanism as
"a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to notman; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the trans-human magnificence. ... This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist. ... It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy ... it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty."
___________________
Robinson Jeffers, 1887 - 1962
The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads—
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
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