Perspectives and Focus

Extract

If one is to settle for any length of time in a new country there is a necessity to adapt oneself to it, and to its society in some measure, if one is to understand it and learn from it. Such an adaptation has nothing to do with compromising one's way of life or one's attitude to life itself and there need be no confusion about this. It is in what I would call this changing of perspectives and focus that the artist is more acutely involved than others when he makes such a move, and it is in just such a move that he is able to pit himself against certain factors relating to himself and to his work which never face him in this way while he works in his native society.