William Segal (1904-2000) was an extraordinary man who savored the amazing variety in his life and was attuned to the spiritual dimensions of reality. This wide-ranging memoir delivers a vivid overview of his creativity as an artist and his spiritual explorations of the Gurdjieff work and Zen Buddhism.

He was born in Macon, Georgia, and after attending New York University on a football scholarship, he began a career in magazine publishing during which he started a series of publications including Gentry and American Textiles. An acclaimed painter, he exhibited in Paris, Tokyo, Jerusalem, and other cities, including a 1999 retrospective at the Tibet House in New York. Twenty-eight full-color representations of his art are included in this volume as well as an entire section on this facet of his creativity.

In an essay on "Luminosity," Segal observes:

"In painting one is brought to see in a different way. Ordinarily, we're asleep to the world around us. Being forced to look and then to render with paint and paper, compels one to see both inward and outward, to learn a little more about oneself as well as learning about the nature of things. . . . Luminosity is a reflection of a higher world, which sometimes enters your world and my world through a face, through an apple, through a painting. It is always here, this luminosity, but it's so densely hidden. Luminosity is all around us in everything. The painter, with a certain quality in himself, is able to evoke this on canvas."

In a conversation with Mark Magill, Segal discusses 60 years of self-portraits and his attempt to attend wholeheartedly to the moment when looking at a face or a body. He also salutes Rembrandt's self-portraits as models of the kind of concentration and presence that must be a part of the artistic path.

Segal was also a spiritual seeker who learned from some twentieth-century masters. He was very much taken with the Russians P. D. Ouspensky and G. I. Gurdjieff and their very specific practices for self-realization. He also had great respect for the Japanese Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki and the Dalai Lama. Segal writes about what he learned from his encounters with these teachers. As his wife points out in her introduction, Segal barely survived a terrible car accident in 1971. A Zen master told him, "Lucky man, one accident like yours is worth 10,000 sittings in a monastery." It brought the artist's wonder and gratitude to the fore of his personality.

Ken Burns, a modern historian of America, created a trilogy of films about Segal and did long interviews with him, which are included here. In one, Segal explains why he slowed down his busy life: "The whole secret of life, whether it's inner or outer work, is to give total attention to what one is doing now. If people would concentrate and really look and see how they're working and give their total interest and attention to the moment or to the task at hand, it would make people more effective in living. It would feed them instead of depleting them. Generally we come back over and over again to the necessity of being here as totally as possible, no matter what you are doing. But we do need, also, engagement of the outer world. We need engagement of ourselves with others, and with confrontations. Life is a question of challenge and response."

Segal took the challenges of his business, painting, writing, and spiritual practice and made the most of them a thousand times over.