A ferd til Hvalfjörður (A trip to Whale-fjord)

By Jessie | Published: February 5, 2010 Leave a comment

A and I took a road trip to Hvalfjörður, or Whale-fjord, not long ago.  We took the scenic route there, and stopped along the way to check out a river that had frozen over.  This is what I love about Iceland:  you can drive a matter of minutes outside of Reykjavík proper and spot something interesting that makes you want to pull the car over, jump out, and run around like a little kid at the wonderment of the landscapes.  For instance, I am a big sucker for moss, although you’re not technically supposed to walk or drive on it (!), as it takes many years to grow back if it’s damaged.  In some spots, it’s several inches thick and feels like a squishy mattress to lie or walk on.  When I see a giant black lava field covered inches thick with lush, green moss that has been virtually untouched for hundreds, maybe even a thousand years and no one is around and there’s nothing within sight, I have to fight the urge to take a stroll on it, lie on it, feel how soft and velvety it is to the touch.  It’s seemingly smaller things like this that make me feel happy, grateful, and alive.

When we reached the frozen river right off of the road, I felt a similar urge to explore.  I’d never walked over a frozen river before, and it was a little daunting; you could hear the water flowing underneath inches of ice.  I didn’t think I’d fall in, but you never know in this country; you just never know.  Just last week, a woman and her child fell 20 meters through a covered crevasse on a glacier; the woman died, while the child survived.  The area was cracked — a sure signal that the ice is hollowing underneath — and no one should have been walking there, but they didn’t know or maybe they didn’t notice.

I remember once hearing an interview with Bjork, where she was asked what Icelanders do in their free time.  She said something about how people like to go off-road driving on the glaciers, and sometimes people fall into the large crevasses, and that’s just the way it goes here.  And it’s true.

Iceland is an Enter At Your Own Risk kind of country, a large contrast to the liability concerns that seem to control most Americans.  There are very few areas that are roped off, even at some of the most popular tourist attractions — for instance, at some of the large waterfalls; if it’s icy or wet and you walk too close to the edge and slip and you fall over, that’s it, it’s over.  (The only place that I last remember seeing ropes were at the geysirs, where one might easily walk into a large boiling hole of water this time of year in the darkness, because you just can’t see them.)  You can climb and explore and walk over icy areas and the nearly unchartered, fragile grounds in the northeast, but the ground might break where there’s boiling mud underneath, or you might step into a covered fissure or hurt yourself walking over hardened lava, or fall into a glacier river and be swept away.  You just never know, and so it has to be at the forefront of your mind when you venture out to explore; a simple walk near the beach might become a risk-benefit analysis you run through in your mind.

The southern beaches can be particularly dangerous to visitors who travel to see the breathtaking and surreal views.  The waters are rough and ominous, pounding away at the black beaches, pulverizing the volcanic remains.  Every once in a while a rogue wave — usually attributable to an earthquake at sea — will swallow someone whole.  This tragically happened just last summer to an American tourist, whose body was never recovered; she, along with a small travel group, were walking along the beaches taking pictures, taking in the phenomenal views, breathing in the cool sea air, when a deadly wave suddenly came and swept her away.

I don’t take pleasure in these kinds of tragedies at all; they are nothing short of pure horror when they happen.  But the fact that they do happen, that the land is one of such extremes where real risks exist for seemingly innocuous endeavors, where taking a simple walk along the beach or countryside can leave you injured or worse, means that a level of awareness and humility is required to venture out to some of these places.  That in itself brings with it a certain level of exhilaration, submissiveness and wonderment; it brings you down a few levels and reminds you of who and where you are in the grand scheme of things.  I appreciate this.

When we finally reached Hvalfjörður, there was steam coming up from the ground from hot spring water, some of which was being led into a hot pot overlooking the fjord.  This is where whales were often caught, and until the 1980’s it was the home of one of the largest whaling stations in Iceland.  During World War II, this is also where a naval base for the British and American navies was located.

Posted in Iceland, Photography, Travel | Tagged , |

The Dark Crystal (1982)

By Jessie | Published: February 3, 2010 Leave a comment

A piece I wrote for A Bright Wall in a Dark Room:

Wherein being a Gelfling doppelgänger isn’t necessarily a bad thing

When Chad asked if we’d be interested in writing about one of our favorite childhood movies, this one was kind of a no-brainer for a number of reasons. One reason is that I used to be teased and called a gelfling when I was a kid; it was my nickname for many years. When I was seven, I watched this movie along with several classmates during a special after-school screening in our school’s library, which had recently acquired a brand new VCR. Shortly after the movie ended, a classmate observed that I looked like Kira, the girl gelfling in the movie, and from then on, it was a reference that I couldn’t shake. Oddly, even years later, strangers will, on occasion, randomly approach me to let me know about the mythical muppet I most closely resemble. It was a likeness that used to make me cringe, but one that I can now take some comfort in. Anyhow, now you know who I allegedly look like, and if you see me on the street, no I cannot fly.

The Dark Crystal was to the 1980’s what The Lord of the Rings and possibly Where the Wild Things Are have been to the 2000’s, though arguably, it is a darker and scarier world for a little kid. It’s a classic good versus evil quest story, though told through a unique story line and set in a land without any humans at all, where prophecies, guardians and mysticism can determine one’s destiny, and it’s a story that utterly captivated me as a child.

The story begins: “Another World. Another Time. In the Age of Wonder. A thousand years ago, this land was green and good…until the Crystal cracked. A single piece was lost, a shard of the Crystal. Then strife began and two new races appeared: the cruel Skeksis and the gentle Mystics…”

In the first 15 minutes of the movie, we’re introduced to most of the creatures existing in the greatest mystical world Jim Henson created, along with artist/conceptual designer Brian Froud, production designer Harry Lange, scenarist David Odell, co-director Frank Oz, and composer Trevor Jones, who created a magnificent score that balances the movie perfectly and accentuates the mood at all the right points. There are the Skeksis, appropriately named for the skeletal creatures who reign over the Castle of the Crystal and the Crystal of Truth. The Skeksis resemble vultures, pterodactyls and reptiles combined, and don layers upon layers of ornate clothing like something from the Victorian era that is rotting off of their shrivelled bodies. They are quirky creatures who have Very Bad Table Manners, burping and making loud noises while feasting on the Nebri, other creatures of the land. Some are ferocious, such as the Garthim Master, the Ritual Master and the Slave Master, while others, like Chamberlain, are very curious, making strange whimpering noises while plotting revenge.

It is said that in developing the Skeksis for the movie, the creators were inspired by the Seven Deadly Sins, and watching the movie as an adult, it is easy to see how. In the beginning of the film, the Skeksis’ emperor dies, then literally crumbles to dust, and a violent duel over his successorship ensues, with the loser, Chamberlain, being beaten, chastised, stripped nearly to the bone and ousted from the castle. Later we see the Skeksis drain the “vital essence” from defenseless Podlings (little gnomish-creatures) kidnapped from the kingdom — which the emperor then drinks to remain young — turning them into catatonic slaves.

By contrast, the slow, laid back but calculated, tan, four-armed Mystics lead a simple, contemplative, peaceful life. Despite appearing harmless, they are not to be underestimated, least of all because of their wisdom and apparent clairvoyant abilities.

Jen, a Gelfling, is raised by the Mystics, and is believed to be the last of his kind, because the Skeksis massacred his people. Jen is the Chosen One, and his destiny is to find the missing shard that broke off from the kingdom’s Crystal and heal it, lest the land will become one of evil over good. (The Crystal harnesses the forces of nature in this world, particularly the light from the three suns, for the benefit of the world’s inhabitants.) A prophecy is inscribed on a wall in the ancient Gelfling village: “When single shine the triple suns, what was sundered and undone, shall be whole, the two made one, by Gelfling hand or else by none.” No pressure or anything. So when the Skeksis find out that Jen exists, they go a little Cheney on everyone, push the red panic button and send out troops of giant Garthim — these lumbering black beetle-like creatures that are capable of destroying anything within sight with their enormous pincer claws, all while making these disturbing clicking noises. Their orders: to locate and destroy Jen.

Meanwhile, Jen is helped by a gray, squishy curmudgeon astrologer named Aughra, who can remove her eyeball and still see through it. The logistics of this feat intrigued me very much as a child and left me wondering whether this was actually possible for terribly unfortunate accident victims. Aughra is a wise and witty soul who lives in an observatory and knows a lot about suns and planets; she explains to Jen that the Great Conjunction of the three suns is imminent, but not before the Garthim catch on to her.

Soon after locating the missing shard, Jen runs into Kira, a girl Gelfling who knows how to communicate with other species via their calls and languages, and who also demonstrates that maybe not all blondes are dumb, as she proves resourceful with her various animal friends as well as an important anatomical difference that helps save them later on. Her pet Fizzgig is my favorite creature in the movie, resembling a cross between a small, furry brown dog and Animal from the Muppet Show; it barks and scrambles around and opens its mouth to reveal a mouthful of teeth when it cries and yells. Jen and Kira complement each other well; he has lived among the Mystics and learned their ways, while she has lived her life at peace with nature among a variety of other species.

When I first saw this movie, I was terrified! The Skeksis, the Mystics, the Garthim, even the Gelflings and the Podlings scared me. For some time after watching it, I became utterly convinced that if I stared at lights long enough — especially fluorescent ones — my “vital essence” would be drained from me (if only I’d known!). Watching the movie again over the weekend, the first time in many years, I was a little amused by how the movie once scared me so. It also made me realize how much of an effect it had on me and my desire to create things as a child, and also how transformative the power of imagination can truly be.

Never before The Dark Crystal (that I can think of, anyhow) had viewers been transformed to an entirely new, vivid and believable world devoid of any human contact, yet still a world divided by two opposing principles, a world both fragile and beautiful and also savage and cruel. The movie depicts an evolution of imagination, and a tangible representation of duality. In this world, like our own, we see the importance of balancing science and faith, logic and spirituality, survival and sacrifice. There is a spiritual philosophy that emphasizes the importance of maintaining a spiritual, psychological and social equilibrium that is shared by various cultures and faiths, including Buddhism, Druidism and Christianity, and there are references to each of these in the movie; it is reflected in the design of the characters and the sets that at times resemble those of different ethnicities, though overall, seem to avoid specific profiling or any single hortatory message.

While some of the scenery and characters might appear completely archaic by today’s 3-D animation standards — I don’t think there was CGI in 1982 — there is something incredibly special about the use of “vintage” special effects (puppets and/or models) that computer generated graphics will simply never be able to compete with. To create the special world of The Dark Crystal, every single detail, every structure, every creature, every organism, every flora and fauna had to be built to move, to shift, to sway with the landscape, to evolve and respond naturally, from the lush, verdant landscapes to the scary Skeskis’ castle to Aughra’s planetarium and the caves of the Mystics.

The inhabitants of this world were painstakingly crafted by skilled technicians and puppeteers, creative wizards who were free from the confines of cubicles and who literally submerged themselves into the world of their creation to make each creature with its own personality, mannerisms and uniqueness. The result is a beautifully, lovingly crafted film, a rich and majestic visual feast of stunning and outlandish creations in an alien world that never existed, yet that is still so believable that it almost feels as though we are watching documentation of a newly discovered planet. I still enjoy this movie as an adult, and I still notice something new every time I watch it.

There is a sense of intimacy in this kind of fantasy film that is often lost in the sterility of computer animation these days, though those movies are also often quite exquisite. Even with computer technology breaking new ground every day, in my opinion there’s still nothing comparable to the soft magic that Jim Henson created here. The Dark Crystal changed my understanding of puppetry forever, and it also triggered a level of imagination that had been previously unknown to me — the power of storytelling through imagery. It’s a film that does not underestimate the viewer’s ability to think and wonder and imagine and long to create, things that are equally important to everyone in this world, children and adults alike.

Posted in Bright Wall Dark Room, Film, Writing | Tagged , , |

Later in the day

By Jessie | Published: February 3, 2010 Leave a comment

Last week, Owen Pallett played a concert in London’s Union Chapel, with the following super amazing guests:  Sam Amidon, Nico Muhly, and Beth Orton. It was pretty special, from what I’ve heard of it. They played a new song by Beth Orton, which sounds as fine and affecting as wind in your hair — this song is the one above. They also played one of my favorite folk songs ever, “Sugar Baby“ – preceded by an odd rendition of a German folk song.
Amazing!

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Don’t forget to look up

By Jessie | Published: February 3, 2010 Leave a comment

Posted in Photography, Travel | Tagged , , |

James Ensor

By Jessie | Published: February 2, 2010 Leave a comment

I spent some time wandering the streets and museums of Paris just before Christmas, and stumbled upon a really intriguing exhibition on Belgian artist James Ensor at the Musée d’Orsay.  There are many popular and beautiful pieces at this museum from the likes of Gauguin, Monet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Van Gogh, Vuillard, etc., but I really only cared to see Ensor for some reason.  It was a crowded Saturday afternoon and I generally dislike the crowds on these days (much like it is in NYC), but I waded through layers upon layers of sleepy, hushed bodies and waited patiently to get a glimpse at every piece they’d included in the exhibit.

When I was in college, I somehow landed a part-time job in the school’s art history library, where I catalogued, cleaned and repaired slides while listening to the graduate students bitch and moan about most things and people under the sun.  I was lucky to learn a little about lesser known artists (for those of us who haven’t studied much art history), including James Ensor.  While I’d taken a couple of art history courses in college, and in retrospect, wish that I’d at least minored in the subject, his work really captivated me, and I can’t remember giving it much thought again until I stumbled upon the Musée d’Orsay exhibition.

Life is strange in the way that it sometimes seems to come full circle, drudging up certain memories that trigger even others, and so on.

Ensor was a strange and enigmatic painter, known for his skeletal images, quirky and satirical self-portraits, and masks, and this is what I admire about his work.  The exhibit was segmented into four categories that were meant to reflect the progression of his art.  The first category, A Kind of Modernity, included work from early on in his career, just after 1880.  After studying at the Académie des Beaux Arts in Brussels, Ensor returned to his hometown of Ostend with the intention of revolutionizing painting, though he’d later establish himself in Brussels.  Ensor was confident in his originality and strength in his experimental work, which was largely based on the study of light, and this intrigue with light sustained him for most of his career.  Although he was often categorized with Impressionists, he eschewed this classification.

The second part of the exhibit, “Light has ennobled me”, refers to Ensor’s observations that light is the opposite of line, which is in itself, “the enemy of genius; it cannot express passion, anxiety struggle, pain, enthusiasm or poetry, such beautiful and great feelings[...]“.  Ensor was convinced that he was the first painter to express the reality of light.  Driven by his convictions, his work during this “period” shows a mystical aspect replaced the more modern inspirations of his earlier work.  The result was landscapes that became more distant from reality, representing something more akin to images of a primitive chaos dominated by a spiritual power.

The third part of the exhibit, “Strangeness reigns everywhere”, moved me greatly because it represented a turning point in Ensor’s career, triggered by the death of his father and grandmother in 1887.  He began a series of drawings called “Visions”, which were badly received, and the criticism affected Ensor greatly.  I thought these were quite beautiful and moving, albeit a little scary; his grief apparent in them.  His approach soon changed, though:  he began painting scenes where masks concealed people and heightened a reality that Ensor found too ugly and cruel, while skeletons pointed to the vanity and absurdity of the world.  He produced several panels, engravings and drawings denouncing the injustices of his time while also expressing some of his own more personal concerns.

The last room in the exhibit featured 112 self-portraits, which were both mesmerizing and frightening.  Émile Verhaeren once wrote, “It would be surprising if Ensor, who loved his art above all else, and consequently loved the person who created it, that is, himself, had not reproduced his own image ad infinitum.”  Ensor seemingly did love his art, and by extension, himself, but for someone who also could not tolerate criticism or a lack of understanding, who was both anxious and extremely sensitive, yet who also believed he was the most excoriated artist of his time, the exercise was not simply one of self-reverence.  From these portraits — which vary from large to very small, with various mediums and different styles: realist, sardonic, caricatural, macabre — I got the sense that they express his changing moods and individual growth and struggles, particularly as they span a long period of time.  They also somehow unify his work, as they follow along with the style of his paintings, portraying himself in his studio, surrounded by his masks, ghosts and paintings.   They demonstrate how abundant and brilliant his work was, and also how disparate.  My favorite is his portrait of his head on a platter.

Posted in Art, Travel | Tagged , , |

Snowflake Bentley: Snow Up Close

By Jessie | Published: January 31, 2010 Leave a comment

Last week in New York, photographs by Wilson A. Bentley (aka the Snowflake Bentley and The Snowflake Man), the first person to capture the image of a single snowflake with a camera, went up for sale at the American Antiques Show. The vintage images are breathtaking…

“Every crystal was a masterpiece of design, and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost” said Bentley back in 1925.

According to an article in The Guardian, Bentley’s interest with snow crystals began when he received a microscope for his 15th birthday: “He became spellbound by their beauty, complexity and endless variety”.

“Bentley started trying to draw the flakes but the snow melted before he could finish. His parents eventually bought him a camera and he spent two years trying to capture images of the tiny, fleeting crystals. He caught falling snowflakes by standing in the doorway with a wooden tray as snowstorms passed over. The tray was painted black so he could see the crystals and transfer them delicately onto a glass slide. To study the snow crystals, Bentley rigged his bellows camera up to the microscope but found he could not reach the controls to bring them into focus. He overcame the problem through the imaginative use of wheels and cord.” (via The Guardian, Thursday January 21, 2010)

“The year was 1885.  By jury-rigging a microscope with a bellows camera, Bentley was able to capture for the first time the exquisite delicacy of a snowflake.” … “Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others,” Bentley said in 1925. (via The Telegraph)

The technology Bentley used came to be known as photomicrography.  The method of singling out a snowflake to photograph apparently hasn’t changed in all that time. “You basically let the crystal fall on something, black or dark-coloured, and then you have to pick it up with a toothpick or brush and put it on a glass slide,” says Kenneth Libbrecht, professor of physics and snowflake enthusiast.

Bentley later went on to publish a book in 1931, “Snow Crystals”, which featured images of nearly 2,500 snowflakes, and was dedicated to their lacy, fragile, delicate beauty, stating, “Every crystal was a masterpiece of design, and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost.”

Weeks after the book’s publication, Bentley, walking through a blizzard, caught pneumonia and died. Despite his groundbreaking work, which led to significant contributions to photography and science, Bentley’s name remains largely unknown to the public. (via The Telegraph)

Bentley was a farmer in Vermont, and there is a museum dedicated to his work at an old mill in his hometown. It houses about 2,000 of his vintage images.  I’d really like to see them.

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Andrew Bush

By Jessie | Published: January 30, 2010 Leave a comment

I love these photographs by Andrew Bush, a nice tribute to subtle things.  He has so many of them, dating back to 1992.

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RIP J.D. Salinger

By Jessie | Published: January 28, 2010 Leave a comment

“D.B. asked me what I thought about all this stuff I just finished telling you about. I didn’t know what the hell to say. If you want to know the truth, I don’t know what I think about it. I’m sorry I told so many people about it. About all I know is, I sort of miss everybody I told about. Even old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance. I think I even miss that goddam Maurice. It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”  – The Catcher in the Rye

Blogging being one of the most self-indulgent mediums of self-expression currently in existence, I thought I’d share, along with everyone else on the internet, why the news of J.D. Salinger’s death saddened me so much.  I have no idea why, as I generally don’t think that I share very much personally, or at least I try not to, but today really got to me.

Probably like most everyone else, I was once an irreverent teenager who felt lost and bitter and angry at the world for not understanding me and also for seemingly not even pretending to care what I thought or how I felt.  Maybe it didn’t, maybe it still doesn’t.  At the time, I questioned my place in the world, in a school in which cliques were prevalent and “friends” manipulative, where music and art education weren’t encouraged but sports certainly were.  I felt as though I’d been the product of a sociological experiment gone awry, including living in a biracial family with older siblings who weren’t always so kind and parents who were pulled in too many directions, family members with suicidal ideation, a schizophrenic, a drug addict, a felon, an abuser, and I had too much responsibility for a burgeoning adolescent.  I just wanted to enjoy being young for a while before I was required to think and act like an adult, but no.  I felt as though I had no one to relate to, and as a result, I questioned myself constantly, not exactly wanting to fit in but also not wanting to feel so… different.

I remember the day my class was assigned to read The Catcher in the Rye by our high school English teacher, someone who became and who has remained to this day both a mentor and a real friend.  I remember reading Holden Caulfield’s wry take on the world and thinking “yes! finally, someone gets it too! but why can’t this Holden person be real?”.  I was fighting a battle that I would eventually lose at that time, playing tug-of-war with Adulthood at a really young age, desperately clinging to my side of the of the rope, clenching it, digging my nails into it, planting my feet into the ground, twisting my palms, my forearms, my elbows until they were swollen and red, blistered and burned.  I wanted Childhood to win.  It didn’t.

And Holden, he knew it, he told it like it was.  There was no bullshit, no dancing around the answer to Why People Just Can’t Be Nice Sometimes; they’re morons and phonies and assholes, and most of the time, they’re searching for something they’ll probably never find.  There were no excuses proffered for overbearing Adults and all of their lies.  There were so many “Fuck You’s” in this world that even if you wanted to, you could never fully erase them all, so fuck it all.  He was so self-aware, and yet not self-aware at all.  He was like me.

I remember how our teacher would have us sit around in a circle on the days that we’d discuss our assigned reading, and the conversation on Catcher went from utter silence in the room to a dialogue between me and him, something along the lines of:

“How do you think Holden is feeling when he says ‘x’?”

“I think he feels different, like people don’t understand him. That he sees and feels things differently.”

“And how do you think that feels”?

“Lonely.”

Maybe I was projecting a little from my personal experiences at the time, and I’m also not translating that class discussion very well, but, for me, that day transitioned into The Day That Maybe Some Adults Do Understand; maybe they were once teenagers who felt the same way; maybe others currently feel this way.  It became the day that part of my bitter, adolescent angst receded just a bit, that I removed a stone from the wall.  Maybe Adults aren’t all bad, and maybe not all people are either.

There’s a part in the book where Holden’s English teacher, Mr. Antolini, tells him:

“I have a feeling that you’re riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall.  But I don’t honestly know what kind…. It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college.  Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, ‘It’s a secret between he and I.’  Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer.  I just don’t know.”

It’s a passage that didn’t fully register with me at the time, but it certainly does now (it also registers with me every time I stumble upon the rants of seemingly miserable people on the internet).  Mr. Antolini goes on to explain that this kind of “fall” that he envisions is experienced by people who cannot deal with the environment around them because they refuse to grow up.  But by interacting with others, Holden might learn that there are others who feel similarly disturbed by the world and the human condition, and in turn, he might learn something about his own mind as well.  It’s a different kind of  attempt at “catching” someone than Holden’s determination to protect people (and himself) from adulthood.

There has been a lot of criticism of Holden Caulfield’s character — that he’s the real phony, a disillusioned, spoiled brat who had all things going for him but he refused to see past his myopic view of the world.  I think that’s true, and it’s kind of the message of the book. Holden lives in a world of disillusionment, with an idealized view of childhood and an oversimplified understanding of adulthood in order to justify his withdrawal from and disdain for society.  But he’s also a fragile creature (character?) whose little stability that he has remaining depends on him maintaining such an oversimplified view of the world — he cannot tolerate motives that might be ambiguous.  He resists intimacy with others because the complexities of real-world relationships threaten to collapse his overly simplistic perspective on things.  So he shirks.

I think this discussion with his teacher causes Holden to begin to realize the trap of loneliness and isolation he has created for himself by his self-imposed alienation and withdrawal; it forces him to see his problems as well as the ambiguity and complexity of what Adulthood means.  In retrospect, this is very much what happened to me that day with my teacher, though I wasn’t fully cognizant of it at the time.  What I did realize was that I’d found an Adult who would believe in me and who supported and encouraged me to wade into the tumultuous waters of Adulthood with my chin held up, knowing full well that the person I was at school was very different from the person I was at home and that no one would know and that’s the way Life is sometimes; it doesn’t necessarily mean you must become a bitter, older person because your childhood was basically a joke.

I struggle with the “fall” that Mr. Antolini alludes to, often yearning to recede into my own isolated world because it’s easier that way — just Me, Myself and I to deal with, which usually isn’t so bad.  Often, I do.  But I’ve realized that the happiest I’ve been and the most I’ve ever grown was a result of me letting down my guard, even if for just a short while.

I’ve wondered what led Mr. Salinger to live his life in seclusion, given what I thought was the message of Catcher.  Maybe I missed something; maybe the joke is on all of us.  Either way, I feel sad in probably a very self-indulgent way today because I am reminded of my childhood and the time when I became an Adult, and I mourn it; I long for it because it represented an entirely new beginning, a new world of possibilities, and unchartered oceans.  I mourn that time when the people I love and care for were younger and death seemed so foreign and distant, a ship moored far off at sea.  I selfishly feel sad that I wasn’t able to read more from this enigmatic writer who seemed to have real insight on meaningful issues that I might have benefitted from.  And I feel embarrassed that I am being self-indulgent in a manner that would have likely offended him.

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