My mother sent me a link to the latest New York Times column by Michelle Slatalla, wife/mother/spy. It's a sad and funny story about simple memory loss, but the thing that caught my eye was the way that the novel, Bleak House, inspired Slatalla. For decades, she thought of it as her favorite book. For decades, she took comfort in the ways the story had moved her. When push came to shove (her daughter read Bleak House in college, and came home to chat about it....) Slatalla couldn't remember the main character's name. One of the points of the piece is that this loss of doesn't diminish the impact the book had on her. I love that idea -- that even if we don't remember who made the painting we saw in a museum when we were ten, or how the melody of a great song goes, or what the name of a character in a play we loved was named, we can still claim it as inspiration.
Check out the piece at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/fashion/26spy.html?emc=eta1
No comments:
Post a Comment