HAVE YOU EVER BEEN IN LOVE?

I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew–
Only more sure of all I thought was true.

(1915, A Boy’s Will ROBERT FROST)

Do you think Elle Fanning could play Alice Wentworth

when they make a movie of THE LEGEND OF VICTOR STANDISH?

Hey, I can dream, right?

Do you think of your characters with faces of movie stars? Tom Selleck in QUIGLEY DOWN UNDER is who I think of when I write Samuel McCord.

I liked the love story in that movie.

In most of our novels we write of love. But do we do it so the prose touches the heart?

Neil Gaiman wrote:

“Have you ever been in love?

Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable.

It opens your chest, and it opens up your heart, and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”

Being in love and writing of being in love. It's something they don't teach you in school."

 And Neil, being the genius he is, also wrote of that:

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you in school.

They don't teach you how to love somebody.

They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor.

They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer.

They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying.

They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”

No, in school students learn illusions: 


Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits in the hutches of our schools. They are the displaced persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for romance, yet settle for what they call making out.

They have been taught that if you are sunny, cheery, sincere, group-adjusted, popular, the world is yours,

including barbecue pits, charge cards, disposable diapers, percale sheets, friends for dinner, entertainment centers, color DVD's  of the kiddies on the laptop, and the eternal whimsical romance -- with crinkly smiles and Owen Wilson dialogue.

So they all come smiling and confident and unskilled into the computer, digital world,

and in a few years they learn that it is all going to be grinding and brutal and hateful and precarious. 

These are the slums of the heart. 

Bless the misinformed bunnies. These are the new people, and we are making no place for them. We hold the dream in front of them like a carrot, and finally say:

Sorry you can't have any. 

And the schools where we teach them non-survival are gloriously architectured. They will never live in places so fine until they contract something incurable.


Still each day which dawns is the eve of a New Year no matter the date.  

I will let Neil Gaiman give his benediction for the New Year we awoke to this morning:

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness.

I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art --

write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can.

And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”
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