Come Back, Come Back To Me

I Apologize For Being Obvious, But Every Time I Watch The Curtain Come Down On Even A Halfway Decent Production Of A Shakespeare Play I Feel A Little Sorrowful That I'll Never Know The Man, Or Any Man Of Such Warm Intelligence.

Four Or Five Years - Nothing At All. But No One Over Thirty Could Understand This Peculiarly Weighted And Condensed Time, From Late Teens To Early Twenties, A Stretch Of Life That Needed A Name, From School Leaver To Salaried Professional, With A University And Affairs And Death And Choices In Between. I Had Forgotten How Recent My Childhood Was, How Long And Inescapable It Once Seemed. How Grown Up And How Unchanged I Was.

Politics Is The Enemy Of The Imagination.

It Is Photography Itself That Creates The Illusion Of Innocence. Its Ironies Of Frozen Narrative Lend To Its Subjects An Apparent Unawareness That They Will Change Or Die. It Is The Future They Are Innocent Of. Fifty Years On We Look At Them With The Godly Knowledge Of How They Turne Dout After All - Who They Married, The Date Of Their Death - With No Thought For Who Will One Day Be Holding Photographs Of Us.

But It Was Too Interesting, Too New, Too Flattering, Too Deeply Comforting To Resist, It Was A Liberation To Be In Love And Say So, And She Could Only Let Herself Go Deeper.