I live in the past
have to admit it is more
comfortable there
A few weeks ago I was talking movies with one of the younger people on the staff and I mentioned The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
He had never seen it.
I mentioned Patton.
He had never seen it.
I mentioned The Maltese Falcon.
He had never seen it.
I asked, for crying out loud, what movies had he been watching?
“Movies that had been released in the last 20 years,” he said.
He had me there.
I couldn’t think of but a handful of ‘new movies’ that I had seen or at least remembered seeing.
This morning, The Guardian had a list of the top 100 books of the last 20 years.
I felt that here I would be on much firmer ground.
I like to read.
I like to think I read EVERYTHING.
I scanned the list of top 100 books of the last 20 years … and recognized 3.
I knew some of the authors.
But for the most part …
The book the author picked as their best book was Wolf Hall.
I think I got through three pages and it was walking though wet cement and I dropped it.
So what do I read then?
My Kindle’s are so full, I have to delete books and keep floating libraries on my google drive.
I am always reading.
Always reading the same thing.
Little known and less read titles on history and biography and the type of fiction that catches my interest.
And old novels.
Novels I first read years ago.
Novels that I have read and re-read over and over again.
I am comfortable with those books.
I like how they were written.
I know how they end.
Maybe if I was a kid when I first read them, when I read them now, I am a kid again.
I am comfortable with old movies.
I like how they were made.
I know how they end.
Maybe if I was a kid when I first saw them, when I see them now, I am a kid again.
In a kids world you don’t worry much about who is President, or which country is mad at which country or even what the price of gas is.
Who wouldn’t want to be a kid again?
For a lot of reasons, I live in the past.
Mostly, though, I am more comfortable there.
No Haiku For You 