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June 9, 2011

Keeping Things To Yourself

In days gone by, when I saw a film my immediate response was to go write about it. I enjoyed sounding off. Later on, during that brief period in which I developed my voice in the burgeoning world of online film criticism, I not only enjoyed it but felt a responsibility to make sure my two cents were heard as they fell into that increasingly gaping change jar. I'd watch a movie within the context of writing about it later; phrases would form as the film played, I'd know my angle before it was over. I'd go home and write about it.

I was watching a film last Friday (okay, it was The Tree Of Life), watching and recognizing grand gestures drawn from quotidian detail, and thinking that the vast majority of people in the world live their lives and experience the same swells of feeling and trembling of spirit that have emboldened or shaken me or made me crane my neck higher from time to time, and they don't go home and take those intangible things and write them down in novels or poems or lyrics for songs or make films about them or compose symphonies or paint paintings encapsulating the breadth of their empathy. I see something writ large and think that every person on earth must understand that, and it frustrates me to think that they have not expressed it to me. Not because I want to have their confidence but because I can't imagine any single person simply containing themselves. Is stoicism so prevalent? How does one go through life keeping things to oneself? Does not the urge to express the depths of one's experiences proliferate us all? Or is the profundity of such experience such a rarified and personal thing that the most common reaction is to simply have them, and not purloin them through expression?

I can't do that; whether this compulsion was inherent in me or ingrained over time, it exists and I act upon it. These pages here are indicative of that. But I've decided to try and approximate a sense of containment, to hold something close and keep it to myself and see what happens to it then. If I see a film or read a book or hear a symphony or song and respond to it in a personal way, it's because it expresses something for which I have a high degree of sympathy. It is not my own experience but a mirror of it; recognizing that reflection is an experience in and of itself, and it is this refraction that I will not try to express, nor compress with objectivity. At least for a time. At least in this one case.

We'll see how long it lasts.

Posted by David Lowery at June 9, 2011 11:20 AM