Friday, June 29, 2012

As I write this now, it occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.

Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas - abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken - and what could be more frail than that?

But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.


 - Neil Gaiman, 
On the Introduction of "Fragile Things, Short Fictions and Wonders"

Friday, June 1, 2012

"Chester Cricket began to chirp to ease his feelings. He found that it helped somehow if you sang your sadness." - The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden


Tears or sullen silence or lashing out are not the only ways to cope with sadness. Some sad feelings crave a voice, even a song. I guess that's what 'singing the blues' is all about, is it not?