Two Hundred and Fifty Nine

She said if I died, she’d die with me.  Now she’s dead and I’m alive.  I thought of that as I watched Romeo and Juliet (Prokofiev's, not Shakespeare’s) earlier tonight.

It’s more difficult to translate a play into a ballet than into any other art, because a play is words and ballet's action.  But Prokofiev understood this play's about youth, and ballet is the ideal art in which to depict the physicality of youth.  Children act before they think, let alone speak.

The young love to live, and live to love.  For them, the end of love is death.  They die when they learn to imitate their quarreling elders. 

When I was young, some learned adult claimed children don’t know they’ll die one day.  Children understand death better than adults do because they’re closer to it, having just begun to live.  It’s life that’s a mystery to them.  Only after they’ve learned to love life do they fear losing it, and tell themselves some part of them lives on after they die.  The young have no need of religion.

When I was young, art was for some of us what religion used to be for most of us.  Now we worship the tribe, which is not religion but superstition.

I tried to kill myself after she died, but I won’t again.  She said she never wept because weeping is a display for others, a bid for their sympathy.  So is suicide.