Blog Posts

When I was a student in college, the walls of my youthful worldview began to collapse as I discovered the films of Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Federico Fellini and other directors. My friends and I loved discussing The Seventh Seal, The 400 Blows and La Strada. But one night, after a date at the movies, my girlfriend accused me of taking films– especially “foreign” films– too seriously. The accusation hurt my feelings because I thought she meant there was something wrong with me. She made it clear: that was exactly what she meant.

It was true that when I first saw Disney’s Pinocchio as a little boy, I was so terrified when the whale swallowed the puppet/boy that I turned my back to the screen. I can tell you what the rest of the audience in the theatre looked like as they watched the film, but I refused to look at it. So my girlfriend was right; I certainly had taken Pinocchio much too seriously. But why, I wondered? What was wrong with me?  As a young man I knew that there were several things wrong with me, but only later did it occur to me that taking films seriously wasn’t one of them. It was her problem, not mine: she didn’t take films seriously enough. So we broke up.
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In last week’s post, I wrote about my painting of people dancing at the Nevada County Fair. The work had been commissioned by the county’s Board of Supervisors to decorate the county’s newly constructed  administrative center. After the painting was installed, I left California  and spent a few months painting in Spain. When I returned to the U.S., a message on my studio’s answering machine cast a shadow on my happy homecoming. A gruff male voice in a menacing tone demanded that I phone him: “Hey, are you the guy that did that painting that’s in the new county building? The people dancing? Well, I got something to tell you. You call me right away, you hear?”

I couldn’t imagine why this man was angry, but his tone of voice led me to expect the worst.  Had I painted him dancing with someone else’s wife? Or equally unfortunate, had I depicted his wife dancing with someone she wasn’t supposed to be dancing with?

I waited until the next day to return his call.

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Imagine the unthinkable: Imagine that we human beings didn’t have to work for a living. Imagine that everything we needed to prosper in life was already there for us, like Eden. Imagine a world without money where we could pay for whatever we needed with only a smile. I wonder, what would we do with all the “free time” we had?  How many of us would decide to become policemen or to sell insurance?

If we didn’t have to work, I imagine that we would sleep a lot; we’d putter in the garden, goof off with the kids, play tennis and golf, enjoy long lunches, and do fun stuff, like fishing and playing cards. We’d weave and knit beautiful things and tell stories to each other. And no matter what, we’d play music and sing and we’d dance.

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