One of Maurice Sendak’s best compliments

I absolutely adore this story by the late, great and lovely Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are:

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it.
I answer all my children’s letters—sometimes very hastily—but this one I lingered over.
I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it.
I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.”
Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.”
That to me was one of the highest compliments I've ever received.
He didn't care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything.
He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”

Sendak_Studio.JPEG

xez

Don't you dare

Caitlin Moran is  a very wise and extremely funny human being.
I had read the following words over and again in particular times of need, before I found out that they are actually part of a larger and touching Times article.
However, the fierce and loving hopefulness of this particular excerpt, still remain the core message to me:

"At 19, I’d read a sentence that had re-terraformed my head: “The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang.”

In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing – not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over.

Each baby, then, is a unique collision – a cocktail, a remix – of all that has come before: made from molecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra’s breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms.

When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes – we have never been before, and we will never be again.
Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely fact of our existences.
The honour of being alive.
They will never be able to make you again.
Don’t you dare waste a second of it thinking something better will happen when it ends.
Don’t you dare."

Picture by Carol Jerrems

Picture by Carol Jerrems

Read the full article here and visit Caitlin’s website over here .

xez