Dear Mr. Sendak,
I am sorry for your sick heart and for your grief.
I am sorry for your vunlnerability and your regrets.
I am sorry about Norman Rockwell and Salman Rushdie and the fact that you think Catherine Keener may matter more than you do.
I’ve got nothing against Catherine Keener, or James Gandolfini, or Dave Eggers, really.
But Mr. Sendak?
You’re beyond compare.
In your work is the beauty and the despair, the exquisite and the blunt, the truth and the mystery.
In your work is the stuff of Mozart, Keats and Blake; Melville and Dickinson.
In your work is the stuff that ignites a passion in a lot of us.
Not just tomorrow, but yesterday and today.
I am sorry about the rubber bullets that never penetrated in the way that they were meant to, but I want you to know that in your work is the stuff that penetrates us all …
(Edited to add: This letter is written in response to a New York Times article about Maurice Sendak that was rather full of doubt and sorrow. When I look at Sendak’s life work, I do not see doubt and sorrow. I see Little Bear and Where the Wild Things Are and Night Kitchen and Higglety Pigglety Pop. I see insight, bravery, wit and vivid imagination, all in good measure. And I hope that somewhere inside Sendak’s tired, "curmudgeonly" heart, he does, too…)
He sure was opinionated and curmudgeonly in that article….
I don’t know. I guess to me he just sounds sad…
True. I felt sorry for him – like a man who is depressed. But his anti-Judaism comments and such made him a tad unlikeable. But of course I only skimmed the article so maybe I made a fatal judgment error. I couldn’t tell from your post whether you were being forthright or sarcastic, so I was trying to respond somewhere in the middle.
Oh, gosh. I was definately being forthright. I think Sendak is just a fount of riches and it makes me sad that his riches don’t thrill him they way they thrill us…
Thank you for this post. Without it I wouldn’t have known about the article.
His work, oh my, it penetrates, so deep and so many.
that last line in the article is a doozy.
ka-powie. he definatly already has.