“The World is so big, so
complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises, that it takes years for
most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of
research “childhood.”
There follows a program of
renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality,
entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and
grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart.
Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long
as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of
cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an
intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world
unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The
feeling haunts people all their lives.
Everyone, sooner or later,
gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes: What to do with
the pieces? Some people hunker down atop the local pile of ruins and make do,
Bedouins tending their goats in the shade of shattered giants. Others set about
breaking what remains of the world into bits ever smaller and more jagged,
kicking through the rubble like kids running through piles of leaves. And some
people, passing among the scattered pieces of that great overturned jigsaw
puzzle, start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a vague yet
irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about putting the
thing back together again.
Two difficulties with this latter scheme at once present themselves. First of all, we have only ever glimpsed, as if through half-closed lids, the picture on the lid of the jigsaw puzzle box. Second, no matter how diligent we have been about picking up pieces along the way, we will never have anywhere near enough of them to finish the job. The most we can hope to accomplish with our handful of salvaged bits—the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience—is to build a little world of our own. A scale model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half remembered. Of course the worlds we build out of our store of fragments can only be approximations, partial and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished whole that haunts us, they must be accounted failures. And yet in that very failure, in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may yet be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. We call these scale models “works of art.””
Two difficulties with this latter scheme at once present themselves. First of all, we have only ever glimpsed, as if through half-closed lids, the picture on the lid of the jigsaw puzzle box. Second, no matter how diligent we have been about picking up pieces along the way, we will never have anywhere near enough of them to finish the job. The most we can hope to accomplish with our handful of salvaged bits—the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience—is to build a little world of our own. A scale model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half remembered. Of course the worlds we build out of our store of fragments can only be approximations, partial and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished whole that haunts us, they must be accounted failures. And yet in that very failure, in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may yet be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. We call these scale models “works of art.””
-Michael Chabon, The Wes Anderson Collection
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-All photos are stills from films by Wes Anderson.
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-All photos are stills from films by Wes Anderson.
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