So this video.. [do not open if you want avoid Vampire Diaries season 3 spoilers]
made me a little obsessed with “Never Let Me Go” by Florence + the Machine.
Too bad that, despite liking at least a few of their songs, I cannot shake how bad their live performance was when I saw them at a festival 2 years ago.
"I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be… This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages…the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide… Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I’m with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don’t ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child’s awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup."
Madeleine L’Engle
Another quote of hers that seemed a fitting response to this piece by Joel Stein on children’s books.
"This book is…brilliant? It’s short and illustrated which might scare some people away but it’s also one of the most true things I’ve read. It’s a book that tells a story on multiple levels and is emotionally affecting and universally true. It doesn’t matter that the protagonist is young, either, to say that this story is only meant for people around the same age as the main character is to deny that we are all always human no matter what age and that terrible things that happen affect us in similar ways."
