![\"IMG_4653\"](\"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/IMG_4653.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe in-between is where we live – between good and evil, heaven and earth, perfection and despair, knowing and not-knowing.\u00a0 Sometimes this in-between feels like giddy freedom – like the white space between lines of poetry, like imagination. Sometimes it feels perplexing, floating about, wondering\u00a0how to behave in wartime, in this age of persistent, unpredictable terror.<\/p>\n
When I was a kid, I used to sigh and hang my head, not understanding how my mother could have grown up doing normal things during WWII.\u00a0 How was it possible that she attended art classes, dances, movies when millions of people were dying!??\u00a0 \u00a0The simultaneity of daily life on one hand, and bombing and gas chambers seemed unfathomable.<\/p>\n
Time changes everything, doesn’t it?\u00a0 The rules of fate dictate that one-time critics, adolescent or otherwise, land on the other side.<\/p>\n
Here we are with people dying in warlike arenas – close to home in Orlando, and around the world in fields of chaos.\u00a0 And here, summer arrives.\u00a0 There are summer beaches, glorious high skies, the luminosity that you don’t see otherwise, colors shimmering in veils of clouds.\u00a0\u00a0 Kids graduate, go to proms,\u00a0 fly away.\u00a0 (My daughters are in Italy: as Eliot’s famous line says, “In the room the women come and go\/Talking of Michelangelo.”) \u00a0There are health insurance forms to fill out; furry black caterpillars invade trees on their way to becoming gypsy moths.<\/p>\n
There is summer food to prepare – salads of radishes, asparagus, pea shoots, scallops – and piles of cherries and peaches.\u00a0\u00a0 Do we eat to honor the dead, to resist the enemy or to raise up the good?\u00a0\u00a0 Or just to eat?<\/p>\n
The push forward is fraught and it’s not.\u00a0 This summer, I’ll be pursuing a complex set of coordinates across Europe.\u00a0 A\u00a0frisson is in the air, some nerves, some excitement.\u00a0 How indeed did my mother “do art, do life” during an age of terror?\u00a0 With a purposefulness.\u00a0 The abyss intensifies what we know to be essential in every bit of play and pleasure.\u00a0 In the between of what’s given, you just do it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The in-between is where we live – between good and evil, heaven and earth, perfection and despair, knowing and not-knowing.\u00a0 Sometimes this in-between feels like giddy freedom – like the white space between lines of poetry, like imagination. … Continue reading