In the surprisingly good (post-zombie-apocalypse) novel, The Reapers Are The Angels, Temple, the main character, is a teen-age girl who’s grown up in an America where the ruins of the old world are in pretty much the same state as the zombies that shamble through the land. Dead, but still maintaining a semblance of life, reaching out to grab you if you slow down too much.
When Temple comes across a museum, she stops before a picture of a cottage far off in some woods, caught in the dream of a place to be.
“…she finds a painting that just looks like a bunch of trees, like a forest or something— but then she notices a little bitty cabin in the distance, just barely visible between the trunks of the trees…She stares at the cabin for a long time, her mind filled up with the shape of it, the peacefulness of it. It looks like a place she would like to go if she knew how to get there.
She pulls her eyes away from it. She knows if she looks at the painting too long it will make her sad about the way things are.”
– The Reapers Are the Angels • 119
Which I totally get. I’m sure that’s a real painting, and should probably ask the author which one, but I have my own picture that fits that feeling, if not the exact description.
A few weeks after reading the book I went to the National Portrait Gallery here to an Elvis exhibit, which was quite good, btw, following his early years. Though I’d missed it when I went to the Edward Hopper exhibition last year, I found a print of a cottage amidst some grassy dunes in the gift shop. You may think of Hopper for his urban images, especially “Nighthawks” the picture of a later night diner that has been reborn in countless parody and homage, but he also did a lot of Cape Cod/New England images which I’m fond of.
This one is Ryder’s House, painted in 1933, and it looked weathered even then. It also looks small and simple and isolated. I imagine the ocean is just over the dunes, and that it’s sparsely furnished with simple wooden tables and chairs and the afternoon sun creates a shaft of light filled with dust-motes caught in the breezes that slip in through the cracks around the windows.
I don’t know if looking at it makes me sad about the way things are. From time to time I’m that way naturally. Looking at it I think about what it would be like to live there, with just a tea kettle and some books for friends. I’d still want to blog about it of course. And take my camera on long walks in the dunes.
For now it’s just sitting there, propped up on the corner of my desk, and sometimes I look over at it, and imagine that I’m there already.
Links:
- Amazon: [amazon_link id=”0805092439″ target=”_blank” ]The Reapers Are The Angels by Alden Bell (aka Joshua Gaylord)[/amazon_link]
- National Portrait Gallery: Echoes of Elvis
- Smithsonian Collection: Ryder’s House by Edward Hopper