Boccacino
Alice
Back in the 1850s, James Frame, the minister of the Queen’s Street Chapel, wrote that innocence, once lost, can never be regained. On a day like today, only a few short hours since the tragic events of Las Vegas, it’s impossible to argue with him.
And yet there’s this. There’s this photograph of Alice in motion. Maybe we can’t regain our lost innocence, but we can at the very least open ourselves up to it. Today we have to rage and grieve and curse and weep, but tomorrow we can go out into the world and open ourselves up to simple joy and delight. That’s not innocence, but it’s as close as we’re going to get.
We need to do it. We need to do it even though we know that our innocence is lost forever, even though we know that if we experience joy and delight today, there will inevitably be another horror that will assault us and set us back on our heels. We need to do it so we can prepare Alice to understand that even though innocence is ephemeral, joy and delight never entirely disappear.
I needed this photograph today to remind me of that fact.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
