Passion

Excerpt from "Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are," by Patricia Cohen, in the September 10, 2008 issue of The New York Times. The subject of the article is the children's book illustrator Maurice Sendak who recently reached his 80th birthday. A celebration will soon be held in his honor.

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Mr. Sendak is pleased with the coming birthday celebration, just as he is about his awards and honors, but in the end, he maintained, they don't amount to much. They "never penetrated," he said. "they were like rubber bullets."

It's not that he isnt't grateful. "They made me happy, but at a certain point in life, you see through them," he said. "You don't mock them, you don't hate them, you feel sorry for them" - tiny, inert emblems that just aren't up to the task of answering pressing questions about meaning, soul-touching greatness, and durability.

So he spends his days pondering his heroes: Mozart, Keats, Blake, Melville, and Dickinson. He admires and yearns for their "ability to be private, the ability to be alone, the ability to follow some spiritual course not written down by anybody."

Mr. Sendak is quick to insist that a vast distance stands between his own accomplishments and theirs. "I'm not one of those people," he said. "I can't pretend to be."

Still, he has the feeling that "I will do something yet that is purely for me but will create for someone in the future that passion that Blake and Keats did for me."

What he has failed to consider, though, is that he may already have.

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Photo location: Bang Saphan Noi, Prachuab Khirikan province