{"id":45,"date":"2012-05-08T17:55:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-08T23:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/egregioustwaddle\/2012\/05\/where-the-wild-things-are-reunited\/"},"modified":"2016-05-02T11:33:39","modified_gmt":"2016-05-02T17:33:39","slug":"where-the-wild-things-are-reunited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/egregioustwaddle\/2012\/05\/where-the-wild-things-are-reunited.html","title":{"rendered":"Where the Wild Things Are Reunited"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
<\/div>\n
Maurice Sendak, who died today, was always someone I respected more than loved.<\/div>\n

I was 13 when Where the Wild Things Are<\/i> was published, so too old to come to it as a child. My son liked it fine, but it wasn\u2019t up there at the top of the list of read-it-AGAINs with Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs<\/i>, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day<\/i>, or the weird Swedish fairytale about Princess Ingeborg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
My grandson as Max, stirring up
\na wild rumpus with a sleepy dog<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

That was fine with me. I don\u2019t have trouble with the anarchic spirit of childhood Sendak\u2019s work evoked, but wild things scare me\u2013maybe because my own childhood was so peopled with them, even if their wildness was emotionally rather than physically threatening. In the Night Kitchen<\/i>, though a pretty disturbing book in lots of ways, was less of a problem for some reason. (The childhood nudity that gets that book banned from library shelves was not a stopper, since my son attended The Last Unreformed Hippie Preschool in Hollywood, where clothing was as optional for toddlers as it had been for Woodstock attendees.) I was fascinated by the evolution of Brundibar,<\/i> from Sendak and Tony Kushner\u2019s storybook based on the children\u2019s opera originally performed in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia through their revival of the opera itself. I knew that Sendak had described the focus of his life\u2019s work as \u201cthe struggle to survive childhood,\u201d a struggle I honor but don\u2019t feel comfortable cuddling up to, wild thing that it is.<\/p>\n

So it took me by surprise, this afternoon, when I was brought to sobbing by a replay<\/a><\/b> of Sendak\u2019s last Fresh Air<\/i> conversation with Terry Gross. I was driving, and only caught the end, in which Sendak makes some very personal observations about belief, loss, and death\u2013a good 15 minutes, during which he is himself audibly weeping. I had to pull over. Talking with Gross about the death of loved ones, Sendak says he doesn\u2019t believe there\u2019s anything after death, so when someone dies, that\u2019s it, they\u2019re gone forever. And he loves them so much, and the emptiness is so great. Faced with this inevitability, Sendak (like Christopher Hitchens before him) forcibly maintains his lifelong atheism. But then he says, \u201cStill, part of me believes I will see my brother [Jack, a frequent colaborator on children\u2019s books, who died in 1995] again . . . in some dream state.\u201d I had to pull over, because I was crying so hard myself.<\/p>\n

I think this man of very great imagination and very little faith might be (like Hitchens) in for a surprise. It doesn\u2019t matter that he thought he didn\u2019t believe; he loved, and that works. It doesn\u2019t matter that the person he loved longest in his life, next to his brother, was another man, Sendak\u2019s partner of 50 years who predeceased him; not that it\u2019s anybody\u2019s business, as even Mark Shea said this past week, but Sendak himself said their relationship was less about \u201cbeing gay\u201d than about sharing the pleasures of good books and good music\u2013the blessing of comfortable intimacy that marks all good marriages in the end anyway. It speaks well of Sendak that if he was an idolator, he counted among his gods Melville, Dickinson, and Mozart. And in his conversation with Terry Gross, he described what he has come to see as his version of religion simply: \u201cI am in love with the world.\u201d The Creator of the world takes that as a compliment, I bet.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s my prayer. God of Surprises, let Maurice and his brother and his partner and his parents and his family members lost in the Holocaust (but never lost to You) and Herman and Emily and Wolfgang Amadeus be kicking up a joyful rumpus, not in some dream state but in the place where all the wild things\u2013beyond our imaginings, beyond what eye has seen or ear heard\u2013are reunited, now and always.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maurice Sendak, who died today, was always someone I respected more than loved. I was 13 when Where the Wild Things Are was published, so too old to come to it as a child. My son liked it fine, but it wasn\u2019t up there at the top of the list of read-it-AGAINs with Cloudy with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1086,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nWhere the Wild Things Are Reunited<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Maurice Sendak, who died today, was always someone I respected more than loved. 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