I am still seeing her in that hospice bed. She was unconscious, lying on her right side. Her face was relaxed and a bit pinkened (thanks to the morphine, no doubt); the pulse in her neck was quite rapid. I noticed a smattering of freckles that I had overlooked before. She was wearing her watch and her wedding ring. (I brought the watch home with me.) It was, as she had put it the day before -- one of the last things she said -- unreal. Or all too real.
The great art of films does not consist of face and body, but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.
Over the years I suffered poverty and rejection and came to believe that my mother had formed me for a freedom that was unattainable, a delusion. Then . . . I was . . . confined to this small apartment in this alien city of Rochester. . . . Looking about, I saw millions of old people in my situation, wailing like lost puppies because they were alone and had no one to talk to. But they had become enslaved to habits which bound their lives to warm bodies that talked. I was free! Although my mother had ceased to be a warm body in 1944, she had not forsaken me. She comforts me with every book I read. Once again I am five, leaning on her shoulder, learning the words as she reads aloud "Alice in Wonderland."
