Week 26 — A Veiled Innocence

Week 26/52

Oh, dang, we're halfway through. And yet, somehow, I don't feel like a better photographer than I was before I started it. Oh well. It shall come.

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All things truly wicked start with an innocence. — Ernest Hemingway

This quote has been rolling around in my mind this week; maybe it's because I'm feeling wicked — and not in a good way —, or maybe it's just that I've been so frustrated with my photography lately that nothing else seems to make sense. That's the risk you take when you throw yourself into your art; when it doesn't cooperate, nothing else does.

But back to the quote, this is a concept that I found to be truthful. It all starts with a sense of innocence, of an expectation that is never fulfilled, until it breaks. And then it breaks you, makes you want to run and hide, makes you want to be truly wicked.

This quote also makes sense in the context of one of my favorite books — yes, Wicked, by Gregory Maguire — where we see the transformation of a girl who thought she could change the world, who thought that she could do something better than what everyone else was, who had all of this innocence within her — into something dark, something solitary and fearful, something everyone else perceived as a frightful. Elphaba goes from a student who aspires to change the way Oz works to a dark and lonely soul, so lost and closed up that nothing can touch her. That path scares me. I see myself going down that same way over and over again and I look back to try to cling to the light, to the reality that I've always lived in. My happy place. So why is it that the darkest path is always the most alluring one?