I am told that I usually seem to have, as Margaret Laurence once put it, the “strength of conviction.” (Other people have been known to call it stubbornness.) But, you know, I don’t know everything. (I know!!!) Someone was telling me the other day that they thought there was really very little in life worth regretting. “Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” this person said, grasping for depth, authority, I guess. No better place to go than Shakespeare.
In high school I had a crazy madman of an English teacher. I have succeeded in shedding most things from high school except the memories of this person. To my sixteen-year-old bookish self he was like Heathcliff, in more ways than one – there was always a hint of a storm cloud around his eyebrows.
I can’t say I was attracted to him, exactly, though perhaps my mind has whitewashed some schoolgirl crush. But he was the first person I’d ever met who did things like paper the walls of his classrooms with e.e. cummings poems. (Now that I think of it, in that time before the internet he had undoubtedly typed them out himself, an even greater sign of something-wrong-in-a-good-way.) So he had a sort of magnetism to him that, in college, I would realize, attaches to most people who are invested in some higher order of thing than themselves. At least, that quality is magnetic to me.
I should say, at the outset, I am not a huge comic book fan. Well, rather, I should say, I am not any kind of comic book fan. There is something forbiddingly male about them, to me, and moreover, something alienating about their conviction that the world is easily divisible into the good guys and bad and that life is as simple as choosing sides. I was born with the wrong intellectual wiring to find that view engaging.
What I am a fan of, or was a fan of, I suppose, is Heath Ledger. Oh, I know. I know he was not whatever person I have imagined him to be through whatever I have seen in the media and gleaned from his small set of performances. I have known enough actors to be skeptical of their types, and in particular of the talented ones, because they always seem to have an irritating self-awareness of how very good they are, and they can smell your hunger for a good performance from miles away.
