I know my title sounds like it might belong to a marriage guidance manual from the seventies, but that's not what this blog post is about. It's not about romantic love or even interpersonal love. It's about "love" in the sense of enthusiasms, interests, pursuits, and so on. And it's unabashedly personal. I hope it's of interest to someone out there, but even if it's not, I want to write it for myself.
I was watching a horror film earlier today (the one I mentioned in a previous post), and it occurred to me: horror is probably my oldest love in this sense.
I can't remember when I started to love the horror genre. More than anything, it's horror films that I love. I was allowed to any number of horror films as a child, perhaps because my father also liked horror. At least, he liked ghost stories. He often mentioned staying up late as a boy, after everyone else had gone to bed, and reading a collection of ghost stories.
I once asked him why he was so tolerant of ghost stories, when he only had mockery for science fiction and fantasy, which he generally regarded as childish trash. "Because ghosts are real", he said.
How many horror films did I watch in my childhood? I have no idea, and I find it hard to even remember particular horror films. They all blend together in my mind, but they were mostly English: Hammer, Amicus, and other films of that kind.
Horror has always felt like home to me. I feel about horror-- the horror atmosphere, which has to be somehow cosy or appealing as well as scary-- the same way English people feel about the white cliffs of Dover, or Americans feel about Mom's apple pie.
But speaking of the white cliffs of Dover...my anglophilia, my love of Englishness, was also a very early acquisition, though not as old as my love of horror. Somehow, when I think of it, I think of the image of Big Ben in the cartoon Dangermouse, even though Dangermouse was not a big part of my childhood. I think it was mostly to do with English comics (such as The Eagle) and English TV programmes, though none of the latter suggest themselves to me right now. I do remember that the first "grown-up" book I ever read-- that is, the first book that was mostly text-- was Robin Hood and his Merry Men.
What about my love of poetry? This was a rather late arrival. It wasn't until my early teens that I discovered poetry, and the discovery was sudden. It's hard to write this without sounding obnoxious, but I was astonished-- even then-- at the realization that I had a mature taste for great poetry. As soon as I read W.B. Yeats, I loved him, in the same way that I love him today. I expected poetry to be over my head, but it wasn't. I have no idea how this happened, other than my father reciting poetry to me. (I can still remember the first time I heard the "Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow" speech from Mabbeth-- when my father recited it to me-- and the frisson I felt at the words "a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing").
My love of the cinema was even later. I'd gone to the cinema exactly seven times in my childhood, each of them memorable occasions. But it hadn't sparked a particular love of the cinema per se.
My passion for cinema-going actually began in 2001, when I was already in my early twenties. It sounds ridiculous (and it is ridiculous) but for many years I was reluctant to go to the cinema on my own, being unsure what exactly you did when you walked up to a box-office. I thought there was some kind of mystique to it, like ordering from the menu in a French restaurant.
Perhaps this nervousness was Providential, because when I finally overcame my cinema hesitation, I became an avid cinema-goer, and I experience a profound sense of revelation. I went every week, several times a week, for several years. I read the movie magazines. When people saw me, they asked me what films I'd seen recently-- which irritated me.
The cinema I attended was the Santry Omniplex, which was part of the Omni shopping centre in Santry, not far from Dublin Airport. Importantly, though it was part of the shopping centre, it was semi-detached, as it were-- which meant that, when I left a screening (and I always preferred morning screenings), I would walk from the darkness back out into the cold light of day.
The Santry Omniplex was the sort of suburban cineplex which is called "soulless", but it was exactly what I needed-- although it would take too long to explain this.
The more this great era of my cinema-going recedes into my past, the more important it seems to me. It was like an imaginative rebirth, even a spiritual rebirth. It reminds me of this great line from John Denver: "He was born in the summer of his twenty-seventh year, coming home to a place he'd never been before..."
But that's all I can write for now...
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