Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering

I read this when it first came out, and have reread it again several times since. Some of it I now know by heart, and it has become a part of me. Which is to say, Wendy Lesser has affected my thinking about Art and the way we view Art through life. It has helped me rediscover books and movies that I had previously written off as a younger man. Some colleagues have told me that it changed their reading habits and enhanced their enjoyment of the many classics discussed too. For instance, she devotes a chapter to the movie, Vertigo. It was a failure when it first came out: "In 1958, when Vertigo came out, movies were not quite the willed. eternally accessible experience they are today. You couldn't just pop down to your local video rental place or order up the film online. You had to wait for the movie to appear in its own good time...then the movie was taken off the market for 15 years." And audiences did not like the movie the first time because it was slow, slow, slow. Jimmy Stewart was having surreal experiences, a vertigo in which, on the screen, his figure in superimposed on a descending hardwood corkscrew, his hands out in a state of zombie paralysis. When she saw it the first time, Lesser says she thought that Stewart's obsession with Kim Novak was silly, and the slow, slow, slow kiss, now famous for the 360-degrees turning camera against the surging music, particularly slow and ridiculous. Hokey and embarrassing. It was fifteen years before she saw it again, and it was then a different experience. She says, "I was aware, even at the time, that I was getting the benefit of a second viewing. The first time I was too caught up in the suspense, and if that is your motive, the end of Vertigo can be a bit disappointing." "But once you know how it ends, you are free to focus on the emotional progression of the film. For the first time I saw how much of the movie was about loss, and about second chances." Something she had learned to care about in the fifteen year gap between viewings. "What had seemed hokey and melodramatic to me before now seemed tragic and true: this was what love was like." And what was she learning from this second viewing of Vertigo, this story of obsession and ghosts and love and loss? "Well, all of the usual things that those of us who have ever had their hearts broken learn. That you temporarily lose yourself when you lose somebody you love. . .that you go looking for your former self as much as for your missing half. . .That love is mysterious and archaic, with something almost ghostly about it, so that being powerfully in love seems to take you back to some point of origin, back beyond your childhood to a past you couldn't actually have known." "We are soul mates, we say. I seemed to have known him forever, we say. These are the banal, colloquial expressions of a feeling that Vertigo, with all of its dramatic excess, subtly and skillfully captures." "At the heart of the movie is a ghost story that