If you grew up or had your young adulthood in NYC in the late 60's, 70' or 80's, Patti Smith's memoir/love letter to Robert Mapplethorpe will trigger your nostalgia for a city you once knew well. It has inspired me to write a few passages recounting those days for myself, but I will spare you the tawdry details.
I am struck, by how, in youth, it is almost impossible to do anything other than just be. There is not a large enough frame of reference to really conduct the obsessive meta-analysis of later life.
Your whole life is ahead of you.
You don't know how good you have it.
You don't know how bad you have it.
You endure unimaginable loss; it goes underground, or it kills you.
So much in Patti Smith's story of love and loss goes unsaid. The circumstances are intense and so are the emotions, but they are softened by the lyrical prose and the feeling of inevitability and possibility contained in youth.
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