Footsteps in the snow suggest where you have been, point to where you were going: but when they suddenly vanish, never dismiss the possibility of flight.
I have always been the lover - never the beloved - and I have spent much of my life waiting for trains, planes, boats, footsteps, doorbells, letters, telephones, snow, rain, thunder.
I certainly don't mean to suggest that all investigative journalism prior to 9/11 in the US was praiseworthy. But there were more examples to which one could point, and there were at last some activist photographers who understood that getting information into the public sphere in spite of military censorship was a right and obligation within democracy. That strain in war journalism did nearly vanish during that time.
In London the day after Christmas (Boxing Day), it began to snow: my first snow in England. For five years, I had been tactfully asking, 'Do you ever have snow at all?' as I steeled myself to the six months of wet, tepid gray that make up an English winter. 'Ooo, I do remember snow,' was the usual reply, 'when I were a lad.'
You can learn from an ordinary bamboo leaf what ought to happen. It bends lower and lower under the weight of snow. Suddenly the snow slips to the ground without the leaf having stirred. Stay like that at the point of highest tension until the shot falls from you. So, indeed, it is: when the tension is fulfilled, the shot must fall, it must fall from the archer like snow from a bamboo leaf, before he even thinks it.
If you are an artist, you may live with Lincoln. You sit with him, your coat is spread to keep the snow from the grave of Ann Rutledge; you will walk with Washington through the snow and suffer with him as you note the bloodstained footsteps at Valley Forge.
Maybe it's wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either.
I followed your footsteps," he said, in answer to the unspoken question. "Snow makes it easy." I had been tracked, like a bear. "Sorry to make you go to all that trouble," I said. "I didn't have to go that far, really. You're about three streets over. You just kept going in loops." A really inept bear.
But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,
If your Snark be a Boojum! for then
You will softly and suddenly vanish away,
And never be met with again!
I present the thing we're going to do as a simple starting point. They all know it's an art piece and that it's all going to be recorded. And I have never had an experience where one of these men tried to take advantage of the situation. If they were guilty of anything it was of being lonely. It was never that they were violent or dangerous.
Who was I? The stranger was footsteps in the snow a long time ago.
One only gets to the top rung on the ladder by steadily climbing up one at a time, and suddenly, all sorts of powers, all sorts of abilities which you thought never belonged to you - suddenly become within your own possibility and you think, 'Well, I'll have a go, too.'
The past record of man is burdened with accounts of assasinations, secret combines, palace plots and betrayals in war. But in spite of this clear record, an amazing number of people have begun to scoff at the possibility of conspiracy at work today. They dismiss such an idea merely a conspiratorial point of view.
Snow White has always been one of my favorite fairy tales growing up. To be able to say, "I'm going to be Snow White" - it's crazy. It's an honor.
Sometimes you have to go and do something different. I'll just disappear and write a couple of books, and then go back and do some TV when I've been forgotten about, and people think it's fresh. I see people who suddenly put themselves around everywhere and I think, 'You're going to last for about two years and vanish.'
A need for enforcement implies the possibility of behavior that violates the rules of the game. The point is that if there were no possibility of violation, then you wouldn't need enforcement.
I hope the snow covers everything so all the footsteps are silenced, and the whole city can be at peace.