40 Days and 40 Nights
He was a sad man. A man of many faults, cracks. We knew this. We all knew this. But watching him now, watching those furtive first steps, the genesis of our rapture, we mourn him. He is still beautiful. He was beautiful once. He is frozen in his beauty: a snapshot, a shockwave, a reflective disc. We know this. We forgive him because he is beautiful, because he is frozen. Art is a thing without context. The crimes of the creator are forgiven in her work; the roar of approval from the maddening crowd erases all blame, all memory. A Lethe of song and motion. So we forget and our forgetting is ecstatic. We forget the sad man; we know only our own applause. There were some that dared call this forgiveness.
