sylph_fics

Black and white.

Odd, that the first thing that springs to my mind for that is the films I mainly grew up on. Color film was, of course, around by the time I was born, though I could name someone of my acquaintence who could barely claim the same... but black and white was still far more common for film. There's a reason it's called the 'silver screen' even today.

Of course, until well after I was married, color television was something barely imaginable--Oh, stop with the look.

Back to black and white, then.

The films of my youth often seem... well. As naive as I was at the time, looking back at them now. People say the world was simpler, then, and in some ways I don't disagree. In others, I do, because the world has always been a hell of a place. That the dangers were different ones, sometimes more hidden, sometimes less, doesn't mean that time was any easier to live in. The fallacy of "the world was better when I was young"... isn't one I hold to. Though I admit that the world has changed, and on the main not for the better, since I was that age. All the nostalgia daydreams or wishes for a life more like that in those old films won't change the ugliness of human nature that has been here since man figured out how to think.

Think, and plan, and write, and read... another form of black and white, there, and probably one with far more value than any film, no matter the subject matter. Words on a page, nothing simpler, right? Stark black-and-white evidence, or fantasy, or carefully-crafted plot... Nothing is seen as simpler, more straight-forward than writing, and nothing is more complicated, either.

Hm. I am getting damned maudlin, there, and thinking on and on about the twists and turns in literary ambition is my old friend's passion, not mine.

323 words