A dónde van/Where do they go?

She died one day before my birthday one month ago. I have never heard about Tasha Tudor before when, on my birthday, one anonymous dropped a newspaper clipping with a note in my husband’s mailbox in a very tender handwriting: Think your wife may be interested. The newspaper clipping was about the illustrator. Some extracts…

• “The modern world held few charms for Tasha Tudor, the eccentric and adored children’s book illustrator who died last week at the age of 92. In both her life and her work, Tudor exuded an unabashed nostalgia for a vanished time that she never knew first hand. She was born in 1915, but was so intensely fond of the 1830s that she sought almost her whole life to pursue the rural manners of that era.”

• “She appeared to have none of fastidious modernity’s terror of death. She told an interviewer in 1996 that she believed in Albert Einstein’s theory of time as a kind of river. If we could get around the river’s bends, Einstein (and Tudor) thought, we could travel on either direction, “When I die” she concluded, “I’m going back to the 1830s”
• “(Her work): the effect was to create a lovely protected world, a walled garden of the imagination where bands of little children might spend the afternoon playing fairies or pretending to be pirates. ”

• ¨Tudor seems sometimes to have found the world’s acclaim faintly exasperating ¨Everyone who likes my illustrations says, “Oh, you must be so enthralled with your creativity¨ she once remarked. “That’s nonsense. I’m a commercial artist, and I’ve done my books because I needed to earn my living” Still, what a way to live. It’s fair to say that, like the Oscar Wilde, Tasha Tudor put her talent into her work and her genius into her life. May she rest in…1830”

There are some objects, some facts, some people that at first sight impress us in a transcendent way, like Randy Pausch, who left us today.

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