ABSTRACT
At the age of six, I took a vow of silence. I had witnessed something so exquisite, so evanescent that I had to memorialize it. I had to sacrifice my words on the altar of something greater than myself. What engendered this act? The impossible purity of love shared by a singing bibliophile and a bestial curmudgeon. I had just seen Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 1991) at the cinema. In the dark embrace of a nondescript multiplex on an otherwise forgotten afternoon, I had seen – and felt – the truth of the universe, or so it seemed. It was, for want of a better word, mystical. Sure, the singing teapot didn’t hurt my complete and overwrought devotion to the film. And I had to abandon my silence a few hours later, so as to stop annoying my Mum. But still. For those brief few hours, I ascended the lofty heights of knowledge of how to be human, how to be in the world, and perhaps most importantly how, eventually, I would be an adult. I was in the film; the film was in me.
