Ascoltavo Radio Popolare ieri sera e la recensione di un film appena arrivato nelle sale italiane ha attirato la mia attenzione. Nella versione originale si intitola "Where the Wild Things Are", esattamente come il libro da cui e' tratto. Ed un titolo cosi' bello non poteva che appartenere ad un libro per bambini, apparentemente uno dei piu' amati di tutti i tempi. A me non e' suonata nessuna campanella finche' non sono andata a guardarmi le illustrazioni, che ho riconosciuto subito per averle viste spesso in librerie e biblioteche.Da sole raccontano un mondo intero e commuovono gli adulti.

"And when he came to the place where the wild things are
they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth
and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws
till Max said "BE STILL!"
and tamed them with the magic trick
of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once
and they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all
and made him king of all wild things.
"And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!".

Pare che l'autore (di testo e illustrazioni), Maurice Sendak, si sia ispirato ad una coppia di zii, ebrei di origine polacca dall'inglese zoppicante, nell'ideare le sue creature selvagge, e per esplorare il grottesco e l'onirico della fantasia infantile. Anche se le creature di Sendak ispirano tenerezza piu' che terrore, non ce dubbio che egli violi l'Assioma del Piccolo Principe, per cui "Tutti i grandi sono stati bambini, ma pochi di essi se ne ricordano". Sendak se ne ricorda di sicuro, e va a rafforzare l'evidenza empirica del mio Corollario all'assioma suddetto, per cui "gli adulti che si ricordano della propria infanzia, sono spesso artisti geniali".
Come ulteriore prova del mio corollario, concludo con un'altro artista geniale che si ricorda della propria infanzia:

(The small magnifying glass-along with an album for twenty-five hundred stamps, a stamp tweezers, a perforation gauge, gummed stamp hinges, and a black rubber dish called a watermark detector-had been a gift from my parents for my seventh birthday. For an additional ten cents they'd also bought me a small book of ninety-odd pages called The Stamp Collector's Handbook, where, under "How to start a stamp collection", I'd read with fascination this sentence:"Old business files or private correspondance often contain stamps of discontinued issues which are of great value, so if you have any friends living in old houses who have accumulated material of this sort in their attics, try to obtain their old stamped envelopes and wrappers". We didn't have an attic, none of our friends living in flats and apartments had attics, but there'd been attics just beneath the roofs of the one-family houses in Union-from my seat in the back of the car I could see little attic windows at either end of each of the houses as we'd driven around the town on that terrible Saturday the year before, and so all I could think of when we got home in the afternoon were the old stamped envelopes and the embossed stamps on the prepaid newspaper wrappers secreted up in those attics and how I would now have no chance "to obtain" them because I was a Jew.)

(e' Philip Roth in "The Plot Against America")