#208 In Dreams Begin Responsibilities- Delmore Schwartz
The title is a homage to a W.B Yeats poem. The narrator is dreaming on the night before he turns twenty-one.
He dreams of his mother and father before they were married.
The dream is of himself watching a movie of their courtship.
It’s a quaint old black and white scene of meeting her father, taking a lovely
trip to Coney Island and his father proposing marriage to his mother.
He gets progressively anxious as he watches the movie,
shouting at the screen for them to stop. He knows the mistakes they will make
and want to warn them, but he cannot, this is only a movie, it’s only a dream.
He is anxious about making mistakes in his own life as he embarks on adulthood.
Notable Passage: “I am anonymous, and I have forgotten
myself. It is always so when one goes to the movies, it is, as they say, a
drug.”
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