David and Pop-Pop's Europe Trip
The Louvre

Once, at Pomona, I was visiting my friends at Mudd-Blaisdell's Pooh Corner. Caroline was doing something with wire for an art project. I took some of her discarded, small wire pieces and bent them together to make a stick figure. I mounted it on a scrap of carboard and showed my friends.

"What's that?" asked Sylvie.

"It's Lonely," I replied. The figure was kneeling with its head back, looking up, with one hand reaching for the sky.

"No it's not, Lonely would be like this," said Sylvie, sitting, hugging her legs with her knees held to her chest and her head down and hidden.

A most interesting conversation followed. Sylvie and her friends thought that Lonely was a drawing-inward kind of feeling. But to me Lonely was a reaching-out-with-longing kind of feeling. We could understand the others' views, but not intimately.

Anyway, this painting was La Melancolie, not Lonely, but my story is what it reminded me of.