Throwing Down Flowers

I talked to Ingmar when he had just seen [Trolösa]. For two years, since he handed me the screenplay, we hadn’t talked about it. He never saw anything, he was never part of it. He left it to me. Now there was one thing he asked me to take out. It’s in the end. She says goodnight and she’s gone and he’s lonely. He goes to the window and he looks out and what I showed out there was him walking on the beach. I don’t even want to say why I had it there.

Ingmar said, ‘I beg of you, take that away. Please take that away.’ I said, Ingmar, you mustn’t because it is so much the film. It’s done with love. He said, ‘You have to understand, it looks like I will commit suicide.’ No, no, I said, it’s not going to look like that—I swear. He begged. I took it away and put an empty island in the same place.

Today I called him, and he said, ‘I’ve seen it again. You’re right. Put it back again.’ And I will. It means something.

When he was 60 years old he celebrated his birthday on that island, on that beach. And my daughter was there; she was five years old. And they went down to exactly that same place and he said to her, ‘When you are 60 what will you do then?’ She said, ‘I’ll have a big party and my mother will be there. She’ll be really old and stupid and gawky but it’s gonna be great.’ And he looked at her and said, ‘And what about me? Will I not be there?’ And the five-year-old looked up at him and she said, ‘Well, you know, I’ll leave the party and I’ll walk down to the beach and there on the waves you will come dancing towards me.’

Liv Ullmann

from "A Kindness"

I need
something now to look back to, in order to say,
I have been sudden in the sun’s perfection,
I have had blood rise like light,
my hands have answered,
my memory is a bush of grown flame.

It is a kindness you can do me, to have been there
at the center of summer, yourself the attack of summer,
and to have made all that light out of being young.

I need to have loved you. I need to have told you so.

William Dickey