“There were eight plastic orange chairs stationed around the pool…In each of these chairs, a lifeguard sat and watched a group of six to eight children as they worked with another lifeguard in the water. There were never fewer that two lifeguards – one watching, one teaching – per group.”
It is difficult to imagine a more iconic image of American life than Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom from Want,” part of the Four Freedoms series of paintings appearing on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in the year 1943. In it, nine members of a family are seated at a dining room table, leaning forward in gleeful anticipation as the grandparents present a sumptuous Thanksgiving turkey. Wildly popular at the time, the image was later critiqued as portraying American over-consumption, and even national Puritanism, since the family had only water in their drinking glasses.
By the counter cultural 60’s, Rockwell was dismissed by some critics as trite and sentimental. However, luminaries of Pop Art such as Andy Warhol, who purchased two of his works, were genuine admirers. Warhol even credited Rockwell as a “precursor of the hyperrealists.” As Deborah Solomon’s biography, The American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell, shows, the man himself was as nuanced as his artistic legacy. A patriotic champion of the Boy Scouts and American-style democracy, Rockwell was also a supporter of racial equality and what we would today call multiculturalism. Available at the John T. Richardson Library, Call number 759.13 R6844YS2013
brilliant bands of jagged light in one field of his vision which expanded to include a blind spot. His
mother, a physician and fellow sufferer, explained the phenomenon of pre-migraine auras to him,
replacing his fear with a lifelong curiosity about sensory hallucinations.
Some of the content in Hallucinations is disturbing, such as a chapter about the bizarre hallucination of seeing one’s own double. However, Dr. Saks is mostly reassuring, letting us know that seeing and hearing things is not necessarily an indication of mental illness. In fact, hallucinations may be caused by conditions as disparate as blindness, epilepsy or emotional trauma. He shared his own experience of hallucinating after being badly injured in a hiking accident. In extreme pain, and struggling to cross a stream, he succumbed to the desire to give up. A firm voice told him “You can’t rest here–you can’t rest anywhere. You’ve got to go on!” Available at the Loop Popular Reading Collection, Call Number 616.89 S121h2012