John Fenn

In tenth grade, I met a playwright named John Fenn. He had the guts to come into our English class--in the year the newspapers called our school "Suicide High"--and tell us to write about the most painful thing we could think of.

Mr. Fenn told a story of how he had been flipping through a copy of National Geographic and had seen a photo of the oldest known cave painting. It was of a bear, he said, and archaeologists thought it had ritualistic significance.

Mr. Fenn shook his head and told us what he thought about the painting. He thought the bear had killed a man, a man with a mate and children. In deliberate anguish, his mate scrawled a picture of this murderer on the cave wall. He said that she was tired of mourning. He said that some ancient peoples believed that making an image of something gives one power over it.

John Fenn concluded by saying, "That which you cannot speak of controls you."