"A refurbished Star Wars is on somewhere or everywhere.

File: IMG_2615.jpg (41KB, 550x400px) Image search: [Google]

41KB, 550x400px

"A refurbished Star Wars is on somewhere or everywhere. I have no intention of revisiting any galaxy. I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned. Twenty years ago, when the film was first shown, it had a freshness, also a sense of moral good and fun. Then I began to be uneasy at the influence it might be having. The bad penny first dropped in San Francisco when a sweet-faced boy of twelve told me proudly that he had seen Star Wars over a hundred times. His elegant mother nodded with approval. Looking into the boy’s eyes I thought I detected little star-shells of madness beginning to form and I guessed that one day they would explode.

“I would love you to do something for me,” I said.

“Anything! Anything!” the boy said rapturously.

“You won’t like what I’m going to ask you to do,” I said.

“Anything, sir, anything!”

“Well,” I said, “do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?”

He burst into tears. His mother drew himself up to an immense height. “What a dreadful thing to say to a child!” she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities."

What "sea shells of madness" was Alec so astutely seeing in the boy exactly? A metaphor for autism?