Well I Ain't No Miss Jessel, That's for Sure

One of my favorite movies is The Innocents, a classic psychological horror film from the 1960s based on a Henry James novel. It begins at the end, after the horror has concluded and the chips have fallen. It's a very intelligent film, and the first shot — even though the first 30 seconds or so of the film are of pitch blackness — is of the caretaker's hands. Deborah Kerr's character, Miss Giddens, has pledged her life to protect the children placed into her care. The well-being of the children, in a very real sense, is her reason for being.

And so that first shot is of her hands, clasped in prayer. Not the prayer of the righteous, but the prayer of the penitent. "The children," she sobs. "I wanted to save the children."

I'm not giving anything away, folks. This is how the movie starts.

The reason I bring all this up is because today I've erased my .muttrc file.

But it wasn't out of malice or spite. I sure as hell wasn't trying to save it from no ghost monsters. I was trying to save it! And not in the Ctrl-S "save" kind of save. No, I was trying to develop a means by which it would automatically update itself with new information via a script and a cronjob.

But at one point I accidentally replaced ~/.muttrc with ~/.muttrc.incomplete and, well, the rest is a bunch of shots of my hands, if you get my drift.

"We lay, my dot-muttrc file and I, beneath the weeping willow
But now alone I lie and weep beside the tree

Singing O willow waly by the tree that weeps with me
Singing O willow waly till my dot-muttrc file returns to me

We lay, my dot-muttrc file and I, beneath the weeping willow
A broken heart have I
O willow I die, o willow I die"