Listen in on a conversation between three people with very different beliefs…
Carter: Religious Liberals and Religious Conservatives both have an apocalyptic narrative. It just differs in the how and why.
John: Lets hear it.
Carter: Religious Conservative believs man is so sinful and bad, that eventually God will have to judge the earth and destroy everything. The righteous will be whisked up to heaven and the wicked will be tortured forever in hell.
James Robertson lives in Detroit. He walks 21 miles each day to get to work, from his home in Detroit to a factory in Rochester Hills, a suburb. Twenty one miles? Think about that. At an average gait of 5 mph, that’s a little more than 4 hours of walking.
Imagine he’s at work at least 9 hours. Add four hours of walking. That’s 13 hours a day. Not to mention how spent he must be each night after walking through rough parts of Detroit in rain or freezing winter.
This is a cold movie. No, it’s a FREEZING cold movie! (WARNING: some story spoilers ahead…)
The main character is steel cold. It opens up with a literally cold snowy scene. The warmest human relationship is a one-night stand at an Italian bordello (at least until Act 3).
I’m at a seaside resort somewhere in the Aegean. I’ve just visited the Temple of Apollo today. Built 2,700 years ago, the temple was surrounded by stone blocks full of inscriptions in classical Greek, which of course I cannot read.
I kicked myself why I haven’t devoted the time in the past to learn this ancient language. How wonderful it would’ve been to read these ancient “hardcover books” chiseled into granite.
Going through my library this weekend, I came across an old copy of Harold Bloom’s classic, The Western Canon.
When it was published, Bloom’s book was (and remains today) controversial among educators and academics for its unshrinking advocacy of intellectual elitism and its defense of Western canonical literature. That is, the European literature that most people who went to American public high schools encountered at some point, such as Shakespeare.
Yesterday, I received a postcard from a friend studying in Rome that had the Italian Renaissance painter Caravaggio’s famous depiction of Narcissus staring at his own reflection in the water.