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January 10, 2007
OGIC: Night thoughts
Heading toward the holidays, I anticipated being much more in evidence around here. Following the hectic build-up to Christmas, it seemed, a few quiet, blessedly blank days were in the offing--good for blogging as well as other essential activities too often deferred during life-as-usual: learning to knit; getting good and enveloped by the second season of The Wire, which has been sitting here keeping my Netflix subscription at a standstill for the last two or three months; and reading a book in longer sessions than the seven or eight minutes that expire, on a typical night, between when I shimmy beneath the covers and when my eyelids flutter, droop, and slam shut. For all these reasons, and for the overarching sense of exemption from many of life's normal demands, that week between the holidays has always been a sweet little stretch of exceptions to most of the usual rules.Sweet, this year, it wasn't to be. Beginning with the scary but ultimately unharmful accident of an elderly relative on Christmas night, the last week of 2006 was crowded with illness and hospital visits. By New Year's it seemed, at least, that all of these incidents had ended well. But last week my grandmother, who is ninety-two years old, wound up back in the hospital. Though she's home again now, the doctors don't believe her condition will improve. And I'd take workaday life as I used to know it, with all its impositions and little assaults on time and mind, gladly.
Somewhere during the six years since I last lost a grandparent, I realize, I've changed. Losing my grandfathers in 1996 and 2001 was difficult, of course. I mourned them and learned an absolute new way of missing someone. With my grandmother's health failing now, I feel my own mortality implicated, and that of everyone I love--because I'm an older person now but also, I think, because past a certain age the end of a life ceases to seem premature, exceptional, unfair. There's no sense of the injustice of circumstances to distract you from facing the necessity of the event: you can focus on the "why now?" instead of the "why?" It's a colder, harder, more inexorable proof of the one inevitability. Besides which, you don't miss someone any less just because they lived a long life.
Changing the subject, but only sort of, who out there saw Children of Men who has also read P.D. James's book? I read perhaps a quarter of the book before venturing out to see the movie a couple of weeks ago. The latter experience was a frustrating one that has sent me back to the book fairly hungrily to see the founding concept of both book and movie--that the human race has gone almost two decades without being able to procreate--treated with some curiosity and imagination (I'm now about a third of the way through).
In Alfonso Cuarón's film, this germ serves merely as an occasion to depict and decry a fairly standard-issue vision of a future fascist dystopia. In some way that goes unspecified, we gather, the aging and near-extinction of the race has upset and depressed people; from that despair (and, perhaps more directly, from a governmental predisposition toward fascism) has sprung nearly worldwide catastrophe. Before infertility kills off the race, the movie suggests, the race will destroy itself out of rage and fear. That's a plausible enough extrapolation, I suppose, but it does by design foreclose the possibility of exploring the specificity of the sorrowful, wondering situation James posited.
It wasn't all bad. Cinematography and performances gave the first half a real pull before the movie descended into a tedious, overwrought tedious chase sequence during which nothing beyond pursuit and evasion develops--but I didn't feel much. By contrast, the ruminations of James's deeply flawed main character are less spectacular but entirely more moving. They're as illuminating of our own loneliness and reaching for consolation as of those of a dying race:
I can still find pleasure, more intellectual than sensual, in the effulgence of an Oxford spring, the blossoms in Belbroughton Road which seem lovelier every year, sunlight moving on stone walls, horse-chestnut trees in full bloom, tossing in the wind, the smell of a bean field in flower, the first snow-drops, the fragile compactness of a tulip. Pleasure need not be less keen because there will be centuries of springs to come, their blossom unseen by human eyes, the walls will crumble, the trees die and rot, the gardens revert to weeds and grass, because all beauty will outlive the human intelligence which records, enjoys and celebrates it. I tell myself this, but do I believe it when the pleasure now comes so rarely and, when it does, is so indistinguishable from pain? I can understand how the aristocrats and great landowners with no hope of posterity leave their estates untended. We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life. But our minds reach back through centuries for the reassurance of our ancestry and, without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins.
Peter Suderman is a more lucid voice of dissent from the critical consensus on the film; his review can be read here.
Have a good week.
Posted January 10, 2007 9:00 AM
