To thine own self be true

1967’s The Stranger, director’s Luchino Visconti’s totally faithful adaptation of Albert Camus’s excellent 1942 Existentialist novella.

Meursault (Marcello Mastroianni is perfectly cast) is a likable, ordinary, humble, easy-going, honest man who seems mostly like a spectator of life, going with the flow of life around him.

He is accustomed to not making trouble and pleasing others; if anything, he has no strong preferences about most things: “It means nothing to me” is his common refrain.

Spoiler: But gradually, he becomes engage (you’ll have to provide the French accents) and ‘accidentally’ murders an armed Arab on a beach in the climax. In truth, he was delirious with summer heat and somewhat blinded by the sun, and instinctively, pulls out a revolver he happened to be carrying when the Arab lunges at him.

The absurd trial and final scene that follows makes many of the central points that Camus made in his original:
-that appearances and individual behavior/choices can be misread/misinterpreted by society
-that context and circumstance can determine one’s destiny apart from individual will
-that an individual can be condemned for being too honest
-that unconventional individuals are prone to misjudgement
-that religious people often have little tolerance and understanding of people who are unconventional non-believers.
-that justice can be ‘blind’ to the actual lived experience of accused individuals
-that justice and religion often have limited/limiting agendas.
-that people often don’t truly know or understand one another
-that violence is a common theme in human affairs
-that many people are and feel alone, isolated, alienated from others
-that many people never think much or deeply about their lives and choices until confronted with the immediacy of death.

There is much to admire about this thoughtful ‘little art film’ which never made it to DVD. Visconti connects characters like Meursault, Raymond, and the old man regarding their violence. He connects the priest to the various lawyers with respect to conventional religion, even satirizing them in a couple of places.

And the various other characters are all strong including Anna Karina as Meursault’s girlfriend, Raymond, and the old man. The pace of the film is alternately a casual, controlled flow (reflecting Meursault’s personality) and headlong ‘swirl’ (once the murder occurs).

I first saw this intelligent, sensitive film in 1971 when I was a Comparative Literature student studying Camus’s book and it was a knockout then and still is some 50 years later. It’s very memorable, powerful, and thought-provoking. It will get a viewer to question what happens, the choices Meursault makes, and the viewer’s own views on life and death. You can’t ask for much more than that from a movie or book. Two thumbs way up.
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The ideas of the book/movie listed above made quite the impression on me back in ’71; I found myself mostly in agreement with them, and had no problem understanding Meursault. Camus’s 1967 American edition of his book:

Lobby cards of the film from my personal collection; the main focus is on Meursault (Mastroianni) since it is his story/his thoughts which help to carry the narrative via voiceovers:

Last week and now this week, Japan has taken top honours at the Augusta Master’s–both men’s and women’s. The world really and indelibly comes to the States and the world of golf in a huge way.

Matsuyama is an exceptional, nice, incredibly-skilled golfer. and has arrived as a major force in tournaments to come.

In retrospect, you could certainly sense that he would win an American major over the past few years. Today he won his first–The Big One.

Appropriately, he foreshadowed today’s victory by winning the low amateur at the Master’s 10 years ago. He has long paid his dues and has fully arrived as a dominant pro.

I predict we will now see a flood of Asian golfers take on the North American golf world and all the other majors. The global village has truly caught up with American golf. A major achievement for Japan, in particular.

Amazon workers voted against having a union.
They know Bezos would fire anyone who would not accept his shameless Dickensian 19th century job conditions.
They (and their families) want to survive and get ahead.
They know what side their bread is buttered on.
Forced slave labor (with no bathroom breaks) in America.
Pity, as I do, those workers who are that exploited (along with all the health care workers, overworked, underpaid, devalued, and taken-for-granted on both sides of the border).

I would not think or believe that the currently viral elephant is capable of representational painting of itself unless I was present and saw it happen myself. (CGI is much too commonplace these days.)

Conversely, I would, though, believe elephants are capable of abstract painting as in our local zoo elephant Lucy. That seems much more likely within the realms of actual possibility.

With snow on the ground and nowhere to go, I flicked on Julie Andrews hosting the PBS New Year’s Vienna Philharmonic concert for Jan. 1, 1916. Excellent Strauss music, Vienna scenery, beautiful dancing, and shots of the Danube valley during the “On the Beautiful Danube” climax.

One of my daily certainties is that I know how to cheer up myself with my vast library of audio-, visual-, and aural-arts resources I’ve purposefully accumulated over the decades.

It has long been, of course, a truism that the Arts have, historically, raised people’s minds, feelings, and spirits. People who are currently depressed and down need only turn to the Arts and Nature for whatever pandemic healing they urgently and immediately need.

We are personally responsible for ‘medicating’ and ministering unto our own selves, restoring our idealism and heightened living. One has to personally ‘put back in’ when one has been depleted by whatever changes and losses. “A (wo)man can do all things if (s)he will.”–Alberti.

Nothing happens/no improvements happen without conscious choice and personal WILL. As Viktor Frankl and the Existentialists pointed out: we make our lives; we largely determine what responses we have to change, context, and life’s buffetings. Mind over matter, basically.

(An example of conscious choice and will to turn a boring school room into a concert hall with many more-than-willing ‘accomplices’)

when your rough hands catch onto a smooth glasses-cleaning cloth.

On Friday afternoons, we had a free period at the end of the day that could be used for homework and study. I dragooned a couple of classmates into staging a ‘hip’ reading of the wall scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. My director’s choice was end up with dumping a load of confetti as the finale. Except for a few guffaws, the class reaction to this ‘sure-fire’ brainstorm was embarrassingly minimal. I recall my red-faced female lead and I down on the floor afterward cleaning up after class. Well, they can’t all be gems, I recall thinking.

On my short list:
Tightrope (Clint Eastwood and Bujold)
The Iceman Cometh (American Theatre’s presentation)
Insomnia (Pacino and Williams)
Jesus of Montreal (satire on religion and modern culture)
The Godfather series
Bleak House (BBC series)
Week-end (Godard)
War and Peace (Russian)
selections from the BBC Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen Collections

plus just arrived:
All Is Lost (Redford–a thoroughly engaging, suspenseful movie with one actor; the ultimate man vs. Nature movie)

when I was young in the late ’50s and he was in Winnipeg still, training to go into the navy. I just noticed online that he passed away in Halifax in his 80s and had been a career navy man. He also had many kids and grandkids and was to be buried at sea. Here is a memory of him I wrote in the guestbook:

One memory of ‘Pudge’ via his nephew: He was in Winnipeg in the late ’50s and came over to spend some time with m at our house. We played some games and I may have showed him my school down the street from the outside. After supper, he suddenly remembered he had to return a book to the old William Ave. library on a dark fall evening (leaves blowing around). He asked me (about 8-9) to come along with him in a taxi.

It was my first time there and I had never seen so many books. He talked to me about the library, books, and reading, and I never forgot that special close one-time experience. (Years later, I would become an inveterate reader, book fan, and high-school English author and edit/write many books for senior-high English. My grown-up son works in a university library, so maybe the ‘library’ and ‘books’ stuck.)

think of all the greats already forgotten or who will soon be forgotten. I wonder how many of the following geniuses and greats are actually known today and/or will be forgotten by subsequent generations:

Aquinas
Aristotle
Bach
Beethoven
Ingmar Bergman
Blake
Rachel Carson
Cervantes
Charlemagne
Chekhov
Constable
da Vinci
Dante
Darwin
Descartes
Dickens
Dickinson
Durer
Einstein
Erasmus
Galileo
Goethe
Goya
Handel
Stephen Hawking
Homer (not Simpson)
Ibsen
Kurosawa
Martin Luther
Martin Luther King
Nelson Mandela
Michelangelo
Monet
Montaigne
Thomas More
Newton
Picasso
Plato
Raphael
Rembrandt
Renoir
Rodin
St. Francis of Assisi
Shakespeare
Shaw
Tchaikovsky
Tolstoy
Turner
Van Gogh
Voltaire
Orson Welles
Whitman
Wordsworth
Woolf
Yeats
Vermeer
Frank Lloyd Wright