and seek transcendence, specifically, I still turn to beautiful Nature and the Arts (great works of literature, poetry, books, music, painting, film, etc.). Via those, I regularly and predictably attain acceptance, peace, solace, answers, and wisdom.
5 , bored, and wandering my grandmother’s big house and returning to her powder/music box to play this nostalgic post WWII music box over and over. To hear the very same music box today, paste the link below into your browser:
1950’s Ladies’ Powder/Music Box playing “To Each His Own” – YouTube
At a moment of great emotional stress in his life he is said to have read from ‘An Elegy Written In a Country Churchyard’ by Thomas Gray to his officers and said “I would rather have written that poem than take Quebec.”
better than anyone else has been outstanding in many roles including as Winston Smith in Michael Radford’s intense Nineteen-Eighty-Four.
And add the 1979 BBC tv series (available on DVD; 225 mins., 3 parts) of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment to his outstanding performances of suffering characters. No one else could have caught the ironies, nuances, and complexities of Raskolnikov’s character and personality methinks; for example, he laughs crazily at the absurd thought of Napoleon killing the old pawnbroker!
Timothy West is outstanding as the magistrate Porfiry Petrovitch who, Columbo-like, plays games with the unstable killer.
Yolanda Palfrey is very convincing as the unbelievable Sonya, an earnest Christian/part-time prostitute whom Raskolnikov is closest to and confesses to.
The sleazy Svdrigailov played by Anthony Bate also steals some scenes, personifying that evil, selfish force which tries to corrupt Raskolnikov’s sister, mother, and him under the guise of false benefactorship.
This is, essentially, an actor’s film, and director Michael Darlow ensures very seamless performances from everyone down to the extras and his part 3 is especially engaging. Script-adapter Jack Pulman has also successfully captured the essence of Dostoevsky’s book, ideas, and its many conflicts.
There are many ‘big’ ideas in the production including the original author’s view of the great man as his own law and authority around the time of Dostoevsky. Mixed in also is Dostoevsky’s budding interests in modern criminal psychology, such as it was emerging in his age. Suffice to say, there is no shortage of things to think about and discuss with another fellow viewer.
Highly recommended.
of the smell of ’60s-’70s beachside public bathrooms at Grand Beach, MB!
The Odyssey
War and Peace
To the Lighthouse
Nineteen-Eighty-Four
Pride and Prejudice
The Secret Agent
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Hamlet
Crime and Punishment
Great Expectations
Death of a Salesman
The Great Gatsby
Walden
(Virginia Woolf: A writer who was quite preoccupied with sensibility in her various writings.)
As originally understood in the 17th century, sensibility starts out as sense information taken in and/or expressed. But sensibility was also thought of as refined experience, judgement, and truthful expression. There has always been an authenticity about it in which the practitioner is true to him/herself. Fine taste is also associated with the term with an emphasis on purity and fineness of feelings, sensations, and experiences.
And yet the latter does not mean that sensibility is mere snobbery; rather empathy and sympathy are part and parcel of its experience and expression. It is, above all, an inwardness tending toward the best living of oneself, as in more ennobling or elevated feelings and resulting moral affects.
The person with sensibility is, above all, very much in touch with his or her feelings, and often engaged in the process of making one’s own soul at a higher level.
Common sense is seeing things as they are; and doing things as they ought to be.
― Harriet Beecher Stowe
Andre, the night before his first battle: “Tomorrow everything may be over for me! All these memories will be no more, none of them will have any meaning for me…I don’t know what will happen and don’t want to know, and can’t, but if I want this–want glory, want to be known to men, want to be loved by them, it is not my fault that I want it and want nothing but that and only live for that. Yes for that alone!… All the same, I love and value nothing but triumph over them all. I value this mystic power and glory that is floating here above me in this mist!”
Thoughts of Andre’s wife pathetically dying in childbirth: “I love you all, and have done no harm to anyone; and what have you done to me?”
“Forever? said Andre. “Nothing’s forever.”
Andre: “It is not given to man to know what is right or wrong to man. Men always did and always will err, and in nothing more than what they consider right or wrong.”
Andre: “I only know two very real evils in life: remorse and illness. The only good is the absence of those evils.”
Andre: “So I lived for others, and not almost, but quite, ruined my life. And I have become calmer since I began to live for only myself.”
“‘Spring, love, happiness!’ this oak seemed to say. ‘Are you not weary of that stupid, meaningless, constantly repeated fraud?’….
‘Yes, the oak is right, a thousand times right,’ thought Andrei. ‘Let others–the young–yield afresh to that fraud, but we know life, our life is finished!’….
During this journey, he, as it were, considered his life afresh, and arrived at his old conclusion. restful in its hopelessness: that it was not for him to begin anything anew–but that he must live out his life, content to do no harm, and not disturbing himself or desiring anything.”
Returning later and beholding the dead-looking oak covered in leaves, after he has fallen for Natasha: “‘No, life is not over at thirty-one!’….’It is not enough for me to know what I have in me–everyone must know it: Pierre, and that young girl [Natasha] who wanted to fly away into the sky, everyone must know me, so that my life may not be lived for myself alone while others live so apart from it, but but so that it may be reflected in them all, and they and I may live in harmony!”
Andre, before another battle: ” To die…to be killed tomorrow…That I should not exist…That all this should still be, but no me….”
Thoughts of Andrei approaching death: “Love? What is Love? Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.”
“But at the instant he died, Andrei remembered that he was asleep, and at the very instant he died, having made an effort, he awoke.
‘Yes, it was death! I died–and woke up. Yes, death is an awakening!’ And all at once it grew light in his soul and the veil that had till then concealed the unknown was lifted from his spiritual vision. He felt as if powers till then confined within him had been liberated, and that strange lightness did not again leave him.”
……………..
Context and comment: Andre’s process moves him from vainglorious egoic thoughts to pessimistic cynicism to regained purpose and acceptance in life via love.
In the end, despite the war raging on, he is far removed from all conflicts, dying at home surrounded by loved ones, finally and consciously freed.
(The feeling of lightness had been first experienced on his first battlefield as he lay shot and musing, assumed dead by others, initially.)
on one thing re. putting on footwear.
You pretty much have to deal with one foot at a time when you have snowboots with velcro strips. Step into one, then pull the strip across before going on to the second foot.
