(no subject)
I have six days until I leave for college. The calm before the storm, as it were, or perhaps the eye of the hurricane. I didn’t post last week because I was busy last week. Without going too much into personal details, my best friend (female) spent the week with my family. It was mostly good, stressful, and educational.
We watched Memento - which I recommend. One of the best movies I’ve seen. It’s about Leonard Shelby, a man who’s trying to track down his wife’s murderer, with the small catch that he has a brain disorder which means he can’t form new memories. He is conscious of the past few minutes and everything that happened before his injury, but he can’t remember anything since. Now, that’s a good premise, but here’s the best part: the story is told in short scenes, in reverse order. We are as unaware of the past as is the protagonist. We can’t remember either who these people are, why they know him, what they’ve done in the past. We can’t remember why there’s a man bound and gagged in the closet, or who this woman is he’s sleeping with, or any of it. It’s really, really scary. It’s a whole lot scarier once you start trying to figure out the differences between the Leonard’s condition and our condition - because there aren’t any. But we remember things - don’t we? What do we remember? Often we remember things that didn’t happen and forget those that did. Our memories are as reliable as Leonard’s tattoos and instant photos and handwritten notes. Leonard finds himself in any given moment in an unfamiliar situation, having to decide all over again who he is, searching through his photographs for clues. At any given moment, we find ourselves in an unfamiliar situation, trying to sift through all the junk in our head - the desires, the thoughts, the memories which do not belong to us but to the person who occupied our head one moment ago, or perhaps to the one before that, or the one before that - trying to figure out who we are. Just as Leonard’s surroundings change, so do our thoughts and desires - who are we? Is there such a thing as a continuous self, or do we simply go along with whatever selft-1 was doing for lack of anything better? Time for pragmatism. We are continuous over time because that’s the only way to operate.
Deadly sin: lust. I absolutely hate it. It’s degrading. It destroys relationships. And from what I understand of our culture, it’s just not viewed as a problem. I do not understand that attitude - an attitude that says sexual fantasy is fine, normal, healthy, easily compartmentalized, and that you couldn’t fight it anyway. It affects you - if you’re in the habit of fantasizing about people, it doesn’t mean you’re going to act on that, necessarily, but that’s because of external pressures - societal pressures, such as the opinions of others or going to jail. If external pressures were removed - look, it’s not about doing the right things and not doing the wrong things, contrary to every religion ever. It’s about who you are. Is there a difference, morally, between someone who would kill his boss if he could do it without being found out and someone who actually does kill his boss without being found out? The differences are in opportunity and ingenuity, not in moral character. This is why Jesus said that if you are angry with your brother without cause, you are a murderer, and if you look at a woman lustfully, it’s the same as if you’d screwed her. Oh, and lust isn’t impossible to fight. You’re just told that it is, by entertainment, advertising, culture, so you never try. (Why would you anyway? I realize that I’m speaking from within Christianity, and it may seem irrelevant to you.)
So used bookstores. I acquired seven books this week. James Agee’s A Death in the Family (a gift), a Myst novel (yes, based on the computer game. Writing and plot are meh, underlying concepts are fascinating.), Hemingway’s Island’s in the Stream, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Pale Fire by Nabokov (the story take the form of deranged commentary on a poem - brilliant), and Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (kind of a Da Vinci Code, except worth reading - about a group of Italian editors who decide to make up a conspiracy theory involving the Templars, Jewish kabbala, the pyramids, tribal religions, medieval alchemy, and every other occult element ever. It’s all fun and games until their invented conspirators kill them. A great novel.) and The Name of the Rose (which I’m reading now, about a medieval equivalent of Sherlock Holmes in the form of a Franciscan monk investigating a series of bizarre and bloody murders in an Italian abbey, battling with webs of heresy and misinformation.)
Music: I found this. Listen to the Sonic the Hedgehog soundtracks, 1-3. Good stuff (or I think so, but apparently videogame music is an acquired taste. That or people are just prejudiced against it.)
Six days.