Saint Agnes

Agnes was the daughter of a Roman noble. She was very beautiful. Many men lusted after her. But she was pure. Though her parents were not Christians, her nurse, a family slave, was, and it was through this slave--through this shimmering sliver of a Providential design plotted through the motions of an uncaring empire that bought and traded in human lives, through this more-than-mother who loved her dearly despite being the daughter of her masters--that Agnes learned of Jesus and the Gospel and became a Christian. She dedicated her life, her blood, her virginity to Christ. But Phocus, the son of the Roman prefect Sempronius, fell in love with her. He offered her riches; he tried to seduce her. She refused them, refused him. She told him that she already have a Lover, and that this Lover was a better, more powerful, and more rich Lover than he could ever be. Rejected, and enraged, Phocus left. Lust consumed him. He could think of nothing else. But when he discovered that she was a Christian, he was elated and thought he'd found a way to possess her. Diocletian was emperor at the time, and he had ordered the persecution and execution of Christians. Christian blood flowed through the empire, choking the ground, crying out to Heaven. Phocus, assuming she would much rather give herself to him than face an empire's wrath, denounced Agnes as a Christian to his father, and she was brought before him to answer the charge. She freely professed her faith. Sempronius then gave her the ultimatum: make sacrifices in a Roman temple or be executed. She was steady; she did not hesitate. She chose execution. She would rather bow her head to an executioner's sword than to a pagan god. She was condemned. But a Roman law stood in the way, apparently. Virgins could not be executed. It was considered inhumane. Sempronius therefore, in deference to the law, ordered her stripped naked and dragged through the streets to a brothel, where she could be raped in preparation for her execution. It would not be right, after all, to execute an innocent, and so such would be this empire's tender observations of decency. This happened. This is a thing that happens in this world. But it did not happen as Sempronius imagined. As she was being dragged naked through the street, her hair miraculously grew and provided a natural covering and protection for the virgin from the eyes of all those who watched. And there were many who watched. She was thrown into the brothel. An angel appeared and gave Agnes a garment to cover herself. God does not abandon His beloved; the shape of His comforts and tokens of His love, however, are not often recognized in this world. Because this world means something else to Him than it does to us. And so though He may not spare us the trials we must face, His grace is the sort that allows us to face those trials with dignity, knowing that a loving bridegroom stands ready to embrace us at their end. Grateful, she wrapped herself tight, terrified but steadfast in her faith. Men lined up to rape her. Word spreads quickly, especially when youth and beauty are being offered up, and there is never a shortage of people willing to do this, not then and not now. But when they were admitted into the brothel and saw her... well, accounts vary. Some say that any man who looked at her was immediately struck blind; others say that they simply looked at her and did not dare to touch her, so beautiful, so pure, and so young as she was.

She was very young, after all. She was only twelve years old. Entire empires die for things like this. Worlds will burn for things like this.

The men began to flee the brothel. Phocus, who was outside, mocked them, ridiculed them for their weakness, for not being able to rape a small, defenseless child of twelve. See, it was not enough for him that she be violated before being executed; he did not simply want to find a way to overcome a bothersome law; he desired that all the filth of a dying empire penetrate every part of her and erase her intolerable purity. Having once loved her--loved her, that is, in the vulgar, contracted, animal way which was all a mind like his was capable of--and having been once rejected by her, that love turned, and he now desired that no such thing as her exist. So he himself entered the brothel. He would rape away that purity; he himself would smear his stain onto her innocence. He pushed through the crowds of fleeing men and entered the chamber where she was kept and when he saw her he was struck immediately dead. Just like that. But Agnes, though she had no worldly reason to, prayed for him and he revived. I imagine he must have been terrified. I imagine he could not look at her. Sempronius could, however, and he immediately accused her of witchcraft and decided they should dispense with the prohibition on executing virgins. Though Phocus now pleaded with his father to spare her life (perhaps because he, like Pilate's wife, now knew that something awful was happening), she was nevertheless tied to a stake to be burned alive. And here again accounts vary. Some say the wood would not burn no matter how hard they tried to light it; others that it did burn but that the flames refused to touch her, that they actually bent away from her as if the very elements of this world recognized and reverenced her purity, so that she stood--inviolate and inconsumable--within a crown of flames. Sempronius was enraged; Phocus, again I imagine at least, must have fled and spent the rest of his life contemplating the meaning of what he had witnessed. But maybe he did not do this. Maybe he remained insensible, the terror of his encounter with the Divinity through the intercessions of that Divinity's beloved bride gradually fading until it was only an uncomfortable memory, a shining possibility of redemption now reduced to a cancer in his soul. But I do not know what happened to him; I can only imagine. But at the scene of the burning, the living Agnes, the young girl, the betrothed of a Great Lover, would not die; her flesh that man could not touch was not touched either by flame. Eventually, as Sempronius's rage, and probably his terror, increased, and as the mobs that had gathered to cheer on and witness the utter destruction of a young girl gradually began to understand that something terrible, something awful, something holy and beyond their comprehension was happening, and as their long-dead and now too-late pity finally turned towards the innocent girl, the Roman officer in charge, probably fearing that Sempronius's rage would fall on him, drew his sword and cut off her head. And so Agnes died. A child of twelve was martyred for her faith--a faith that could not be staggered, could not be humiliated, could not be unsteadied, and above all could not be touched. And from this dark world and into the arms of her Great Lover she soared.

At her trial Agnes said "To Him I have given my faith; to Him I have commanded my heart. When I love Him then am I chaste, and when I touch him then am I pure and clean, and when I take Him then am I a virgin. This is the love of my God."

127 Hours

Gotta say: it's contending with Alice Creed right now. Bless him, Danny Boyle does not disappoint. For him, the human suffers, often in extreme and grueling circumstances, often to the point of despair... but ultimately survives, endures, hopes. While not as visceral, or quite as devastating-slash-triumphant, as the remarkable Slumdog Millionaire (a movie that returned Boyle to the kinetic, bursting-at-the-seams, lusting-after-life energy he'd harnessed in Trainspotting), 127 Hours continues the aesthetic and thematic direction set in that movie: one motivated by hope, spun through with life, and held together by an abiding conviction that the "human spirit," ambiguous a term as that may be, or clichéd as it has been by more cynical artists, has the capacity to overcome and burst its way upwards towards redemption.

Trailer. IMDb.

Alice Creed

The ridiculous "grippingly twisty thriller" quote on this poster notwithstanding, this is my favourite movie of 2010 (unless I'm allowed to count the North American releases of either The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or the Red Riding trilogy). The less you know about Alice Creed going into it, the better the movie plays. In fact, don't even watch the trailer. Watch this movie cold.

Compact

"And indeed, my dear, I know not how to forbear writing. I have now no other employment or diversion. And I must write on, although I were not to send it to anybody. You have often heard me own the advantages I have found from writing down everything of moment that befalls me; and of all I think, and of all I do, that may be of future use to me; for besides that this helps to form one to a style, and opens and expands the ductile mind, every one will find that many a good thought evaporates in thinking; many a good resolution goes off, driven out of memory perhaps by some other not so good. But when I set down what I will do, or what I have done, on this or that occasion, the resolution or action is before me either to be adhered to, withdrawn, or amended; and I have entered into compact with myself, as I may say; having given it under my own hand to improve, rather than to go backward, as I live longer." -- Clarissa

Walkabout

The centerpiece scene in this film, the scene which this somewhat horrible and sensationalist poster references--a scene of a white teenage girl lost in the Australian outback swimming in a rock pool while her younger brother and their befriended aborigine explore and hunt---is perhaps one of the best erotic scenes I have ever not been aroused by. It is a beautiful scene, but not a sexy scene, and that is its triumph. It's flesh, but it is flesh as life not flesh as object; it is flesh as subject in nature, as subject of nature, as a thing unto itself--warm, vital, nascent, and feather-like fragile. Nicolas Roeg finds the balance that so many lesser directors, fumbling to portray innocence from their own so-experienced position, often trip over. The scene is about innocence and sexual naivety awakening to, and glorying in, its own sensuality while still being childishly ignorant of the darker impulses, impulses both from within and from without, that can overcome it and that will, as the film unfolds towards its end, threaten it. But here, now in this scene, there is no hint of shadow. Here there is no outside other. Here are memories of Eden. There is display in the girl's action. She vibrates with sensual energy. But it is an unwitnessed, un-ritual display, a self-display; she swims naked for herself. Here is lightness and water and a camera that, aware of how precarious an edge this moment hangs on, does not gaze but that humbly witnesses. For us watching her swim there is perhaps some voyeurism, but it is voyeurism couched in time and memory--and while we look at the girl, the girl becomes us. 

IMDb. Trailer. Criterion.

In Elevated Strains but Broken Accents

"She was tolerably recovered by the time I came; and the doctor made her promise before me, that, while she was so weak, she would not attempt any more to go abroad; for, by Mrs. Lovick's description, who attended her, the shortness of her breath, the extreme weakness, and the fervour of her devotions when at church, were contraries which, pulling different ways (the soul aspiring, the body sinking), tore her tender frame in pieces." -- Clarissa

The Red Shoes

Simply stunning. The quintessential backstage drama, as Criterion appropriately describes it. This film is magic. There has perhaps never been a better movie about the so-called "life of the artist." I put this disc in a few nights after watching Black Narcissus for the first time and was hardly prepared for how much I would love it. It's exquisite. It's haunting. It's beautiful. It's lodged tightly in my brain.

IMDb. Trailer. Criterion.

Insensibility

"I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion's) a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind. The aesthetes touched the last insane limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things. The thistledown made them weep; a burnished beetle brought them to their knees. Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any sort of symbolic sacrifice. Men (I felt) might fast forty days for the sake of hearing a blackbird sing. Men might go through fire to find a cowslip. Yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep sober for the blackbird. They would not go through common Christian marriage by way of recompense to the cowslip. Surely one might pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals. Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde." -- G. K. Chesteron, Orthodoxy

Abysses

"... we are of a broad, Karamazovian nature--and this is what I am driving at--capable of containing all possible opposites and of contemplating both abysses at once, the abyss above us, an abyss of lofty ideals, and the abyss beneath us, an abyss of the lowest and foulest degradation." - The Brothers Karamazov

The Misses Vickers

The Misses Vickers (1884) by John Singer Sargent

La Miseria

La Miseria (1886) by Cristobal Rojas

Anna Karenina (excerpts)

I wish I could write like this...

'Please don't be frightened! It's nothing. I'm not a bit afraid,' she said on seeing his alarmed face, and she pressed his hand to her breast and then to her lips.

He jumped up hastily, hardly aware of himself and without taking his eyes of her put on his dressing-gown and stood still, gazing at her. It was necessary for him to go, but he could not tear himself  away from the sight of her. He had loved that face and known all its expressions and looks, but he had never seen her as she was now. How vile and despicable he appeared to himself before her as she now was, when he recollected the grief he had caused her yesterday! Her flushed face surrounded with soft hair that had escaped from beneath her night-cap shone with joy and resolution.

Little as there was of affectation and conventionality in Kitty's general character, yet Levin was astonished at what was revealed to him now that every veil had fallen and the very kernel of her soul shone through her eyes. And in this simplicity, this nakedness of soul, she whom he loved was more apparent than ever. She looked at him smilingly, but suddenly her eyebrows twitched, she raised her head, and coming quickly to him she took hold of his hand and clinging close she enveloped him in her hot breath. She was suffering, and seemed to be complaining to him of her pain. And for a moment from force of habit he felt as if he were in fault. But her look expressed a tenderness which told him that she not only did not blame him, but loved him because of those sufferings. 'If I am not to blame for it, who is?' he thought, involuntarily seeking a culprit to punish for these sufferings; but there was no culprit. She suffered, complained, triumphed in her sufferings, rejoiced in them and loved them. He saw that something beautiful was taking place in her soul, but what it was he could not understand. It was above his comprehension.

*****

He only knew and felt that what was happening was similar to what had happened the year before in the hotel of the provincial town on the deathbed of his brother Nicholas. Only that was sorrow and this was joy. But that sorrow and this joy were equally beyond the usual conditions of life: they were like openings in that usual life through which something higher became visible. And, as in that case, what was now being accomplished came harshly, painfully, incomprehensibly; and while watching it, the soul soared, as then, to heights it had never before known, at which reason could not keep up with it.

*****

And suddenly, out of the mysterious, terrible, and unearthly world in which he had been living for the last twenty-two hours, Levin felt himself instantaneously transported back to the old everyday world, but now radiant with the light of such new joy that it was insupportable. The taut strings snapped, and sobs and tears of joy that he had not in the least anticipated arose within him, with such force that they shook his whole body and long prevented his speaking.

Falling on his knees by her bedside he held his wife's hand to his lips, kissing it, and that hand, by a feeble movement of the fingers, replied to his kisses. And meanwhile at the foot of the bed, like a flame above a lamp, flickered in Mary Vlasevna's skilful hands the life of a human being who had never before existed: a human being who, with the same right and the same importance to himself, would live and would procreate others like himself.

*****

Before that, if Levin had been told that Kitty was dead, and that he had died with her, that they had angel children, and that God was there present with them--he would not have been astonished.

Zao

I recently discovered--somewhat to my amazement (though why I should be amazed is slightly mysterious now that I think about it: I've all but ignored entire scene for several years)--that I band I really liked, and I mean really liked, a long time ago, was still around. They had disbanded just about the time I lost interest in the entire Solid State scream-o, grind-core, metal, whatever it's-just-loud genre. The band was called Zao. I mean, well... it's still called Zao, I guess. But it's not Zao, you know? No. Whatever. Turns out they pulled themselves back together when I wasn't looking. (Coincidentally, Living Sacrifice is still a thing, too. Christian metal's still a thing. Huh. Ever notice that, that when you lose interest in something it seems absurd, almost ridiculous, that it keeps going without you? I mean, what's the point? I'm not interested anymore, and that's the main thing. Right...? Where was I?) So Zao's still a thing. They were epic. Man, they were great. I mean, you couldn't be into Christian metal around the turn of the century and not know them. They defined early Christian metalcore. Their influence was enormous. They, along with the aforementioned (and also still around) Living Sacrifice, basically played godfather to a genre, spawning an embarrassing legion of less-than-impressive but no-doubt well-meaning sound-alikes. But I guess that's not their fault. They were just great, and everybody wanted to be like them. But those wannabe bands are what eventually killed the scene for me. It all sounded the same, and second rate. Zao and Living Sacrifice had already done it, so why bother with the rest? Plus, well... I grew up, evolved, possibly mutated, and a band's loudness no longer was what compelled me. I started listening to all sorts of bizarre things. Bizarre, that is, for me; normal for everyone else. I started listening, for instance, to Jars of Clay. Jars of Clay?! Growing up is odd. But, to be all literary and stuff, the past in never dead; it isn't even past. A while ago, even though I for the most part get irritated by the sound of it now, I (feeling some strange vibration run along a long abandoned, but once affectionately played, power-chord in my heart) loaded up some old Christian metal albums onto iTunes, an exercise in which Zao featured prominently. Where Blood and Fire Bring Rest brought chills; Liberate to ex Inferis still terrified me. But there was also a strange sense of disassociation, like looking at old photos. It's me, but it's not me now, and you get that distinct feeling you are no longer who you were and who you were actually makes you frown or blush. But autobiography aside, their music, even after years of neglect, still produced the distinct throb and tension in my chest, the desire to just scream until your throat bleeds. It was an epoch, I realize. It was a chapter. It was a time in my life that I value but that I'm glad is gone. I'm rambling. Zao. Still a thing. So poking around in the iTunes store, following up links and recommendations (I can't remember the specific trail that brought me to it, but surely it was something arcane and possibly occult, a digital incantation that resurrected a long dead-to-me band), I suddenly saw that "Listeners Also Bought" Zao. Zao? Zao! That's still a thing? Not only is it a thing, it's a thing with three albums I didn't know about. 30 bucks later, I prepared to enter the past. The past, it turns out, is smaller than it looks. What was enormous before casts a much smaller shadow now, as if the sun had risen higher (which I suppose, if I were to push this particular aging metaphor further, means that the shadow will get larger again as I grow even older and the sun sets... and that's... wow, that's almost terrifying. I can almost imagine pulling out some of these CDs or MP3s from a dusty box and playing them for my kids. Yes, MP3s in a box. Where do you keep yours? But to return...). I guess what really disappointed me is how almost exactly the same the new Zao sounds, as if no time has passed. But time has passed. A lifetime has passed. Possibly several lifetimes. Or at least that's how it seems, if you measure a lifetime by how much you've changed. I'm a completely different person now: different politics, different aesthetic, new priorities, bald. An entire metamorphosis. How is it possible some things stood still while I moved forward? It just seems odd. But wait, no, that's not quite true. What I said about them sounding the same, I mean. It's not quite true. They don't sound the same. They sound younger. Or maybe I listen older. Reading the lyrics, listening to Daniel Weyandt scream and grind and gurgle about how shallow Americans are, how difficult life is, about the struggle and injustice of it all, I wondered, were they always this angry and immature? Surely not. Surely, surely not. Because, if they were... that would have awkward implications for myself. Because I really liked them, thought they were intelligent and important and stuff. And they were. Important, I mean. To me. To the me of then, the different me that I sort of recognize now.

What is all this? I don't know. It's odd, that's what it is. It's self-indulgence, I know, and I'm sorry. I don't really have much to say about Zao, I guess. I liked Zao, but I liked them better in the past than in the now.

Limbo

This game is wonderful. It only takes three to four hours to beat (you know... depending on how clever you are when it comes to physics-based puzzle solving) but those three to fours hours are very satisfying. Like Portal and Braid, Limbo demonstrates that some of the most innovative and intriguing game development is happening in small studios and on small projects.

Thomas Hardy's Wessex

"In these Wessex nooks the busy outsider's ancient times are only old; his old time are still new; his present is futurity." - Far from the Madding Crowd

Cor

"Except the Lord of heaven create new hearts in us, of our selves, we have Cor nullum, no heart; all vanished into Incogitancy. Except the Lord of heaven con-centre our affections, of our selves, we have Cor & Cor, a cloven heart, a divided heart, a heart of Irresolution. Except the Lord of heaven fix our Resolutions, of our selves, we have Cor vagum, a various, a wandering heart; all smoaks and Inconstancie. And all these three are Enemies to that firmness, and fixation of the heart, which God loves, and we seek after."

- John Donne

Part-time this summer, I've been helping to edit and prepare the texts of a number of John Donne's sermons for digital editions. It's been a very interesting and enjoyable task. I've scanned  400 year-old books, edited the scanned images, run the images through OCR (optical character recognition), edited the transcriptions, and turned them into XML documents for web distribution. I've acquired a number of skills I wouldn't have otherwise developed. And, of course, I've had the opportunity to read Donne's sermons. The summer has been good. 

The Scarlet Letter (excerpt)

Lillian Gish as Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, 1926.

A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators. Preceded by the beadle, and attended by an irregular procession of stern-browed men and unkindly-visaged women, Hester Prynne set forth towards the place appointed for her punishment. A crowd of eager and curious school-boys, understanding little of the matter in hand, except that it gave them a hold-holiday, ran before her progress, turning their heads continually to start into her face, and at the winking baby in her arms, and at the ignominious letter on her breast. It was no great distance, in those days, from the prison-door to the market-place. Measured by the prisoner's experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of some length; for, haughty as her demeanour was, she perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon. In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer should should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it. With almost a serene deportment, therefore, Hester Prynne passed through this portion of her ordeal, and come to a sort of scaffold, at the western extremity of the marketplace. It stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston's earliest church, and appeared to be a fixture there.

The Scarlet Letter, by Nathanial Hawthorne

The Wings of the Dove (excerpts)

Girl in White Resting on a Sofa, by Alfred-Emile-Leopole Stevens

There was something deep within him that he had absolutely shown to no one--to the companion of these walks in particular not a bit more than he could help; but he was none the less haunted, under its shadow, with a dire apprehension of publicity. It was as if he had invoked that ugliness in some stupid good faith; and it was queer enough that on his emergent rock, clinging to it and to Susan Shepherd, he should figure himself as hidden from view. That represented no doubt his belief in her power, or in her delicate disposition to protect him. Only Kate at all events knew--what Kate did know, and she was also the last person interested to tell it; in spite of which it was as if his act, so deeply associated with her and never to be recalled nor recovered, was abroad on the winds of the world. His honesty, as he viewed it with Kate, was the very element of that menace: to the degree that she saw at moments, as to their final impulse or their final remedy, the need to bury in the dark blindness of each other's arms the knowledge of each other that they couldn't undo.

  *****

He watched her, when she went her way, with the vision of what she thus a little stiffly carried. It was confused and obscure, but how, with her head high, it made her hold herself! He really in his own person might at these moments have been swaying a little aloft as one of the objects in her poised basket. It was doubtless thanks to some such consciousness as this that he felt the lapse of the weeks, before the day of Kate's mounting of his stairs, almost swingingly rapid. They contained for him the contradiction that, whereas periods of waiting are supposed in general to keep the time slow, it was the wait, actually, that made the pace trouble him. The secret of that anomaly, to be plain, was that he was aware of how, while the days melted, something rare went with them. This something was only a thought, but a thought precisely of such freshness and such delicacy as made the precious, of whatever sort, most subject to the hunger of time. The thought was all his own, and his intimate companion was the last person he might have shared it with. He kept if back like a favourite pang; left if behind him, so to say, when he went out, but came home again the sooner for the certainty of finding it there. Then he took it out of its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one, handling them, handling it, as a father, baffled and tender, might handle a maimed child. But so it was before him--in his dread of who else might see it. Then he took to himself at such hours, in other words, that he should never, never know what had been in Milly's letter. The intention announced in it he should but too probably know; only that would have been, but for the depths of his spirit, the least part of it. The part of it missed for ever was the turn she would have given her act. This turn had possibilities that, somehow, by wondering about them, his imagination had extraordinarily filled out and refined. It had made of them a revelation the loss of which was like the sight of a priceless pearl cast before his eyes--his pledge given not to save it--into the fathomless sea, or rather even it was like the sacrifice of something sentient and throbbing, something that, for the spiritual ear, might have been audible as a faint far wail. This was the sound he cherished alone in the stillness of his rooms. He sought and guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there till the inevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively coarse and harsh, should smother and deaden it--doubtless by the same process with which they would officiously heal the ache in his soul that was somehow one with it. It moreover deepened the sacred hush that he couldn't complain. He had given poor Kate her freedom.

The Wings of the Dove by Henry James

Epoch

I used to review movies here. The reason was simple. For years, for almost as long as I can remember, I had been committed to the idea that films are art, that actors are artists, that directors had something important to say and that whatever it was they were saying was worth listening to, or at the very least worth analyzing. From Cronenberg to Kurosawa, from torture porn to historical drama--from sci-fi to horror to romantic comedy to nearly everything I could get my hands on--I watched it all. I was large in film. And I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the wonder, the amusement, the excitement, the arousal. I took it as a whole, as one amalgam, one attempt to trace the boundaries and fill in the gaps of the human condition. And all the while, I brought what I hoped was a dedicated critical eye. I didn't submit to film; I submitted film to judgment. My dedication to film grew from the same root as my dedication to literature: a desire to understand, and to sympathize with, the human.

I haven't reviewed a film here in almost a year. The reason was, again, or at least at the time, quite simple. I was busy. I had begun my graduate studies, see. Suddenly I didn't have as much time for old hobbies as I would have liked. I suppose that, like I did with other interests, I could have made time, rescued time, snatched time for movies. I didn't. I didn't even try. I didn't because what I'd discovered was a gradual departure, a sort of out-growing, that has made a new epoch in my life. There is a rift--and a rift that at this time I see no chance, or even desire, of bridging or repairing--between what I want from art and imaginative creation and what Hollywood, as a mythic whole, as an institution, as a collection of individuals artist working together, can offer.

As film gradually began to occupy less imaginative space for me, several developments within Hollywood itself enlarged the rift, made it more pronounced, made it a chasm. It was at first only an imaginative rift: I simply wasn't interested, either on an intellectual or entertainment level, with what was being released this last year. Never before had I been so disinterested in film. From Avatar to The Hurt Locker and even A Simple Man... I simply didn't care. It all looked boring. It all looked contrived and manipulative. I had better things to do. But then it wasn't just an imaginative rift that separated me from film. It was a moral and spiritual rift. When in horror I sat and read the list of names of Hollywood elites, filmmakers I'd dedicated time and mental space to, who had signed a petition to release Roman Polanski and absolve and forgive him for the the 1977 drugging, rape, and sodomy of a 13-year old girl--names such as Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Michael Mann, Wes Anderson; when I realized that people whose art I'd admired pretended to think their art and their status entitled them to a few liberties such as the occasional bit of forced anal sex with a minor; when I heard people like Whoopi Goldberg attempt to defend Polanski and say it wasn't "rape-rape" because, c'mon, the 13-year old drugged girl was just asking for it, and besides, Hollywood is "a different kind of society" that "sees things differently"; when I read, and realized, and heard all this, everything changed. Hollywood revealed itself. Perhaps not in a new light; perhaps it had always been like that, embracing a double standard and indulging in the worst forms of amoral transgression; but it was a a new light to me. Or maybe it was a light I simply didn't want to see it in or could until now ignore.

Today, Swiss authorities, who had been holding Polanski under house arrest until he could be extradited to the US, decided not to extradite and to release him. He's now free to do whatever he wants. Hollywood is quietly celebrating. And I'm done.

I'd always dismissed comparisons between Hollywood and Babylon, or things like that, as alarmist, if not ridiculous. I don't know now if Hollywood actually is Babylon. Perhaps it is. That seems likely. Who else but Babylon could give a standing ovation to an unrepentant child rapist? Whatever Hollywood is, however, I've turned away from it. I've turned my back on film. It will never be for me what it once was. It's not as if I'll never watch a movie again. That would be an absurd thing to say. But I'm now much more aware of the disconnect and the deeply distressing hypocrisy that separates what a film seems to be about and what a director or actor thinks and says. It may be helpful to trust the story and not the teller. Actually, it would be really helpful right now. I wish I knew nothing of the personal lives and opinions of the men and women who have produced so many of the films that I have loved. But I do know these things. I know them because Hollywood hasn't even tried to hide them, has been proud of them, proud of their moral deficiencies. Super-producer Harvey Weinstein defended Polanski and said that “Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion.” Its compassion, however, lies with the rapist and not the raped. And when the difference between the story and the teller is that enormous, it annihilates, at least as far as I'm concerned, the value of the story.

The strange thing is how easy film is to walk away from. I'm not distressed by this. This isn't a Lenten act of self-denial. My waning interest in what film can offer, combined with a new and ugly insight into the heart and mind of Hollywood, has made this an easy break, has made Hollywood a dead thing to me. It has simply ceased to hold any imaginative grasp on my mind.

That's okay. I have better things to do.

Daniel Deronda (excerpt)

Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl, busy with her small inferences of the way in which she could make her life pleasant? -- in a time, too, when ideas were with fresh vigour making armies of themselves, and the universal kinship was declaring itself fiercely: when women on the other side of the world would not mourn for the husbands and sons who died bravely in a common cause, and men stinted of bread on our side of the world heard of that willing loss and were patient: a time when the soul of man was waking to pulses which had for centuries been beating in him unheard, until their full sum made a new life of terror or of joy.

What in the midst of that mighty drama are girls and their blind visions? They are the Yea or Nay of that good for which men are enduring and fighting. In these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affection.