“Nolan’s entertainments, the best ones, anyway, are games. I don’t mean that they resemble puzzles or tricks (though they do that, too), I mean that they are most satisfying when understood as games, not as novelistic narratives. They are contests with rules and phases, gambits and defenses, many losers and the occasional victor, usually a Pyrrhus type.”
—Do the Films of Christopher Nolan Owe a Debt to Video Games? : The New Yorker
July 2012
10 posts
“The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live. Yet, according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one corner of the world. Grief ought to be a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. This is what I call being born upside down. The sceptic may truly be said to be topsy-turvy; for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstacies, while his brain is in the abyss.”
—Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton
“David Edelstein finds Nolan’s films to be empty, portentous drivel interrupted by confusing action sequences. He has a point. With a few exceptions, Nolan’s action scenes are serviceable at best. As for portent … well, the man does seem to own more black suits than Batman.
But I have to respectfully disagree with the notion that he’s empty. Rather, Nolan is clinically focused. He doesn’t tell novelistic tales full of generously detailed characters. Rather, he takes a single idea and works it from practically every angle, so that the idea becomes almost a cipher to unlocking the film itself. As Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb says early on in Inception, the most resilient parasite is an idea: “Once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it’s almost impossible to eradicate.” Each of Nolan’s films is built around a single idea that eventually seizes control of the characters and, eventually, the film itself.” —What Is Christopher Nolan’s Big Idea Behind The Dark Knight Rises? — Vulture
But I have to respectfully disagree with the notion that he’s empty. Rather, Nolan is clinically focused. He doesn’t tell novelistic tales full of generously detailed characters. Rather, he takes a single idea and works it from practically every angle, so that the idea becomes almost a cipher to unlocking the film itself. As Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb says early on in Inception, the most resilient parasite is an idea: “Once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it’s almost impossible to eradicate.” Each of Nolan’s films is built around a single idea that eventually seizes control of the characters and, eventually, the film itself.” —What Is Christopher Nolan’s Big Idea Behind The Dark Knight Rises? — Vulture
“Now man exists only in dialogue with his neighbor. The infant is brought to consciousness of himself only by love, by the smile of his mother. In that encounter the horizon of all unlimited being opens itself for him, revealing four things to him: (1) that he is one in love with the mother, even in being other than his mother, therefore all being is one; (2) that that love is good, therefore all being is good; (3) that that love is true, therefore all being is true; and (4) that that love evokes joy, therefore all being is beautiful.”
—“A Resume of My Thought,” Hans Urs von Balthasar
“
PROTEUS
To leave my Julia, shall I be forsworn;
To love fair Silvia, shall I be forsworn;
To wrong my friend, I shall be much forsworn;
And even that power which gave me first my oath
Provokes me to this threefold perjury;
Love bade me swear and Love bids me forswear.
O sweet-suggesting Love, if thou hast sinned,
Teach me, thy tempted subject, to excuse it!
…Julia I lose and Valentine I lose:
If I keep them, I needs must lose myself;
If I lose them, thus find I by their loss
For Valentine myself, for Julia Silvia.
I to myself am dearer than a friend,
For love is still most precious in itself;
And Silvia—witness Heaven, that made her fair!—
Shows Julia but a swarthy Ethiope.
I will forget that Julia is alive,
Remembering that my love to her is dead;
And Valentine I’ll hold an enemy,
Aiming at Silvia as a sweeter friend.
I cannot now prove constant to myself,
Without some treachery used to Valentine.
This night he meaneth with a corded ladder
To climb celestial Silvia’s chamber-window,
Myself in counsel, his competitor.
Now presently I’ll give her father notice
Of their disguising and pretended flight;
Who, all enraged, will banish Valentine;
For Thurio, he intends, shall wed his daughter;
But, Valentine being gone, I’ll quickly cross
By some sly trick blunt Thurio’s dull proceeding.
Love, lend me wings to make my purpose swift,
As thou hast lent me wit to plot this drift!
Love, having been made a god by Proteus, becomes a demon: “Love bade me swear and Love bids me forswear.”
And behind all idolatry, the worship of self: “I to myself am dearer than a friend.”
“
PROTEUS
My tales of love were wont to weary you;
I know you joy not in a love discourse.
VALENTINE
Ay, Proteus, but that life is alter’d now:
I have done penance for contemning Love,
Whose high imperious thoughts have punish’d me
With bitter fasts, with penitential groans,
With nightly tears and daily heart-sore sighs;
For in revenge of my contempt of love,
Love hath chased sleep from my enthralled eyes
And made them watchers of mine own heart’s sorrow.
O gentle Proteus, Love’s a mighty lord,
And hath so humbled me, as, I confess,
There is no woe to his correction,
Nor to his service no such joy on earth.
Now no discourse, except it be of love;
Now can I break my fast, dine, sup and sleep,
Upon the very naked name of love.
“
Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens, Penn Jillette, Richard Dawkins, etc, specialize—not in philosophical thought—but in ridicule. And that means the new atheists excel on the only evangelistically-effective playing field that matters—that of human emotion and desire. Most Christian apologists conversely seem content to surrender that ground in their preference for mere rationality. This is a tragic mistake and it’s the primary reason Christian belief is diminishing, marginalized and an easy target for nighttime comedians.
Blaise Pascal said, “Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is” (Pensees 12).
All too often (especially online) those of us who like arguing for Christian Theism jump to the end of Pascal’s list. We think we have wiz-bang arguments to offer. Unfortunately, we don’t have a worthy foundation for showcasing such arguments. We have not established that Christianity should be revered, nor that it is attractive, nor that it is worthy of affection. We prefer to pull out our five proofs for its “truth” and argue our misguided interlocutors into the Kingdom cold. This is a mistake, for most of our audience see such arguments as power plays, as manipulation, as simply another advertisement out there trying to entice them to buy something.
” —They Don’t Believe Because Your God Isn’t Desirable (via ayjay)
“
Enter PROTEUS
VALENTINE
Welcome, dear Proteus! Mistress, I beseech you,
Confirm his welcome with some special favour.
SILVIA
His worth is warrant for his welcome hither,
If this be he you oft have wish’d to hear from.
VALENTINE
Mistress, it is: sweet lady, entertain him
To be my fellow-servant to your ladyship.
SILVIA
Too low a mistress for so high a servant.
PROTEUS
Not so, sweet lady: but too mean a servant
To have a look of such a worthy mistress.
VALENTINE
Leave off discourse of disability:
“[Northrop] Frye distinguishes here, as he does in other places, Shakespearean from Jonsonian comedy. The latter is a theater of illusion, always focused on creating the appearance of reality. Shakespeare‘s comedies, however, belong to the theater of convention. Shakespeare “does not ask his audience to accept an illusion,” says Frye: “he asks them to listen to a story” (Renaissance, 136), to enter a world which is not an allegory of experience but which is self-contained and exists for its own sake. Jonson‘s theater is abstract and sophisticated; Shakespeare‘s is innocent and childlike. Jonson‘s builds an experience for the spectator. Shakespeare‘s builds a construct for the participant—an uncritical participant who is asked to willingly suspend his or her disbelief in the face of all the comic conventions: bafflements, disguises, coincidences, improbabilities, mistaken identities, and the like. Comedy, for Frye, has a typical structure and a typical mood, which is festive. It also exhibits what Frye calls “archaizing tendencies,” primitive and popular features that “establish contact with a universal and world-wide dramatic tradition” (Renaissance, 164); and its conventions descend from myths, the outlines of which, lying just beneath the surface of the plays, audiences instinctively respond to.”
—
“Northrop Frye‘s Shakespearean Criticism”
On Frye’s very Northropian take on Shakespeare.
“Between God and man there stands the person of Jesus Christ, Himself God and Himself man, and so mediating between the two. In Him God reveals Himself to man. In Him man sees and knows God. In Him God stands before man and man stands before God, as is the eternal will of God, and the eternal ordination of man in accordance with this will. In Him God’s plan for man is disclosed, God’s judgment on man fulfilled, God’s deliverance of man accomplished, God’s gift to man present in fulness, God’s claim and promise to man declared. In Him God has joined Himself to man. And so man exists for His sake. It is by Him, Jesus Christ, and for Him and to Him, that the universe is created as a theater for God’s dealings with man and man’s dealings with God. The being of God is His being, and similarly the being of man is originally His being. And there is nothing that is not from Him and by Him and to Him. He is the Word of God in whose truth everything is disclosed and whose truth cannot be over-reached or conditioned by any other word.”
—K. Barth, CD II/2, p. 94.
