Friday 9 September 2011

Review: The Reapers are the Angels

Just cross-posting a review I wrote for Civilian Reader. If you're looking for the cliff notes - I liked this book a lot. Many thanks to CR for the opportunity to review!

Thursday 10 March 2011

The Adjustment Bureau and Boethius

I recently watched George Nolfi's enjoyable The Adjustment Bureau. I won't offer a full review here, and I don't particularly want to create a blog-post full of spoilers [***although be warned, some discussion of the film's conclusion lies ahead].

I felt from the beginning that the movie's central concern for destiny and free-will would not be out of place in one of its many medieval predecessors. When Richardson tells his colleague that

The chairman has a plan, we only see part of it.

it seemed clear that the Boethian undertones had to be intentional. Book V of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy outlines a similar argument. Boethius complains of the apparent contradiction between divine foreknowledge and human free-will. Lady Philosophy responds:
The cause of this obscurity is that the working of human reason cannot approach
the directness of divine foreknowledge.
In other words, God can see the whole plan, we can only see part of it.

Nolfi's approach to the problem is rather different to that of Boethius. After all, like Chaucer in the Knight's Tale he proposes a situation in which the divine plan is maintained on an ongoing basis by miraculous intervention. I don't wish to spoil the movie's outcome, but when it finally progresses to its conclusion it becomes apparent that while for most of the story the audience is encouraged to share a Boethian dismay at the divine plan, by the end they are in fact encouraged to share in Lady Philosophy's view that there is a rational order underlying human experience. The Adjustment Bureau explicitly locates expression of such divine order, however, in every individual's attempt to decide their own fate.

[If you'd like a full review of the movie itself, see Slate's opinion here]

Tuesday 22 February 2011

Walk Unafraid

In my late teens I suffered the rite of passage that is the Leaving Cert. I have had to learn more since, I've had to take harder exams, and I've had to spend more hours at my desk. Yet this remains the most stressful challenge I've ever experienced. I suspect that, wherever you come from, your twilight years of schooling felt similar. And so my coping mechanism was to walk. I walked every night, sometimes twice or three times in an evening, down to a nearby lake and back. It was probably just a mile or so, but I found it calming, and whatever I had tried to cram into my brain during the day seemed to sort itself out on the way. I thought of my brain as a box of lego, being shaken about so each piece could settle into place. As I remember it, these walks always took place in night-time darkness, and I'd pace along with my silver Discman (how I loved it) and one of two albums; Tracy Chapman or Up. I'd like to say I selected these albums specially, but in fact I wasn't really one for music, and I think these CDs were lying about in our house. They became the dedicated soundtrack to my evening journey through repeated usage, and if I closed my eyes the track I was on could tell me how far I was from home.

Recently I've been coming to the end of another project. The walking has started again. I was surprised how the same feelings of clarity returned to me so easily. I've heard dedicated runners talking about the 'zone' they enter when they run - I had never really understood it but I've always thought of it as being akin to meditation. Perhaps I'm simply much less fit than my marathon-running friends, so counter-intuitively I'm finding my way to the zone with much less effort. Whatever is happening, it works. My brain feels more rested after a decent length walk, with music or a good podcast, than after hours of sleep. Mens sana in corpore sano I guess.

I had heard of Dickens' long walks (apparently you can follow them if you wish), and as a child I was a great fan of a children's version of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. I've studied Chaucer's pilgrims for years without paying much attention at all to the walking itself that underlies their pilgrimage. If you look for it, walking is a very common theme indeed in writing, and there's a nice article here and a fantastic blog here on the subject. Walking is one of our fundamental activities, so it is no surprise it brings us comfort. I like to think the great road song is just an extension of the walking verse - perhaps that explains why Fast Car suits a long walk so well.

Walking and writing are good analogues for one another. Your progression is linear, you're often alone, you arrange your thoughts along the way, you build up a rhythm, and more often than not you'll find yourself back where you started.

Monday 21 February 2011

So long since I last posted, but more frequent posting will return soon. I've been tied up with a rather long essay for the last few years and I hope to return to blogging once all that nonsense is over with.