Watching the brand-new Criterion edition DVD of Days of Heaven reminded me how beautiful the light is at dawn and dusk. And how farmers--then as now--have only the daylight hours to work with, bookended with the pinks and oranges of daybreak and sundown.
Here in Japan, farmers used to divide the day in just this way: sunrise to sunset; sunset to sunrise. And these two were further divided into six parts—"hours" if you will--that expanded and contracted as the year turned. In winter, the six daylight periods were each shorter, the night ones longer.
We lost that connection with the cycle of the day and year when we left the land, measured our lives with rigid hours and minutes, and turned the night to light. We fill our hours of rest with bright pastimes, go to bed late and wake groggy. I work in an office with the lights on all day. I've seen many more sunsets than sunrises.
Midnight
Convenience store lit up like Christmas
Full moon high above
--Julian
Further reading:
An article on time in old Japan
Roger Ebert's as-always erudite review of Days of Heaven
For cinema otaku, Criterion's blog has a fascinating entry on director Terrence Malick's work on the look of the new DVD edition (scroll down to August 15, 2007: Striking Gold).
When there's sunshine to be slept in
I sleep in it
A body beside me
I embrace it
Wine to be drunk
I drink it
A song to be sung
I sing it
Unbidden joys
And all but the wine are free
--Julian
[This would explain why I can never build a good cellar of wine.]
—NC Tate
23 MARCH 1909
Even in philosophy, the subject and the meaning of ideas are less important than the way they are linked, the elegance with which they are set into motion and developed, in short, than their play. What is properly philosophical is only the play of ideas, just as what is profoundly pictorial is the splendor of lines and colors. The interweaving of ideas in the field of philosophy is equivalent to the mixing that is essential to the creation of orchestral or pictorial compositions.
Victor Segalen in Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity
After days of barely seeing the sun, the week has been magnificent. At
dawn the last bright crescent of the waning moon hangs in a clear sky,
every morning a little lower, a little more delicate. The rising sun
turns the eastern sky pink. Its red orb is reflected in the west,
turning the snow on Mount Fuji pink as well. The ground is white with
frost. Among the evergreens and rust browns, the yellow of ginkgo
leaves is as arresting as the red of maples.
At noon, the sun is warm enough to dry laundry and invite sleep.
In the evenings, I sit under the warm kotatsu table, enjoying the
first local mikan tangerines.
Sliver of old moon
High in the sky at daybreak
New moon on Tuesday
--Julian
Having finished Simon Raven's "Alms for Oblivion
Men say that to lead the religious life one should be free from the distractions of the world. But if there are no distractions, if one is left alone with God all day long, as we were on that island, then one very soon realises how cruel and monstrous he is, how much misery and horror he has to answer for. Which of us has asked—would ever have asked—to live this life of pain? How dare God make such a life possible—and threaten to damn us if we seek solace from it in sin? That is the sort of thing which one asks if one is long alone with Him. So either one comes to hate Him, or, better perhaps, one ceases to believe in Him.
From The Face of the Waters
My attempts to get others hooked on Raven's books have failed miserably. How this is possible, when he is capable of tossing off gems like that one, is impossible for me grasp.
—David
They are in no particular order.
They are not necessarily my top nine.
They are nine books I enjoyed in 2007.
See the list here
--David
My review of Haruki Murakami
After Dark begins as a version of Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks," updated and shifted to Tokyo. Just as Hopper's painting was a realistic picture of a 1940s American diner, so Murakami's Denny's, with its "unremarkable but adequate lighting; expressionless decor and dinnerware; floor plan designed to the last detail by management engineers; innocuous background music at low volume," is a realistic representation of the sort of diner at which 21st-century nighthawks roost. Hopper's picture is powerful because it hints at something beyond what it depicts. This hint, however, is only effective because of the precision with which Hopper has painted his four nighthawks and their nest. Likewise, it is the precision with which Murakami presents the world we know that compels us to follow him into less familiar realms, and it is there, as with Hopper, that we begin to understand what drives nighthawks such as Mari into the night.
See what lead up to that conclusion here.
—David
"Death isn't what it used to be," says Guy Brown in a Guardian article worth pondering. In the past, people were usually "fully alive one day, and fully dead the next." Then "in the 20th century, the average lifespan in the world doubled." For the last 100 years, it has been increasing by a relentless 2.2 years per decade with no end in sight even in countries with the highest life expectancy. As a result "people in developed countries--and increasingly in the developing world--tend to die old and slowly from degenerative diseases brought on by ageing. Death is currently preceded by an average of 10 years of chronic ill health. The last decade of life has become a living death."
Both my parents died in their 90s in the drawn out fashion described above. It was their choice if choice is the right word, for theirs was society's default belief that one avails oneself of the medical profession in order to live as long as one can, whatever the cost. My parents paid the cost with great courage. Being of a more cowardly persuasion, I vowed never to buy into that belief, for I never want a life such as they lived in their last years.
We instinctively avoid death. Maybe that's why most of my contemporaries pop pills and monitor their cholesterol level, apparently unaware that there lies the road to the loss of mobility, the dementia, the depression of extreme old age as life crawls to its close. My university campus has just installed AED defibrillators around every corner. I would be most, um, disheartened should one of them be used on me. If my heart stops, it will be for a very good reason. It will be worn out, diseased in a way young hearts are not, clogged from years of enjoying life, at any rate, well beyond its best before date.
This is not a death wish, don't get me wrong. I'll rage against the dying of the light with the best of them, but I'd like to do it while I can still get myself to the bathroom and know my ass from a hole in the ground.
--Julian
