The Universe and All That

My freshman year at Cornell was something I can only describe as magical—above all because of the wonderful people I met. But it was also the time when I first began to grapple with the universe, and I was seduced by her intoxicating beauty and all the secrets she kept. Inspired by Richard Feynman's charm and Julius Sumner Miller's impassioned and slightly creepy television lectures on things like gravity—physics was indeed his business—I tried my best to immerse myself in the world.

This was when I came to understand how deeply satisfying and life-affirming the pure pleasure of thinking could be, and I would argue that the purity of the experience—the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge alone—is the best thing about it. "What are you gonna do with it?" people like to ask us. "What's the point of learning about that? Are you ever gonna use it?" There's something criminal about these questions, which seem to imply that something is worth learning only if we necessarily go beyond the mere learning of it. Why can't it be enough to view knowledge as something beautiful in itself, something that enhances life and adds color to the world?

On my way to class I would imagine those towering figures of the physics world walking through Rockefeller Hall and Space Sciences. In one instance, it was not my imagination at all. I remember sitting down for an astronomy lecture one afternoon and glancing across the hall to see Mr. Bill Nye roaming around in an austere office furnished with little more than a desk and a chair. I walked across the hall to say hello. And yes, he is just as tall and cartoonish as he appears on television. But just as fun and engaging, too.

One of my favorite professors was Dr. James Houck, who taught introductory astrophysics (Astro 211). He was that old-school thinker who never lost sight of the big picture. Rather, he emphasized back-of-the-envelope calculations to pin down the machinery of the universe (most astrophysicists really like envelopes). His was a dry humor, and he would often quietly throw us witty phrases and observations I would write down in the margins of my notebook. I still have the notebook, and I still read it from time to time. "We oughta break and have a turkey or something," he said matter-of-factly just as class was ending before Thanksgiving break. I have no idea why I remember this.

His relaxed attitude at the chalkboard belied his brilliance. But if you paid attention in class, you quickly understood that he had important things to say about physics and life. He spiced up his lectures with anecdotes of legendary physicists and astronomers who had worked or were still working at Cornell—Richard Feynman, Hans Bethe, Edwin Salpeter. And Dr. Houck had brushed shoulders with many of them, which made the anecdotes come alive. These scientists were inhabiting the stratosphere of human knowledge, and they were as close as humans could get to being masters of the universe. And when you walked down the same halls they had walked down, you couldn't help feeling connected to them in some odd way. Maybe even a little invincible.

I remember attending an evening dinner and lecture by Dr. Bethe when I was a sophomore. The talk was on energy generation in stars, and he used transparencies and an overhead projector during the lecture. His wife was by his side to keep the transparencies in order. Unfortunately he talked so low that I couldn't understand a word he said. But it didn't bother me at all. I was completely thrilled to be in the same room as Hans Bethe (Hans Bethe!?). As he spoke, I pictured him competing with Dr. Feynman to see who could calculate faster in his head. Thinking about these two titans trying to intellectually outmaneuver the other was as much as my brain could handle, and perhaps it was just as well that I couldn't hear a word of Dr. Bethe's lecture. Anyway, I'll never forget that evening.

During one lecture, Dr. Houck mentioned Dr. Salpeter, who at that moment was probably a few floors above us working hard on something related to the universe. Who was this person? I wanted badly to know. Dr. Houck sparked my curiosity by making references to Dr. Salpeter's collaboration with Dr. Bethe. But his work went beyond astrophysics—he appeared to float seamlessly through different intellectual worlds, leaving his mark in all of them.

I walked by Dr. Salpeter's office in Space Sciences on numerous occasions. I always wanted to stop in, but I never did. One early evening in the fall of 2000, I happened to encounter him walking by Bailey Hall and decided to introduce myself. I was immediately struck by his modesty and how easy it was to talk with him. At one point he mentioned that his wife had just passed away, and so he was spending most of his time continuing her research in neurobiology, which included the study of neuromuscular disorders. It was clear that this man—this exceptional man—could set camp just about anywhere he wanted—be it the cosmos or the human body—and he was equally at home everywhere.

I opened my Astro 211 notebook this evening and took a look at some of Dr. Houck's thoughts on the world. Oddly enough, I didn't remember what is perhaps the most important one—the one I recorded at the top of page one during the first lecture. It says: "Based on 4,000 years of experience, we're wrong."

It's tough for us to admit this. We don't like to think we're wrong. We like to think we're right, and very often we impede progress by clinging to our models and refusing to admit we got it wrong somewhere along the way. But it turns out that progress doesn't happen this way. Progress happens when we realize how little we know about the world and how far we have left to go. The pure act of thinking about the world may be intoxicating, but it turns out there are other reasons to do it. After all, it is only by understanding the world that we can make it better. Dr. Salpeter understood this. When his wife was returned to the universe, he grieved, of course, but he got on with it. Because he knew there was still work to be done.

What Dr. Houck said on the first day of class is something we ought to remember. In fact, it might be something we must remember if we care at all whether those born tomorrow will be able to look up in the sky on a clear summer night—with the sound of breezy leaves and the smell of freshly cut grass bathing the balmy air—hold their children close, and say, "How great this gift we call the world; how lucky we are to be here at all."

(I publish this piece this evening with a heavy heart and a profound feeling of emptiness, having just heard of Christopher Hitchens' passing from Graydon Carter, Hitchens' friend and editor at Vanity Fair. "Your corporeal existence, O Hitch, derives from the elements released by supernovae, by exploding stars," Martin Amis once wrote of his best friend. "Stellar fire was your womb, and stellar fire will be your grave: a just course for one who has always blazed so very brightly." In the spirit of the stars I dedicate this essay to him.)

Castrating the Universe

It's another white night for you, fueled by coffee and cigarettes and obscure Netflix documentaries recommended by the award-winning Netflix preference algorithm, which makes you ponder for a few moments technology's ability to accurately pinpoint your bizarre tastes and possible tastes and everything in between. At first glance such a thing feels creepy, perhaps a thought experiment that should be confined to the realm of science fiction, an Outer Limits episode for a rainy day. At midnight this everything in between seems like a yawning chasm you'd like to explore for a few hours, but that article is waiting for you and the phone is ringing (of course you don't answer it) and what is the point of all this?

You know you shouldn't ask yourself this question because you might not like the conclusion you come to. It's difficult to stop the urge, though, because it's so much fun to castrate the universe and what else are you going to do at one in the morning? But then you remember that David Foster Wallace said something about water and the urge subsides. You become the vanilla version of you, the least interesting carbon copy of you, and it's one in the morning and what are you going to do to entertain yourself?

You start to think about the day and how little you've accomplished even though you told yourself you were going to do everything, everything in between. But everything in between what, exactly? Where are you situated in the universe? Between what two objects does your person lie? It's not clear to you, but you know what you mean by it.

Your thoughts drift to the girl you saw leaving the coffee shop as you arrived there in the morning. You always intend to say something profound, but you never do. You think you're brilliant and maybe you are, but you don't feel like it tonight. And besides, you never feel like you have the proper venue to spout your brilliance. You're charming and funny and mordant and people should listen to you, obviously. Sometimes you wake up thinking this will be the day when you magically find the proper venue to spout something brilliant, and from this day forward every day will be the same and the brilliance will never shut off. You espouse a self-serving theory, which posits that once the nuclear reaction commences it will continue forever. If only you could be brilliant once, you could be brilliant every time. You're waiting for the first time, and it feels so close.

At this moment in the night, you are overcome by the sudden urge to get violent. You rail against the universe in your usual way, safely confined within the four walls of your living room and with no one to explain how silly you look when the light creeps in through the blinds and hits your face like that. You understand how banal it seems to direct your insults toward that cosmically large and obdurate mass we call the world. It would be better to direct them toward something more specific, like a traffic light or alarm clock.

You are watching the world as it blows up in front of you. Everything around you is fading. People you know are dying and there's nothing you can do about it. And even though you feel suffocated and tired of it all, you are alive and extremely lucky to be able to contemplate the beauty of this disaster.

So live, and live hard. Make the choice to be a part of it all. Breathe in the impermanence of things, and accept this.

Sprezzatura

What is sprezzatura? The word, which has its origin in Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, describes the skill of making difficult tasks appear effortless by consciously concealing the effort that went into completing them. My interest was first sparked last year after picking up the June 2010 issue of The New Criterion and reading Christopher Caldwell's review of Christopher Hitchens' memoir, Hitch-22.

Caldwell used the word to describe Hitchens, and it fit perfectly. We might picture Hitchens entertaining guests at a dinner party and enjoying copious amounts of food and wine when suddenly he disappears for half an hour to spit out a Vanity Fair piece on the evils of tyranny (complete with detailed examples and a hat tip to Orwell) or perhaps a meditation on death, for which his present situation is a case study. Is there a better way to describe his air of effortlessness when debating, reading, and writing? I don't think so.

I am attracted to those who make it look easy, even if it's not. After all, isn't it taken for granted that most things in life are burdensome, tedious, and time-consuming? Why, then, would I want to listen to someone go on about how difficult it was to drive to work or remodel his kitchen? These things do not interest me. What does interest me is the guy who goes on a weekend bender and then destroys an exam on a Monday morning, or the girl who never has a book in her hand, yet has a knack for delivering apt literary analogies at perfect moments. "When the hell did she have time to read that?" I might ask myself. Now that's interesting.

I remember reading a New York Times profile last year on David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, called "Making It Look Easy at The New Yorker" (5 April 2010). And this is exactly what Remnick does: he makes everything look so damn easy. In the article, Stephanie Clifford writes that Remnick "works hard to seem as if he is not working hard." She also quotes Malcolm Gladwell: "He cruises around and chats with people and then disappears and writes thousands of words in fifteen minutes. It's all part of that 'making it look easy' thing." And when he was writing The Bridge, Remnick would wake up "at 5:30 a.m. to write and often stayed up past midnight, but rarely discussed the book at work." I was blown away by his method of getting everything done and keeping his mouth shut. These little morsels instantly attracted me to Remnick. I am drawn toward people who seem to do nothing and yet everything—sprezzatura, in a word.

Last year I watched The Limits of Control. Critics panned the film. In fact, Roger Ebert thought it was quite awful, giving it half a star in his Chicago Sun-Times review. Rarely does he give anything half a star. But I loved it. Why did I love it? I loved it because Jim Jarmusch didn't concern himself with plot. Instead, he wrote and directed a film in which he portrayed life in a purely aesthetic way, like a work of abstract art. I think this disconcerted some people, including the critics. They expected a film that went somewhere, resolved itself. But that's not what they got, and they wanted to make Jarmusch suffer for it. Good luck to them.

I think the film resonates with me because it depicts life in a way I would like to live it. It presents a world in which actions are disconnected from consequences and beauty is an end in itself. Let me give examples to explain what I mean by these two aspects of the film.

First, there is the disconnect between action and consequence. The main character in the film, the Lone Man, played by Isaach De Bankolé, is the epitome of cool. He does not sleep; he merely lies in bed. He does not eat; he just chases pieces of paper with double espressos (in two separate cups). He communicates with people but let's silence do most of the work.

I think this is what Thorsten Botz-Borstein means when he says the cool person manages to "personify paradoxes": He is of this world yet not of this world. He sleeps yet doesn't sleep. He eats yet doesn't eat (in that rare moment when there's food in front of him, the dish looks like something straight out of a Cézanne painting). And he communicates by saying nothing at all. In other words, the Lone Man enjoys the consequences of actions he has chosen not to engage in. He is alert, healthy, and sociable without stooping to behavior human beings find necessary to live in this way. In the ideal world, I think this would be the ultimate resolution of ambivalence: reaching the end we desire without engaging in the act we disdain. But since we must sleep, we can never really be cool.

Now, should we believe that the Lone Man in fact does not sleep, eat, or talk? I don't think so. Jarmusch has chosen not to show those moments that make the main character human, and so we start to believe that he isn't. In a scene at the end of the film, the main character surveys the compound and then mysteriously appears in a room with Bill Murray. "How the hell did he get in there?" we ask ourselves. We have no way of knowing the answer. There must be an answer. After all, he is in a room with Bill Murray—he must have done something to get inside. But since the act of entering is hidden, it's almost as if it didn't happen. "I used my imagination," the hero tells us. And so he did. If only we could be like the Lone Man, entering rooms without opening doors—how amazing would that be? In hiding the Lone Man's humanity, Jarmusch enables us to believe he isn't human at all.

Second, there is the idea of beauty as an end in itself—the aesthetic experience. I think the film is best viewed from this perspective. It is a visual masterpiece that should not be corrupted by a search for meaning or intent beyond the portrayal of life in a purely aesthetic way. Jarmusch directly conveys this idea in the scene in which the Lone Man stares at a cityscape that slowly morphs into a painting. Here we see life as a literal work of art, which is also the way the Lone Man strives to live it.

Why can't we live life this way? I'm not so sure we can't. I don't think we can perfect the aesthetic experience. After all, if we bought fruits and vegetables merely to enjoy how beautiful they are, or if we painted them to enhance their beauty (much like Michelangelo Antonioni famously painted the grass in his film Blow-Up), we probably wouldn't live very long. In other words, for those who view life from an aesthetic vantage point, the decision to be a part of this world has attached to it a certain degree of ambivalence. They don't want to die—they don't care about beauty that much—but they want to enjoy beauty for beauty's sake without having to suffer for it. Yet they do suffer for it because, well, they want to live. Films like The Limits of Control ease this tension and allow us to resolve the ambivalence by pretending, if only for a couple hours, that it really is possible to disconnect action and reaction or live in a way that is fully reconciled with beauty.

The Lone Man is the embodiment of sprezzatura in the extreme. Everything he does, he does without effort or—in many instances—without doing it at all. By cultivating this image, the Lone Man consciously decides to approach his life as a work of art. He assumes the role of aesthete, choosing which movements to display and which to conceal. Everything he does is beautiful.

Last month I walked up to the Hollywood sign with an old college friend. I admire him for deciding to take a chance and move to LA to pursue acting. I love people who can do this—I doubt I could. We talked about a lot of things on the way up and down the trail. And I took some time to mention a story he had told me years ago about a friend he knew who worked as a cashier. He had explained to me how his friend would count bills with an unreal level of focus. His friend would slowly and deliberately pass each bill to the customer, as if each bill were the last one he would ever count. I reminded my friend of this story. We laughed because he didn't remember it and I wasn't even sure why I did.

But maybe there is a lesson to be learned here. Often we are so caught up in the narrative that we view everything we do as a means to an end. We walk to get in shape, or we drive a car to go to the store. Might it not be healthy from time to time to strive to be fully conscious of every movement we make, savoring every muscle twitch because we know that someday we'll die and never be able to move our arms again?

This is why, when the summer comes, I walk to walk. I like to feel the sun beat down on me and savor the opportunity to get a sunburn, even though I know it will hurt like hell afterward. I ask myself, "What is the most beautiful way to walk? What makes me look the best?" I'll experiment with the movement of my arms. For example, I'll try to figure out how much I can reduce their motion and still appear as a normal walker. Flailing them around looks ridiculous; so does moving them not at all. My arms must inhabit a world of movement somewhere in between. I walk in circles to perfect this.

Sometimes I'll drive my car to drive my car. I'll practice the art of stopping smoothly at a traffic light, minimizing the lurch of the car that always seems to occur when I put on the brakes. When I turn the wheel, I'll try different hand configurations that result in smoother arcs. I will do this until I get it right, or at least think I do. There are times I align the direction of the car with the position of the sun to achieve a brilliant shine off the hood ornament, which exhibits a high level of rotational symmetry—a circle segmented into arcs of 120 degrees. I would like my behavior to rise to its level of beauty, my movement to align with its motion, my clothing to complement its color. I can't concentrate on aesthetics when I know a gallon of milk is getting warm in the back seat.

The art of sprezzatura—and it is an art—can be found in those spaces divorced from the realm of the everyday, where we accomplish everything and yet nothing, where utility takes a back seat to beauty. We envy those who appear to do things effortlessly, gracefully—as if it were nothing at all. We wish to be like them. We study their movements and try to enter their world in spite of its impossibility.

And it is impossible. This carefully constructed world is merely an illusion—a work of art that hides all the hard work. Sure, it's beautiful to look at, but it doesn't really exist. Take Shakespeare, who we thought trafficked in such effortlessness. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, "Did Shakespeare Ever Think Twice?" (5 February 2011), Stephen Greenblatt has this to say about The Bard of Avon:

There are literally thousands of these tiny changes. What then of Shakespeare's reputation for "easiness"? He evidently had a stake in hiding all of the hard work that went into his apparent fluency. His was a culture that prized what the famous Italian courtier Baldassare Castiglione called sprezzatura, that is, nonchalance. Castiglione understood that the only way to achieve this nonchalance—in writing as in dancing or riding or telling jokes—was through fantastically painstaking revisions that all had to be carefully concealed.

So that's the way it really is. Maintaining such appearances is hard work—maybe even harder work than the task at hand. And those who make it look so easy are a breath of fresh air in a world filled with people clamoring in the streets, telling us how difficult life can be. Let's be thankful, then, for those who allow us to forget.

In Theory

In theory everything is perfect, pure. But the creative act means making a choice and, inevitably, sacrificing perfection so that something beautiful might be born.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live in an abstract world, where only theories would matter. And in this world, even that utilitarian instrument we call language would become obsolete. Human beings, after all, would no longer be held captive by that base desire to stoop to words.

On certain winter evenings we can approach the outer limits of such an existence. If the snow is falling and people mysteriously disappear from the roads, we have an easier time dissociating objects from their corresponding functions. Street signs and traffic lights, for example, become mere collections of shapes and colors. And during these moments we seem to grasp the essence of things, if only for a time. Even silence has a way of speaking to us, in spite of words.

When I have an idea I think is brilliant, I turn it over in my mind and imagine bringing it to life with an organized array of symbols. Then I imagine what the results would be. Most often the results are extraordinary: I write a bestseller without sacrificing my artistic ideals. Then I turn down talk shows because everyone wants me. Finally I achieve a stratospheric level of fame and fortune. My experience makes me the most sought after dinner companion. I'm cool yet engaged. I'm easy. I live and write by the sea, maybe.

Sometimes, though, our abstract world becomes so complete that the decision to give birth would only contaminate its purity. In other words, the abstract book we have never actually written is indeed written, but written so perfectly so as to destroy our desire to realize it.

In the past I've joked with friends about this phenomenon, which they understand very well because they are also its victims. Before Christmas I had dinner with a close friend, and I was reminded of the time a few years back when he and I discussed our dream of one day owning our own winery. We exhausted ourselves talking about it in the abstract. I told him that we had formulated our vision of a theoretical winery so perfectly that there was no way we could actually construct it. It seemed to us that following through with our plans would only lead to disappointment. We both laughed and agreed that we were probably right.

The plant world does not suffer from such problems. For example, when a tree moves in the wind, it moves perfectly. Perhaps this is because it is not aware it is moving. In opposition to nature, our actions seem contrived, even pointless. It does appear that some things are better explored in theory alone. Football, grocery shopping, and going to work—these are but three examples. There are innumerable others. If only we could rise above the spectacle of grown men in tights, our need to assimilate organic material, renting ourselves to satisfy our need to consume, maybe we could better appreciate the beauty of an abstract world.

In light of our descent into the realm of the concrete, what do we make of our time here on earth? How do we interpret our actions and the shadows they cast? When I am overwhelmed by the masochistic urge to destroy myself, to venture beyond the world of the pure and betray my communion with silence, to give birth to an idea so perfect and so complete by stooping to words, there is one thing that comforts me.

Thrust into the world, we are the concrete answer to a question posed in the bedroom. We have no choice in the matter. We are creatures complicit in our communion with the concrete. Aside from suicide—and even this is a suspect solution—there is nothing we can do to shed this role. And if we choose not to die, then we must choose to live. So why not live as fully as possible?

In theory I want to consume the world. I want to know everything. I want the company of brilliant and beautiful people all day, every day. I want to burn so bright I blind myself. We must accept that life is a work of art that is never fully complete, and a part of it will always remain an abstraction composed of thoughts, desires, regrets. Life only closes in on itself—in other words, ceases to function in part as theory—when it encounters its own finality. Pregnant with our dreams for the future, death is an abortion of sorts—the moment when all of our theories are taken from us, forever.

This is the tragedy we must fight against. This is the theory that must compel us to live.

The Art of Indefatigability

I finished reading Mircea Eliade's Parisian journal earlier this year after many evenings in the park, and it was a transformative experience. There are many facets of Eliade's personality that interest me, but there is one that rises above the rest: his seemingly limitless capacity to consume and create words.

It is clear that Eliade, a prolific writer and religious historian, is an intellectual who simultaneously attracts and arrests. On the one hand, he charms us with his inexhaustible erudition—what is the demon that feeds his genius? In his world, nothing is too obscure for his appetite. He devours books as if they were glasses of water. He possesses the uncanny knack of making connections between what appear to be totally unrelated fields of knowledge. This is the mark of that rare individual who has successfully combined intelligence and creativity into a potent formula for intellectual indefatigability. How remarkable it would be to sit with him and experience the genesis of a single thought.

On the other hand, we are seized in his presence. After all, it's virtually certain he would run intellectual circles around us, and we wonder how he would respond to our inadequacies. Would we embarrass ourselves trying to maintain his stratospheric level of discourse? More important, would our meeting throw us into a state of despair? After all, many of us are simply incapable of devouring books like water. We might be tempted to give up and throw all our manuscripts away.

In "Beginnings of a Friendship," Emil Cioran gives us his own account of Eliade's productive capacity:

Everything negative, everything that promotes self-destruction on the physical as well as spiritual plane, was then, and still is, foreign to him—whence his inaptitude for resignation, for remorse, for despair, for all feelings that imply the bogged-down, the rut, the nonfuture. Again, I may be going out on a limb, but I believe that if he has perfect understanding of sin, he lacks a sense of it: he is too feverish for that, too dynamic, too hurried, too full of projects, too intoxicated with the possible.

Then there's Cioran’s account of Eliade’s lectures at the Faculty of Lectures at Bucharest:

I attended his lectures whenever I could. The fervor he lavished on his articles was fortunately recognizable in his lectures, the most animated, the most vibrant I have ever heard. Without notes, without anything, swept on by a vertigo of lyric erudition, he was a fountain of convulsed yet coherent words, underlined by the spasmodic movements of his hands. An hour of tension, after which, miraculously, he did not seem tired and perhaps, indeed, was not. It was as if he possessed the art of indefinitely postponing fatigue.

When you sit down to read his journals and spend a few hours immersed in his world, your curiosity heightens and you never want to leave. Every word, every gesture becomes a springboard for another thought. Eliade's desire to devour the world is dangerously contagious, and if his musings impel us to move forward, they do so tragically: no matter how hard we try, we will die undone. In the journal Religion, Matei Calinescu provides his own translation of some of Eliade's thoughts from the Portuguese journal:

My capacity to understand culture, in all its forms, is limitless. I wish I could express just one percent of what I think and know as nobody else does. I don't think that a genius of this complexity has ever been encountered—at any rate my intellectual horizons are much vaster than Goethe's.

Intellectual horizons vaster than Goethe's? When I read this, I can only conclude that we are dealing with either a very serious person or a person who is not serious at all. After reading his Parisian journal, I am apt to believe the former.

How can we possibly compete with people like this? Perhaps the answer lies in understanding that everyone—even Mircea Eliade—dies with more work to be done. No one that I know wakes up and tells himself that every task has been completed and every problem has been solved. This is one of the many reasons we might get out of bed in the morning, even if we don't feel like it. And when we die, someone picks up where we left off. There is no way around this.

Eliade is obsessed with time, and perhaps we can interpret Youth Without Youth as his way of dealing with the ever-shrinking space of our existence. The trick is to recognize our journey toward understanding not as a struggle among ourselves, but as a struggle against something beyond ourselves—that immaterial and elusive entity we call time. But the act of naming something does not mean we apprehend it any better. And if you're crazy enough to compete with Eliade, you would be wise to tackle Goethe instead.

Three Great Directors

I thought I would take some time to talk about a few of my favorite directors.

My high school music teacher introduced me to Woody Allen in the spring of 2000. The first Allen film I watched was Husbands and Wives. I watched it with the girl who would become my summer fling before I headed off to Cornell. I don't think she liked the film very much. She's married with two kids now; much can change in a decade. Every time I watch this film, I think of her and that magical summer after graduation. Maybe this is one reason the film has a special place in my heart.

When many people think of Allen, they think of him as a comedian who made funny films. I don't care much for his earlier stuff. I prefer his darker material; e.g., Crimes and Misdemeanors, Husbands and Wives, and Match Point.

Ingmar Bergman heavily influenced Allen, and many of Allen's films demonstrate this. These direct and indirect references compelled me to explore Bergman's oeuvre, starting with his most famous work: The Seventh Seal. This is probably the best film to start with, if you are not familiar with Bergman's work.

My favorite work by Bergman is a film called Winter Light. Everything about this film resonates with me. The cinematography. The acting. The austerity of the scenes. The bleakness. There is no doubt that most do not have the patience for this film, which makes me love it even more. It is slow and plodding. Nothing much happens in the way of plot. One reason I love Bergman—and Michelangelo Antonioni—is that they were uncompromising and authentic. I remember reading an interview with Antonioni. He said that when he wrote, he wrote for himself. He didn't see the point in writing for a particular "audience," since in his view, there wasn't one. The result is that the films may not be blockbusters, but they will almost certainly affect a small group of lucky people in a very profound way. I consider myself one of those lucky people.

I only discovered Antonioni a couple years ago. I believe I stumbled upon him while reading an article on Bergman. I can't remember exactly. Like Bergman's work, Antonioni's films are often difficult and deal with heavy themes. One interesting difference I have noticed between these two directors is their treatment of God. Bergman relates the disorienting absence of God, while Antonioni avoids God altogether, assuming His nonexistence a priori. Each of these approaches has its merits.

Ironically, both Bergman and Antonioni died on the same day in the summer of 2007. I remember hearing about Bergman's passing on NPR as I drove through Ithaca, NY. The interesting thing is that both Bergman and Antonioni would refuse to give this irony meaning, laughing it off as mere coincidence, as I do.

When I dive into the work of artists, I find myself thinking of them throughout the day, imagining how they would respond to various situations. When you are affected by someone's films (or any type of art, for that matter), you can't help being influenced by them to some extent, developing an intuition about their thoughts and actions even after they are dead. This is also why—after this intuition has been rightfully attained through time and patience—it's worth revisiting previous films and experiencing them on another level. I recently did this with Antonioni's The Passenger.

My favorite Antonioni film is L'eclisse. It's difficult to put into words how this film makes me feel. It contains one of the most beautiful and tranquil scenes I have ever viewed—the Verona scene, filled with the beautiful sounds of Giovanni Fusco.

In sum, I would start with The Seventh Seal for Bergman and then graduate to his "trilogy" from the early 1960s: Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence. For Antonioni, I would start off with his "trilogy": L'avventura, La notte, L'eclisse. But then again, perhaps it's better to start with Blow-Up or The Passenger. I'm not sure.

I have no formal training in film. I've just felt my way around over the past few years. I don't know what is right or what is wrong when it comes to film, or to what extent the idea of a good film is an absolute that rises above subjectivity. It doesn't matter much to me, as long as I keep finding well-known and lesser-known gems that get me through the day.

The Program of Breathing

In order to get out of bed in the morning, we can't think too much. It seems that the ability to do anything at all hinges on a certain degree of automatism. Emil Cioran writes the following in Drawn and Quartered:

My doubts have not been able to get the better of my automatisms. I continue to make gestures to which it is impossible for me to adhere. To overcome the drama of this insincerity would be to renounce, to annul myself.

As soon as we begin to think or even question the motivation behind any action whatsoever, a small rift appears between intention and execution. At first, the rift is barely perceptible, welling up on rainy days or Sunday mornings. But this inchoate awareness feeds on itself until the rift becomes a chasm that spoils everything. At this stage, even the smallest gesture becomes an exercise in absurdity, and words are nothing more than meaningless abstractions.

When it first becomes clear that we feel out of place in the world, a natural reaction is to swim against the current and question ourselves. After all, most of us were raised to believe in something that gives us a reason to do things: family, religion, justice. As soon as such notions become suspect, we might become angry at the world and discover the cathartic power of invective. The pen can do wonders, and there is no doubt that giving form and coherence to our thoughts can quell our most destructive impulses.

But this protracted orgasm of the word cannot last forever. Over time it weighs us down and uses us up. No longer infused with the desire to annihilate ourselves, we begin to recognize the impotence of anger and the supremacy of silence, as Cioran writes in On the Heights of Despair:

After having struggled madly to solve all problems, after having suffered on the heights of despair, in the supreme hour of revelation, you will find that the only answer, the only reality, is silence.

What do we do when every action feels contrived and useless, when the nature of every response is contaminated by a sense of arbitrariness and contingency? There is no easy answer, and there is no way to rid ourselves of that feeling of torpor that insinuates itself into every activity. At this point, the world becomes nothing more than a stage we use to entertain ourselves.

But we can use this malady to our advantage and shape it in a way that benefits us. First, we must recognize the automatism that underlies our movements and rise above each act by detaching ourselves from the act itself. Each time we get up in the morning, make ourselves a pot of coffee, go to work, we should perform the activity without believing in it and by refusing to lose ourselves in its uselessness. By injecting lucidity into the mix, we shed the automatism and consequently elevate ourselves above the act.

Second, we must learn to see the beauty in every futile gesture, every pointless task. When there is no burden of meaning to weigh anything down, we liberate ourselves from the merry-go-round. By doing this, we also rid ourselves of any possibility of disappointment. This alone is a strong reason to disbelieve in the redemptive power of hope.

Third, we must praise the purifying properties of inaction and defend it against the insults of busybodies. In order to guilt human beings into doing things, humanity deemed sloth an impure state, a problem to be dealt with. We must reclaim sloth as our own and worship it as the virtue that it is. Restlessness lies at the root of every catastrophe, as Cioran writes in All Gall Is Divided:

Violent actions are the appanage of the nations which, alien to the pleasure of lingering at the table, are ignorant of the poetry of dessert and the melancholies of digestion.

Never satisfied with lying still, our species has unthinkingly moved from one calamity to the next—the automatism of collapse, the disease of disaster.

I am most at peace when I contemplate the supreme disorder of things, when I lie on my couch for hours because no reason to rise is worthy of my respect. I may pass the time with a book or a film, but I understand these pursuits are only diversions, little tasks to fill up the otherwise vacuous hours. Suffocated by the senseless, we must be content merely to breathe. This alone must be enough.