Stranger on Earth

Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer ( Götzendammerung, oder: Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt , 1889), was one of the last two philosophical works (the other being The Anti-Christ ) written by Friedrich Nietzsche at lightning speed (he completed it in a week) before he succumbed to insanity the following year. By this time Nietzsche had already established a name for himself with Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Europe’s literary-philosophical enclaves, though his incorrigible cynicism made him believe that most readers had not adequately grasped the work. In order to rectify the situation, he felt he had to simplify its main ideas and present them in a more digestible format à la Cliff Notes. The result is Twilight of the Idols , a summary of sorts of the philosophical thoughts that had preoccupied him all his life. But the book, furious and acerbic in tone, is also something else: it functions as a metaphorical hammer that seeks to destroy everything that...

Life of Pi as directed by Ang Lee almost did not happen. The project, ever since its 2003 inception, had been passed on by three directing heavyweights (M. Night Shyamalan, Alfonso Cuarón, Jean-Pierre Jeunet) before it landed in Lee’s lap in 2009. For some time, many doubted if Lee, Oscar-winning Taiwanese-born director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain, and Lust, Caution , was the right choice for this idiosyncratic Indian tale about a young boy stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. All doubts can be put to rest, now that it is more than apparent Lee has made cinematic history with this new entry. The Yann Martel novel on which the movie is based needs no introduction. Since its publication in 2001 and its winning of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction the following year, the wildly imaginative story that works like some ancient folklore has entered our collective cultural consciousness, transforming the way we perceive the relation between myth and r...

Link to Part 1:  http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.nl/2012/12/burn-life-unlived-ray-bradburys.html Bradbury himself once remarked in an interview that Fahrenheit 451 was not a writer’s protest against totalitarianism. [+] The fact that the novel is often interpreted as such speaks volumes about its multi-facetedness. The writer’s intention, however, lies in a different sphere: he aims to alert the reader to the soul-flattening addictiveness of visual media and their threat to the existence of books. When Montag encounters the novel’s chief voice of reason Faber, who has an extensive literary knowledge, he learns from him the true worth of books. In reference to the last surviving copy of the Bible Montag has stolen and kept, Faber says: Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture, This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. Yo...

“Stuff your eyes with wonder,” says one of the outlaws to our protagonist Guy Montag before the novel ends, “live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world” (201). Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1958) is traditionally considered a novel about a dystopian society à la 1984 that has made books and the act of reading illegal. But upon closer examination it reveals a message that is even more sweeping than the one above: one of living one’s life to its full capacity. Guy Montag, a fireman who has spent his whole life burning books and the houses of transgressors, has a sudden awakening when he is on the job. Seemingly out of the fiery red (not blue) he develops a sense of guilt, and books, objects he has never particularly cared for, begin to prey on his mind: Books bombarded his shoulders, his arms … A book alighted, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering. In the dim, wavering light, a page hung open and it was like a snowy feather, ...