Stranger on Earth

It took a few days for Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master to sink in. Seldom have I been so bewildered and enchanted by a film and not instantly grasped why it should have such an effect on me. I have seen several other Oscar-nominated films since, but the ingredients that make up The Master – the rolling blue waves, the obscene sand sculpture, the anguish in the eyes of Freddie Quell (an otherworldly Joaquin Phoenix), the madcap motorbike race through the desert, the probing psychological sessions with the Master (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Amy Adams’ cryptic, mildly sinister character – have not lost their hypnotic effect one tiny bit. The film’s length and halting pace help. You are immersed in the tormented world of a war veteran who has long learnt to numb his pain with alcohol and drifts in and out of reality. When Quell comes under the tutelage of the Master, we are both relieved and worried for him. He may be out of the storm, but what tempest has he got himself ...

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...

In Season 1, Episode 9 of Six Feet Under , carefree prodigal son Nate learns to accept that everyone must die, regardless of their age and status. This may sound banal, but his coming to terms with so self-evident a fact shows that in the mad to-ing and fro-ing of everyday life there is little room for truth. I first became aware of death when I was still in kindergarten, a mere six-year-old whose world hadn’t extended beyond colouring books and plasticine models. Perhaps it was due to how everyone had been going on about a boy killed in an accident occurring on the main road separating my house and the kindergarten; perhaps it was the dead cat I had seen (and poked with a twig) by the pavement on the way to school; perhaps it was time – but I remember sitting in class (the teacher was showing us how to paint faces on eggshells) and having the most horrible premonition that my grandmother, who was the centre of my world at that time, was going to die. This upset me so much th...