Stranger on Earth

Dear Herr Hesse, I know you’ve been dead since 1962, a good ten years before I was born, and my writing to you may come across as a mad gesture the likes of which only the overly obsessed are capable of. I can assure you I’m not mad, even though everyone around me is. I’ve just finished reading your 1919 novel Demian , which you wrote when you’re on the brink of madness (Was the war that bad? Why did all those young men have to die?), and which made you what my generation calls an “overnight sensation” among the disillusioned young. Before I started reading the book, I’d wondered why it’d had such an effect on the young men of the 1910s (and also those of the following decades). It’s just a book, I thought. Aren’t we exaggerating? But I should’ve known. Your Siddhartha has after all been my personal guide since I first read it in 2004, so why should this one be made of lesser stuff? The actor/scholar James Franco, a young(ish) man of my generation, wrote a new introduc...

Within the pages of Albert Camus’ The Fall ( La Chute , 1956), I come face to face with some of the philosophical issues that have kept me intrigued for a number of years: the meaning of innocence, the judgemental God, among other things. Composed as an unbroken internal monologue in typically opaque Camus style, The Fall is an inscrutable read even for the most seasoned of Camus readers. The challenge is to figure out what innocence has to do with it all. The narrator Clamence “speaks” to us from a bar in the seedy old heart of Amsterdam, where its “concentric canals resemble the circles of hell” (10). Clamence, a down-and-out ex-lawyer from Paris, tells us we are in the last circle of hell. Dante’s last circle of hell is reserved for traitors and betrayers. The reader is thus effectively reminded of treachery; he is literally seated in the heart of evil. Clamence’s references to the erstwhile Jewish quarter make it clear that Camus wants the reader to dredge up memories ...

A Note to the Reader: In writing this piece, I have attempted to avoid spoilers. The plot summary below is of the superficial kind and should not spoil anyone’s viewing experience. For a more comprehensive summary, refer to:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Condition_(film_series) As far as cinematic war chronicles go, there is not one that is grander and more urgent than Masaki Kobayashi’s mammoth 9-hour-and-47-minute trilogy The Human Condition (1959-61), with David Shipman, the famed British film critic, calling it “unquestionably the greatest film ever made” (984). And yet, ironically, few casual viewers will have seen it, partly due to its off-putting length. This should be rectified. The trilogy carries with it a message as pressing and disconcerting as that of Platoon (1986) or Apocalypse Now (1979), and should be acknowledged by anyone with an ounce of interest in humanist cinema. The film may be more than half a century old, but the protagonis...

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 ...

Perhaps the biggest surprise to the 21 st century reader of Twilight of the Idols , assuming he has not read its predecessors, is its aggressive attack on ideas he holds dear and never thinks of challenging. Nietzsche never had an appreciation for liberal politics. This is expressed in clear and therefore philosophically atypical language in Section 38 “My Conception of Freedom.” Of liberal institutions, Nietzsche opines that they “cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: subsequently there is nothing more thoroughly harmful to freedom than liberal institutions” (103). The reason why Nietzsche distrusts liberalism is consistent with his philosophy: liberal ideas “undermine the will to power, they are the leveling of mountain and valley exalted to a moral principle, they make small, cowardly and smug – it is the herd animal which triumphs with them every time” (103). Since liberalism preaches equality, harmony, and attempts to erase dissonance, it is seen by Nietzsche, who...

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...

Link to Part 1:  http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.nl/2012/11/the-thinking-mans-bible-and-messiah.html Of all the accusations Nietzsche hurls at Christianity, it is the sanctification of untruths concerning earthly matters that is the gravest: God is a thought that makes all that is straight crooked and all that stands giddy. What? Would time be gone and all that is transitory only a lie? … I call it evil and misanthropic, all this teaching about the one and the perfect and the unmoved and the sufficient and the intransitory. All that is intransitory – that is but an image! ( On the Blissful Islands , 110-11) Nietzsche claims that Christian belief inculcates the wrong perception of reality in the believer. The belief in an unchanging, perfect God is philosophically false, since nothing in the universe we inhabit is “intransitory.” Everything is always in flux, and divine constancy can be nothing but a deception. For Nietzsche (or Zarathustra), co...