“What good is a life if you don’t use it to escape what’s wrong with it?” That’s feisty philosophy from the hero of the story I’m writing. Young Thor Gundersen wants to escape his lousy life. Good for you, kid! Story events conspire to tweak his philosophy to: What good’s a life if you don’t […]
A guest blogger on my site? Not in 13 years of “The Meaning of Life Blog”. Until today. Michael Worsfold‘s piece (a 3-minute read) does not concern writing or movies or the meaning of life. It is, however, about a powerfully reflective moment that would make any character, fictional or not, recalibrate their journey to […]
“Excuse me — my wife wrote that book.” That’s me pitching Pamela McGarry’s debut novel, The Unsuitable Bride. I’m in the bookshop chatting with the owner when I see a shopper eyeballing the exotic ochre cover in its featured display. I approach the customer with my ice-breaker and immediately she brightens as if to say, […]
To abide stoically in our darkest moments—strikes me as the wisest thing a person can do. I call it the “discipline of loss”. The thinking goes like this—we’re eventually going to lose everything, so why not get practiced at it? Especially elders. We ought to be consciously accepting loss at every turn, before every last […]
Jack Kerouac hit the road in the late 1940s. Back and forth across America, he and his hipster buddies went searching for IT. Post-war America had become—in the minds of the Beat Generation—a dark age of conformity. Kerouac and his crowd burned themselves out in a desperate search for an antidote to a culture of […]
I hear, “hour of the wolf,” and I think, “fear of the dark.” Or the fear of not-knowing what’s coming. Of what monsters the dark might be hiding. In Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf, the protagonist held darkness at bay around a candle-lit table until dawn. The real darkness was his dream world, of course, […]
Fiction is a one lie after another. But if those lies are compelling enough, we’ll tag along with our heroes even as they start to stumble. Especially as they falter. Most especially when they fail spectacularly. In that dark dead-end, while confronting our abject failure, philosopher John Gray says we may open “to the inexhaustible […]
I crawled out on a limb last week by claiming to see better in the dark. I told the story of falling on my head, which knocked some sense into me, you might say. Because in that near-death experience, I saw clearly who I was not. My fall, it was only a short journey, all […]
Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf depicted the witching hours of night as a liminal zone between sanity and insanity. Between life and death. If you appreciate Bergman, you probably have a working relationship with the dark. You might go around making counterintuitive assertions such as: We see better in the dark. Which is my hypothesis […]
