Episteme

Ending something hot and steamy is never quite as easy as slamming the door in the face of an ugly stalker. But what if the former becomes the latter?

For a case in point, go to Graham Greene's 1951 classic, The end of the Affair. You'll understand why Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes were psyched to play this lurid drama on the big screen, and you might even identify with parts of it if you have ever been through a terrible breakup.

Maurice Bendrix is obsessed with Sara Miles, who is the wife of Henry Miles, a civil servant. Maurice and Sarah have a history together - they enjoyed a long affair, including having sex in the married couple's house when Henry was there and actually walked right by the door. So they got pretty obvious at times and of course the loser husband ended up finding out.

Sarah loved Maurice, but left him after they were in a bomb attack during the London Blitz of WWII and she prayed to God to save him in exchange for her ending their sinful relationship. Maurice didn't realize this until he got a private detective to follow her and steal her diary. The private detective part came after Henry suspected her of cheating and Maurice graciously volunteered to get involved because he was jealous she'd taken up with someone else.

Poor Henry. It's hard to get why he was such a tool. He just sat at home and did nothing, no romance, no action, nothing. Poor Sarah, you can't really blame her. She needed a psycho who would track her down with a PI only to find that she had always loved him. Are all our lives so tragic and pathetic, searching for love but never finding the right circumstances? Or are we just attracted to the exotic and the impossible? I'm beginning to think it's a bit of both!

Posted by Kim at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jamie Tarabay is leaving Baghdad after two years there. She runs the bureau for NPR. I like listening to her because despite whatever awful conditions exist for her, she manages to uncover these really great stories about friends trying to save each other from death squads, sons raising ransom money to save fathers they will never see again, the hell, basically, that Iraqis live since the U.S. can to "liberate" them, or whatever the U.S. came there to do. I heard that she is living and I'm surprised she lasted so long without getting killed, but maybe I'm just under estimating her or I'm speaking about something I don't really know much about. I wonder what news from Iraq will sound like now. She is pessimistic about the future Iraq, though, and doesn't think much good is going to come from the Bush Administration's little experiment of implanting democracy in the Middle East. Busy, busy busy.

But when I heard that Jamie is pessimistic, I realized I am too about a lot of things. But should I be. The fact that being "green" is in vogue has only added to my anxiety about the future and the world and whether civilization as we know it will remain for the coming generations. The fact that environmental preservations has been honed so perfectly to the individual makes me feel increasingly helpless about actually working for a cleaner world. To think that one person's actions make any difference is just absurd. Governments, corporations, these entities hold the key to reversal in climate change or clean water for everyone or clean oceans. I think the message of individual action - using more energy efficient light bulbs or recycling everything - comes at the expense of aggressively demanding government to fund research programs into alternative energy or ratify Kyoto, or better yet write the next pact on global climate change. If we all switched to Priuses tomorrow and only shopped at Whole Foods it wouldn't make much difference because the rest of the world wants to consume like we Americans have for the past 50 years.

Consumer culture and its attendant decadence are the real weakness in Western culture and how we live in the United States. It's a mirage of freedom because we are all carefully condition to believe through advertising, media and our environment that consumption of things and buying expensive items is a sign of freedom. You work hard and can get whatever you want because of it. But really working becomes the means to afford the lifestyle, bereft of meaning and any higher calling. It's just buy a new car, bigger TV and expensive watch. I do it. I buy things I don't need because I think that somehow it's going to make me...a better person? More fulfilled? I don't think we're al meant to live ascetic lives or like jihadis in the mountains of Pakistan. I just go back to thinking about rising global temperatures, Hurricane Katrina, the presidential elections, and I feel completely lost for the answers.

But I like to think that the world has always seemed a confusing, miraculous place, even to the Medieval serf.

Posted by Dawn at 07:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)