LIFE CYCLE
Life is an adventure with a beginning decided by others, an end not wanted by us, and many interludes chosen at random by the case.
Roberto Gervaso
CHILDHOOD LIFE CYCLE
SAROYAN WILLIAM, THE HUMAN COMEDY,
OVERSEAS EDITIONS, Inc New York, 1945
LITTLE Ulysses Macauley was one day intent on observing the new mole hole, which was in the
garden behind the house, in Santa Giara Avenue, in Ithaca, a town in California. The mole of this new hole threw out large quantities of fresh dirt and spied on the little boy, who was certainly a stranger, but not
just an enemy. Before Ulysses finished enjoying this miracle, one of Ithaca's many birds flew behind
the foliage of the old walnut, and, taking his place on a branch, unleashed his joy, thus drawing attention
of the boy from the earth to the tree. A freight train roared and snorted from afar. The little boy listened: the rush of the train made the earth tremble under his feet, then ran away, and it seemed to him that he was going faster of all things in the world.
He arrived just in time to see the whole train at the level crossing, from the locomotive to the last wagon. He gestured with his hand to the driver, but he didn't move. He gestured to five or six other passengers, and those too nothing. They could very well have returned the gesture, but they did not. And finally, he saw a black man leaning over from a freight car: its song reached him above the crash of the train.
“Oh, don't cry, my dear. Oh, don't cry all day! We'll sing a song - the house song, Della, our old home - in distant Kentucky. "
Ulysses also signaled to the black man, and then a great extraordinary thing was seen, which no one would ever have waited: that black man different from all the others motioned to him and shouted: «I'm going home, boy! I'm going back to my home!"
And they continued to greet each other with great gestures, until the train could hardly be seen anymore.
At this point Ulysses looked around, and behold, he saw right around him this strange world of his, full of weeds and scrap, wonderful, illogical, yet beautiful. An old man with a sack on his back came down the street railroad. Ulysses waved a greeting to him too, but he was too old and tired to like them
expansions of a little boy. She looked at him as if they were both already dead.
And so Ulysses went slowly homeward, and still listened inside himself to that train, and the song of that negro and the cheerful words: «I'm going home, boy! I'm going back to my house. " He stopped by a medlar to think better, kicking at the rotten yellowish medlars that were on the ground. And, after a moment, he smiled very special of the Macauleys, that gentle, wise and reserved smile that says yes to all things.
When he turned the corner and saw the Macauley house, Ulysses began to jump on one foot and then on the other; he stumbled and fell for joy, but got to his feet and resumed his run.
Mom was in the little garden feeding the chickens, watching her baby run, fall, get up, stumble again. Quickly but quietly, he came up to her, and then went to look for the eggs in the chicken basket. Neither found one. He looked at it well for a moment, took it, brought it to his mother, and handed it to her cautiously; and with this meant something that no man can guess and no child can remember to tell it then.
When he turned the corner and saw the Macauley house, Ulysses began to jump on one foot and then on the other;
he stumbled and fell for joy, but got to his feet and resumed his run.
Mom was in the little garden feeding the chickens, watching her baby run, fall, get up, stumble again. Quickly but quietly, he came up to her, and then went to look for the eggs in the chicken basket. Neither found one. He looked at it well for a moment, took it, brought it to his mother, and handed it to her cautiously; and with this meant something that no man can guess and no child can remember to tell it then.
What is it that you hold in your hand? A letter? I'm done talking. Come on, read your letter, boy. "
"And a letter from my brother Marco," said Homer. "I haven't had a moment to open it yet."
"Open it then," said the old telegraph operator. “Read your brother's letter. Read it aloud. "
"Do you want to hear what he says, Mr. Grogan?" Homer said.
"Yes, if you don't mind, I'd be very happy to hear it," said the old telegraph operator, and took another drink.
Homer tore open the envelope, took out his brother Marco's letter, unfolded it, and began to read very slowly.
"Dear Homer" - he read. “First of all, everything that belongs to me in the house is yours now - to be given to Ulysses later when you don't know what to do with it: my books, the gramophone, the records, my clothes when they fit you, the bicycle, the microscope, the fishing tackle, the mineral collection and all the other things that belong to me are yours. Then I yield to you, rather than to Bellina, because now you are the man of the Macauley family of Ithaca. What I earn it last year at the factory, I gave it to Mom, of course, to help around the house. But I know it can't at least enough, and soon the mother and Bellina will think about going to work. I can't ask you to stop him, but I hope you will think for yourself not to let him. I think you will, because I would too.
Mom will want to go to work and Bellina too. But this will be one more reason for you to object. I do not know how you will do to run the hut and to study at the same time, but I am confident that you will find the way, there.
Mom gets my soldier's wages, except for a few dollars that I have to keep for myself, but not this money they can be enough. It is difficult for me to ask so much of you, when I myself did not start working before nineteen years; but I have a strange confidence that you will be able to do what it failed to do to me.
I miss you a lot, of course, and I think about you constantly. I am serene, and even if I have never believed in wars, - and I know they are absurd, even when necessary, - I am proud to serve my country, which to me it means Ithaca, our home and all Macauleys.
I recognize no enemies in the world, because no human being can be my enemy. Whoever it is, whatever color his skin, however wrong his opinions may be, he is my friend, not my enemy, because
he is no different from me. I don't have it with him, but with that part of him that first of all I try to destroy in myself.
I don't feel like a hero. I am not inclined to feelings of this kind. I don't hate anyone. I don't even feel
patriotic, because it is natural for me to love my country, its people, its cities, my home and my family.
I'd rather not be a soldier. I would prefer that there were no wars, but as I am a soldier and as a war
there is, it is a long time since I set out to do everything possible to be a good soldier.
I don't really know what awaits me, but whatever it is, I am humbly ready to accept it. I am very afraid
- I have to tell you; but I know that when the time comes, I will do my duty, and perhaps even a little more than my duty; but I want you to know that I do not obey any command, but only what my heart commands.
Kids from all over America, from thousands of cities like Ithaca, will keep company. I could die in this war. I must take courage and tell you. I don't like the idea of dying at all. More than anything else in the world I wish to return to Ithaca, and living many, many years with you, with my mother, my sister and my brother. I wish to return for Maria and for house and family that we will build together. We are likely to leave soon - for the front. No one knows which front, but he is sure we will leave soon. So you may not receive any more letters from me for a while. I hope however that this is not my last letter. If so, feel me still close. Don't believe I'm left for always. Let the other rron believe it. I have a friend here who is an orphan - a foundling; it is strange that among all the boys he has become my friend. His name is Tobey George. I told him about Ithaca and our family. One day, I will take him to Ithaca with me. When you read this letter, don't be sad. I'm happy to be the one of the Macauley who is at war, because it would be a sin, and it would not be fair, for it to be you.
I can write you now what I have never been able to say to you verbally. You are the best of the Macauleys. You must continue to be the best. Nothing has to stop you. You're fourteen now, but you gotta live to be twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty. And in the years of your life, you have to live for eternity. I believe you will. I will always look at you.
You represent what we fight for. Yes, you, my brother. How could I tell you these things if we were together?
You would jump on me and fight with me, and you would say that I am crazy; but despite everything, what I said it's true. Now I'll write your name here, for you to remember: Homer Macauley. That's what you are. I miss you a lot. I can not wait to see you again. When this happens, when we are together again, we will do the fight, and I'll let you throw me to the floor in the living room, in front of Mum and Bettina e. to Ulysses, and perhaps also to Mary; you
I'll let it win, because I'll be so happy to see you again. God bless you. Goodbye. Your brother, Marco. "
THE SUM AND SUBSTANCE OF THE NOVEL IN CINEMA
cinema film
Cinematography is a new way of writing, and therefore has a different sensitivity, another inner movement.
It is not a question of "second-class art" or a substitute synthesis with respect to theater, literature or painting, but the discovery of other worlds within us.
CINEMA LITERATURE
It is not a country for old men: "Joel & Ethan Coen: so they betrayed a great book and made a great movie " from the Garlasco di Silvana Library
"No Country for Old Men is the first line of a poem by William Butler Yeats entitled Sailing to Byzantium, in which the Irish poet immortalizes the generations destined to disappear and speaks of 'what has passed, is passing and is to come '.
When Cormac McCarthy chose it as the title of his penultimate novel, he used the line to comment
the mood of its protagonist, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, a man close to old age, speaking time and time again and utters phrases like: 'I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty-five years'. Called on by Scott Rudin to direct the film adaptation of the novel, Joel and Ethan Coen have immediately imagined for the role of the sheriff a charismatic actor like Tommy Lee Jones, but they modified the character: the book, which tells the violent pursuit of a hunter who comes across a suitcase with two million dollars, by a psycho killer, a bounty killer and various drug traffickers, is punctuated by the diary of the sheriff, reflecting on evil and its mysterious nature. The film is very faithful to the book in terms of the plot, but
it minimizes the protagonist's philosophical reflections, which appear in an initial off voice and are integrated in some dialogues. It is not just a choice aimed at making the film adaptation spectacular (the first in career of the Coens): unlike McCarthy, the two directors are not interested in reflecting on why the violence, but they seem, instead, fascinated by it and resolve the story in terms of strong images and details apparently insignificant that are however revealing, surprising effects. They do, in other words, very great, very great cinema, which enhances the dramaturgical potential of a captivating manhunt from the first at the last frame, but risks betraying the most intimate and painful essence of the great American writer's novel.
No Country for Old Men, which deservedly garnered eight Oscar nominations, was filmed on location
described in the novel, between New Mexico and the southern border of Texas. It is the semi-desert area where it has already been McCarthy's frontier trilogy is set and in which, on the highest mountain, the inscription 'The Bible is the truth, read it. ' It is a world in which the inhabitants live constantly in the presence of death and the Thunder they immortalize this condition in the disenchanted looks of the protagonists, in the hopeless irony and in the outbursts of meaningless cruelty. A key line is: 'You can't stop what's coming'. [...] But the most fascinating and risky invention is that relating to the character of Anton Chigurh. Faithful to the teaching
of Hitchcock, according to which the more successful the villain, the more successful the film, the Coens have devoted the greatest
this psychopathic killer, who they turned into the real protagonist. [...] Chigurh is a depiction of
absolute evil and is frightening thanks to the choice to make him act awkwardly: the total detachment with which kills, alternating with flashes of murderous fury, make him one of the most memorable villains in film history. The
film has another winning element: it has no musical commentary. The Coens have never made a cinema
realistic, and also in this case they do not seek the truth effect: it is nature that speaks, with its external sounds, along with it the roar of weapons. The panorama that extends boundless around the protagonists, filmed with colors solemn by Roger Deakins, looks identical to that of millions of years ago, but the intervention of man constantly brings
vulgarity and degradation. In that vast sunburnt area, where a stream of illegal immigrants crosses the Rio every day.
Great, men massacre themselves for a will to dominate that denies the dimension of dreams and emancipation social. In such a degraded universe, the diabolical Anton Chigurh can only triumph: he has neither dreams nor ambitions, and testifies to the inevitability of evil in a world that has chosen darkness. This is why it is not a country for old people ': anyone who cares about values or feelings is doomed to succumb, and only Sheriff Bell
he knows that the past is not necessarily better than the present, but at least it brings with it the dignity of experience. "(da Antonio Monda, Joel & Ethan Coen: so they betrayed a great book and made it into a great film, "Il
Republic Friday ", 15/02 / '08)
"No Country for Old Men: Texas Noir" (from NYTimesBooks)
"No Country For Old Men: Are the Coens finally growing up?" (from Telegraph.co.uk)
MENTION
"repeating each other's writings serve as instruments for this Spirit to give the world ever new works
if souls knew how to undergo this action, their life would be nothing but a continuation of the divine writings, which are expressed up to the end of the world no longer with ink and on paper, but in hearts. "
JP de Caussade, Abandonment to divine providence, (proposed by Prisma)
quote
Why mention? There are two reasons: modesty and pride.
He cites himself out of modesty, acknowledging that the right belief we share has originated from others and that we arrived later.
He is cited out of pride, since he is more dignified and more courteous, according to what Borges said (they will forgive me quote?), to be proud of the pages that have been read that not of those that have been written [...] to quote is a
another way of saying "I have not lived in vain" (in this case "I have not read in vain") and also "I was thinking of you"
quotes
Citation: linguistic, figurative or sound motif taken from a foreign context, therefore easily recognizable, inserted in a current context.
The quotation is one of the concepts with which the intertextual memory of texts in philology is conventionally indicated traditional. Another "interlocutor", absent, is aroused and evoked in his own speech.
In the Middle Ages and Antiquity it was quoted "meaningfully", not literally - and therefore properly "incorrect" - instead, starting from the 16th century, the quotation marks indicate the literality of the extract. Through the quotation a text declares to
invoke the authority of another and interprets a past present as still effective.
Citation is a way of forming memory through repetition. It is attested and put to arrangement in collections or anthologies of citations, the "places", in which the circulation of the citation settles and
the tension between repetition and refinement emerges. To the extent that the quotation brings the past back to the present
inserting it in a new context it can act as a paradigmatic case, or even as a model of the memory in general.
The easy citability and the dignity of citation indicate two aspects of citation as a mode of cultural transmission.
The first aspect corresponds to the form in which something creeps into memory. It indicates a kind of
posteriority of what is remembered: such posteriority is not a presupposition, but rather an effect of the quotation.
The second aspect is a mode of auctoritas, of that authority which is called into question through the citation thus transferred to the citation itself. The act of citing exhibits and demonstrates its premise: the availability of what is recalled and repeated and the authority of the speech quoted. What is presented in the quote encloses a present that only the quotation conquers and that it is not given before the repetition in it: a presence that is given to posterior, posthumous.
In the quotation the evocation of the memory is a "misrepresentation", the context from which the quotation is taken is broken and the quote is extrapolated from it in order to be preserved and therefore to be able to return to use.
W. Benjamin has proposed a formula to indicate this link of destruction and permanence:
"Some hand down things making them intangible and preserving them, others situations, making them available and liquidating them "(in destructive character II).
As quotes, words or phrases are detached from the context in which they generate meaning. Transferred and placed in another constellation what is quoted becomes legible through the text in which it is quoted, establishing new ones connections and acquiring a new context. Even the writing of history can be defined - in a broad sense - as a form of "quotation" through which
"What from time to time is the historical object is torn from its context"
(Benjamin, The Passages of Paris)
and thus preserved to finally become legible.The dignity of citation and the easy citability set the difference between the consecration of a name through the quotation and the anonymity of the quotation.
As topos, between the attribution of authority through the voice of a personality from the past and the anonymity of what it is simply repeated. What is mentioned frequently enough no longer requires any authority behind it,
but rather a recurrence, which makes it commonplace, and a repeatability (meme).
The "proverbial saying" may also have preserved in the lexicon of the citations the reference to the original source, however, the more proverbial it is, the less it refers to this origin.
The quotation is a hinge between past and present insofar as it interrupts the present discourse to recall
the past and insert it as a fragment. The condition affects the actual discourse, but still maintains the
possibility, which hovers around her like a ghost, of a further penetration of the text through other discourses.
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