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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm

Stop the war

Stop the war

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Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (2003)

Rarely has a movie this simple moved me this deeply. I feel as if I could review it in a paragraph, or discuss it for hours. The South Korean film “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring” (2003) is Buddhist, but it is also universal.


It takes place within and around a small house floating on a small raft on a small lake, and within that compass, it contains life, faith, growth, love, jealousy, hate, cruelty, mystery, redemption … and nature. Also a dog, a rooster, a cat, a bird, a snake, a turtle, a fish and a frog.

The one-room house serves the function of a hermitage, or a monk’s cell. As the film opens, it is occupied by a monk (Oh Young Soo) and a boy (Seo Jae Kyung), learning to be a monk. The monk rises, wakes the boy, bows and prays to a figure of the Buddha, and knocks on a hollow bowl that sends a comfortable resonance out into the forest. We gather that the daily routine rarely changes.

We are moved and comforted by its story of timelessness, of the transcendence of the eternal. To live on a lake raft through a cold winter would not be pleasant. In this film it is a passage on the wheel of the seasons. The film it its beauty and serenity becomes seductive and fascinating. We accept the lake as the center of existence.

Its shore is reached by an old but beautifully painted rowboat. The boy often goes ashore to collect herbs, which his master teaches him about. One day the boy rows to shore and plays in some little ponds. Inspired to mischief, he ties a string around a fish, and a small stone to the other end, to make it hard for the fish to swim. He burbles with laughter. Then he plays the same cruel trick on a frog and a snake. He does not know that the master has followed and is watching him.

End of spring. I will not spoil the film’s further unfolding, other than to note that when a girl comes to the hermitage to be cured, she and the boy (now a young man) fall in love. The monk thinks sex might be part of her cure, but warns of anger: “Lust awakens the desire to possess. And that awakens the intent to murder.”




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