Even people who don’t read much poetry tend to be familiar with the lines that conclude Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn”:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
I suspect most readers think of this as poetic hyperbole, charming enough in its way, but hardly to be taken seriously as a philosophical proposition. [Read more →]
In Lost‘s “The Last Recruit,” the Man In Black refers to John Locke as a “sucker” for believing in fate. As he points out, Locke pursued this belief until it got him killed so perhaps MIB has a point. Despite his compelling argument, Jack takes a leap of faith towards the exact same conclusion as his former nemesis. So does this make Jack — the last recruit himself — a sucker too? My short answer is yes, but, what if this isn’t necessarily a bad thing? [Read more →]
In Lost‘s “Everybody Loves Hugo,” Richard complains that Jacob “never tells us what to do.” Richard’s frustration echoes clearly into our world. For most of us, Jacob, aka God, never seems to tell us what to do. He just sits back and lets us make our own mistakes, leading to countless horrors and suffering. For many, this is a major argument as to why there is no God. Yet, when watching Lost, we see that Jacob does in fact tell the Losties what to do — sometimes directly, sometimes through his lists or clues, and sometimes through messages that he passes on through his emissaries. But certainly this doesn’t happen in our world. Here, there are no ghosts of Michaels past, otherworldly whispers, or visits from dimension-hopping Desmonds to guide us on our journey through life. Or…is there?
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Once upon a time, you believed that you were very special. That you’d grow up to make a difference in the world, be paid handsomely for doing so, find true love, have some equally special children, and live happily ever after. Unfortunately, life hasn’t worked out quite as good as the fairytale. So, were we all lied to? In Lost’s “Happily Ever After” Desmond discovers that there is a reality where all his dreams can come true. So where is this reality and do we need to be as special as Desmond to get there? [Read more →]
As we draw near the end of Holy Week, a week where the two biggest Christ-related news stories involved sex abuse in Europe and Christian militia in America, with breaks devoted to ads for Easter candy and holiday sales events, it’s good to remember the biggest news story of all …
He is risen …
Christ is risen, indeed …
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Every Easter, after our dinner guests have gone or we return home from a restaurant or another’s home, my wife and I watch our DVD copy of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
We watch the DVD copy as it is unlikely that Gibson’s controversial film will be played on TV in the way we see The Ten Commandments each year.
I note this and offer an old column I wrote when Gibson’s film was released in 2004 on my most recent post on my blog, http://pauldavisoncrime.blogspot.com.
Beatings, beagle-sniffings, institutional-under-the-bus-throwings, karma-blowings, biblical possessions, bad right-wing metal, and last, but not least, snail mucus. For true believers, think of them as 5 more tests-of-faith . . . and for the rest of us, 5 more reasons to not totally dismiss nihilism.
In “The Package” Jin is distraught over having his $25,000 confiscated at the airport, Sun is panicked that her lavish bank account was emptied by her father, Widmore is angry that events aren’t going according to plan, and Desmond didn’t seem particularly happy about being drugged, stuffed in a sub, and brought back to the island. But if there’s anything that life and Lost teach us, it’s that our plans aren’t always in our own best interest. They say that man plans and God laughs. The question is, is God laughing with us, or at us? [Read more →]
In “Ab Aeterno,” Richard Alpert loses his faith after discovering that the plan he’s dedicated so much of his life to, may in fact, not exist. From the very same episode, some Lost fans began feeling the same. For six years, Lost viewers with an insatiable hunger for answers have anxiously waited to find out what the mysterious island actually is. At the writer’s strike a couple years ago, Carlton Cuse held up a picket sign that read: “Do You Want To Know What The Island Is??” Thousands of fans have dreamed up imaginative theories, all in an attempt to solve the show’s complex riddle. And now at last we have our answer! According to Jacob himself, the island is…A CORK!!! (crickets) [Read more →]
On Saturday, Republican leader John Boehner predicted that the passage of the health care bill would bring about “Armageddon.” Boehner is Roman Catholic (alma mater: Xavier University) so I don’t think that he meant my favorite WWE event or my third-favorite Bruce Willis movie. Nope, this is the Armageddon — the big one. And yesterday the bill passed. Yikes!
As a public service, I looked up how things go from here on in, according to the King James Bible. Here’s what to expect.
In “Recon,” James Ford learns a life-changing lesson from a TV show just as we are learning from Lost. The metaphor is clear: there are messages in the media that are meant to help guide us on our journey. All you have to do is let yourself see through to their true meaning in order to uncover the wisdom.
For many of us, our lives don’t work out the way we planned. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a plan. It’s very apropos that Lost‘s “Dr. Linus” episode was named for a teacher since it taught us some very valuable lessons about who we are and what our purpose here may be. In other words, it really was all about you.
Regardless of whether or not you agree with the stance of the group Atheist Agenda, most of us would recognize and admit the folly of trying to change someone’s mind by insulting them. I think we can all agree that things such as this only make the resistance to their ideas more concrete, opposition more determined, and hurts their overall cause.
Whereas “Lighthouse” was all about our enlightenment, “Sundown” explored our dark side — temptation. “I can see her lying back in her satin dress in a room where you do what you don’t confess,” sang Gordon Lightfoot in his 1974 hit “Sundown.” The song is all about succumbing to temptation, hence once again revealing the double entendre that the Lost writers are so fond of using in their episode titles. When the sun goes down, man gets tempted by the dark. Why a “satin” dress? Sounds like Satan, don’t it? [Read more →]
You’ve probably noticed that in every flash-sideways so far on Lost this season, the central character of the episode has been shown looking into a mirror. Kate looks at herself in the auto body restroom after discovering that Claire was pregnant, Locke in his own bathroom just before attempting to call Jack, and Jack looks at himself both in the airplane while noticing the strange mark on his neck, and again in “The Lighthouse” when noticing an appendix scar that he doesn’t seem to remember. The easy metaphor of course, is that we are looking at secondary versions of these characters through the looking glass. But what’s the deeper meaning for us? [Read more →]
“I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them,” Nietzsche writes in Twilight of the Idols. “The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”
Well, no one will ever accuse Nietzsche of thinking systematically. I actually don’t have much regard for him as a thinker at all. He has brilliant insights that he expresses brilliantly, but a good deal of what he says is pretty goofy — though even that is usually entertaining.
But I have no problem with the unsystematic nature of Nietzsche’s thinking. [Read more →]
Lost episode 6.4, “The Substitute,” has so many parallels with Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory , I am convinced that the movie can be used to reveal Lost‘s endgame. While I’m sure those parallels also exist within the actual Charlie and the Chocolate Factory book, since I am more familiar with the 1971 Gene Wilder movie (having seen it dozens of times), I will make my comparisons there. Sure, this may turn out to be nothing more than stuff and nonsense, but in the words of Wonka, “a little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.” So, let’s get to it because we have so much time and so little to do. Strike that…reverse it.
Much pleasure and enlightenment can be had from desultory reading. I mean the sort when you don’t read a particular book from cover to cover, but just pick up first this one, then that, reading a little here and a little there. The different passages that catch your attention often fit surprisingly well together, like the bits and scraps that go to make up a collage. [Read more →]
As we all know, the world is in a terrible state and likely to end very soon. That being the case, we should be well advised to keep an eye out not only for manifestations of Satan but also for possible messiahs who might extricate us from this unholy mess. Alas, with so many claimants to the title, how are we to know who is the real deal? According to Benjamin Creme we should all be watching our TVs very closely right now, because the ‘Maitreya’ (the coming future Buddha in Buddhist eschatology) has already appeared on our screens. [Read more →]
