ON REFLECTION
It has occurred to me that some of the most vivid characters in my life have existed in novels and films. I saw Jasmine Blue the other day and spent more time thinking about Cate Blanchette’s character than I did about the homeless person I actually had a conversation with. For some time walking back from the cinema I wondered about the role of chance. What would have happened to Jasmine if she hadn’t had accidentally run into a former acquaintance on the street. Would she have been saved, or was she (as I knew already) so far gone that salvation would have only been a brief respite? And what about the actual homeless person? If I’d stuck around no doubt she would have told me how she landed in her situation, but we have social workers to explain how someone ended up on the street and priests to remind us it was only chance that put them and not me there.
Reality, we used to tell each other, is for people who can’t handle drugs. Some years later this sounds as cynical as it is naïve, but not completely inaccurate. We wake up from dreams, put down books and walk out of cinemas aware the world is as troubled as it was when we left. Sartre put this another way: Hell is other people. We must deal with them not matter how horrid the experience turns out to be. When we have, then, and only then, we can turn to our soporific, the flawlessly symmetrical world of our imagination.
It has occurred to me that some of the most vivid characters in my life have existed in novels and films. I saw Jasmine Blue the other day and spent more time thinking about Cate Blanchette’s character than I did about the homeless person I actually had a conversation with. For some time walking back from the cinema I wondered about the role of chance. What would have happened to Jasmine if she hadn’t had accidentally run into a former acquaintance on the street. Would she have been saved, or was she (as I knew already) so far gone that salvation would have only been a brief respite? And what about the actual homeless person? If I’d stuck around no doubt she would have told me how she landed in her situation, but we have social workers to explain how someone ended up on the street and priests to remind us it was only chance that put them and not me there.
Reality, we used to tell each other, is for people who can’t handle drugs. Some years later this sounds as cynical as it is naïve, but not completely inaccurate. We wake up from dreams, put down books and walk out of cinemas aware the world is as troubled as it was when we left. Sartre put this another way: Hell is other people. We must deal with them not matter how horrid the experience turns out to be. When we have, then, and only then, we can turn to our soporific, the flawlessly symmetrical world of our imagination.
