Welcome to this week’s 5BF: a novel about the lonely and captivating
life of secret services, the importance of truthfulness over truth, God found
guilty, a pouring of my heart, and more…
1 – what I read
The Human Factor by Graham Greene – Maurice Castle works at
the secret service and has a black wife and step-son from South Africa where he
recently worked. There’s been a leak and now their section of the SIS is under hasty
and serious investigation, and that’s where we find how a person’s morality can
contradict with one’s duty. Greene’s novel is at once both a grounded and
well-built story with relatable characters and a thrilling peak into the
workings of secret services.
Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels – with a
provocative and direct tone, this manifesto lays bare how the bourgeoise (the
rich, the capitalist) use the proletariat (the poor, the masses) to gain more
capital and widen the gap between them, and instead suggests a communist society
where the proletariats of the whole world will unite and rule out the bourgeoise.
Even in its 75 pages, there a lot to be learned from this manifesto, and a lot
to be thought where did its application go wrong.
2 – this week’s articles
Writing erotica for cash @aeon – writer Marina Benjamin narrates
how she started and failed at writing erotic literature for cash, and in doing
so, presents with the sympathetic and tragic history of erotic literature and
its prominent names like Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and the rest of the gang.
US high school culture and teen values @aeon – this brilliant
article explains how the high school culture, where teenagers are left with
their own peers, totally free of any elderly influence, has come to shape the
inadequate, careless, and pleasure-driven societies of today.
Our epistemic crisis is ethical so are its solutions @aeon –
another brilliant article about how that distinguishes between truthfulness
(sincerity and accuracy) and the truth (hard facts), and how the former is more
important than the latter in both shaping us an honest persons and in our quest
for knowledge and understanding.
The joy of being animal @aeon – humans, for their sense of
superiority over other mammals, have always tried to break away from their biological
bodies, and have thought of themselves as something more, like the mind and
soul. But accepting our bodies and animistic origins might be the way back to
the harmonized and balanced life we once lived with other animals.
3 – what I watched
God on trial (2008) – a bunch of Jew prisoners put God on
trial for breaking His promise of the covenant signed between Him and the
nation of Jew. An insightful dive into the relationship between man and God,
and who stands responsible for the atrocities that happen in this world. This Guardian article by the catholic writer of this film, Frank Cottrell Boyce narrates how
faith-shaking it was for him to research and write this screenplay, and a
similar experience might the viewers of this movie go through as well. The ending
too is an absurd one, leaves you thinking.
Blindspotting (2018) – a black man from Oklahoma is on one
year probation after doing his sentence for beating up a foreign man outside a
bar. A great movie about how one fatal mistake can blind spot others to our
good sides, as well as about police brutality against black people in their own
neighborhoods.
20th century women (2016) – a beautiful movie
about a 1930s, The Depression era mom struggling to raise her teenage son alone
in the 1960s, the funk era. In effort to provide modern help, she asks her tenant,
a girl in her late twenties fighting cancer, and her son’s childhood girlfriend,
to help him navigate his way in the world. A movie about difficulty of helping
those we cannot, and about kindness and trust where understanding cannot be
reached. Lovely movie!
Ted Lasso (2020) – the sitcom I was watching for the past
week, where an American soccer coach is hired to coach an English football team,
for the obvious reasons of destroying the club, as the owner of the club has
cheated on his now in-charge wife. A beautiful, funny, at times irritating, but
also warm, movie that captures the differences between these two nations and
how optimism and humor can go a long way.
4 – at attempt to surrender (a pouring of my heart)
In case you hadn’t noticed, that’s more than usual number of
articles and movies I talked about up there, and that is because I am going through a period
of my life where there’s an unwantedly insurmountable amount of time on my hands,
under the weight of which, I am barely doing enough to stay afloat. I have a
restless mind, the origins of which I know not, but which puts me under brutal
scrutiny of being productive all the time, of always having some activity to do, and
which also ruins my any chance of rest, unless I have done something priorly to deserve it. Upon my anxious nature and displeasure in things, I’m also in the
aftermath of yet another heartbreak, which marks its two weeks today. Of course
I am suffering mentally, and a clinical check-up might be helpful, but due to
my recent experiences with psychiatry and medicine, marked with ambiguity, incomplete
trails, and nothing concrete resulting out of it, I am determined to take this
tough time, head on, all by myself. And I am, truly, all by myself. Except every night dinners
and the weekends with my brother’s company, I am all alone for the rest of
remaining time of these long summer days. What do I do, you might ask, from
night to morning? I endure myself. The grievances of the broken heart, the restlessness
of having nothing to do, the depression of having ended up in this detestable
state, the constant flux of moods and emotions, and being on the edge of falling
into another episode of depression or anxiety disorder with its panic attacks –
it is all too much to bear. My attempt to surrender, then, despite my fight or flight
state of mind, is both ironic and comic; waking up a heart beating out of my
chest and a stomach burning in acid, the realization of where I am at, and then the long hours of passive aggressive soliloquies where I rationalize the pain
of love and the misery of being fooled by it, I can do naught but to put my head down and light a smoke. I stop myself from going mad when I
am done reading and watching movies, when I am face to face with the haunting
void and its threatening hollowness, its debilitating loneliness – there I stand,
every day, every hour, alone, facing the demons inside me and force myself to
bend and surrender…
5 – this week’s quote
‘What do you do from morning to night?’
‘I endure myself.’ (A literal account of these August days)
Emil Cioran