Contents ||| Study Tools |||
Classical Literature ||| Contact |||
Blog
Mel Gibson's movie The Man Without a Face, Selected and introduced for ELLOPOS by Nat Gerrs
Page 7
Even this way, if we are careful, we are given a lesson, at least we learn the difference between pain and depression. Before we think on a movie, especially when it is about emotionally intense scenes, we don't easily or immediately realize a director's flaws, engaged as we are with the characters' life. If their love has become or is in danger of becoming a memory, we feel pain - a pain not expelling probability, though. But, if their love is melting into the nothing, suddenly and unnecessarily, as it was born, this causes depression.
Sadness teaches that love is limited by, at least, time, that memory is love's environment and fate. But since infinity can not be enclosed by finitude, there is always hope in real sadness, a hope that is expressed mainly as commitment - one heart in two bodies, which explains why loving someone is inseparable from caring for one's bodily needs and being amazed by one's bodily presence.
I can understand Shakespeare's couple, who just shared the common fate - this was barely a suicide, if at all. I can understand Plato's attack to sexual pleasure - amazement means full attention to the wholeness of being. But removing commitment is removing hope, which is nullifying love in order to avoid the infinite sadness of a heart fragmented in two bodies dying. This annulment for some is pure depression, for the rest a happy end.
N.G.
Cf. Someone Like Hodder | Rilke, Letter to a young poet | Jaspers, Truth is in communication | J. O. y Gassett, The Revolt of the Masses | Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society | Wordsworth's and Magee's poems | K. Mansfield, There was a child once
More by Nat Gerrs : Why Europe? | J. M. Lefévre, The White Thinking
