On Chess
In the beginning, all is symmetry and peace. The influence of the powerful pieces is muted by a blanket of pawns. The knights alone are eager, ready to jump the fence. The king and queen keep company, the way frailty and power do in Man.

For all this appearance of serenity, though, the king is already a target. The king's bishop pawn is already weak, since the king is its only defender. All of the pieces crave the center stage, all of them require support, all of them seek avenues for advancement, and not all of them can have their way. The king seeks only safety, and only requires that every other piece be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to protect him.

Someone must make the first move, and a torrid hoard of forces is unleashed. Symmetry cannot last long because it has already been upset -- white has gone first. If bishops were physicists or philosophers, they would be straining every nerve to understand how that first move could occur. How, if everything was balanced and inert, could we reach this point of dynamism, asymmetry, contingency? They would perplex themselves as we do over our own world.

The players, though, do not question this. They do not question their power to make what move they please. But perhaps they should. The best player, after all, does not make what move pleases him. He makes the best move. And for that, he must obey the position. He must be sensitive to it. He must respond to it, without delusions or confabulations, without conceit or dejection.

Playing chess, we look as deeply into the position as we can. We bring our study and experience with us, we bring our aesthetic and philosophy, even our ethics. If we know what we are about, we realize that we are in the midst of a mystery, a mystery of creation which involves both freedom and responsibility, the mystery of a position which is far too profound for us to make transparent.

We become only partly conscious of what is going on. For the rest, we are swept along by what is unconscious. Conceits and dejection may set in, or a battle lust that eclipses the mind's light. We are affected by the chemistry of our interaction with an opponent, the secret desire to teach or be taught a lesson. Hunger, sleep, distraction, impatience, disrupt our attention for the position.

The destiny of the game is wedded to our destiny, and our destiny is wedded to our strange and nearly monstrous nature. The only saving graces are humility and awe. Let us pray that these are enough.

On Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game ( Magister Ludi), "The Three Lives: Rainmaker"
There is no telling how this has moved me. How easily he has picked me up and poured my life into another mold.

"The apprentice heard all this in astonishment. He did not dare say a word. The thin silvery sickle rose and was already half devoured by the clouds. A strange tremor passed through the young man, an intimation of many links and associations, repetitions and crosscurrents among things and events. He felt strangely poised both as spectator and participant against this alien night sky where the thin, sharp crescent, precisely predicted by the Master, had appeared above endless woods and hills. How wonderful the Master seemed, and veiled in a thousand secrets -- he who could think of his own death, whose spirit would live in the moon and return from the moon back into a person who would be Knecht's son and bear the former Master's name. The future, the fate before him, seemed strangely torn asunder, in places transparent as the cloudy sky; and the fact that anyone could know it, define it, and speak of it seemed to throw open a view into incalculable spaces, full of wonders and yet also full of orderliness."

That is how I feel in Hesse's hands. But is it him? Something larger, something more impersonal, is active here. The hands that hold Hesse hold me, and all I can do is surrender to their tender care.

I read The Glass Bead Game many moons ago, but stopped short at the final chapter called "The Three Lives", which is, in a sense, an appendix, and represents the protagonist's attempts to cast his life and identity into climes and times far distant from him. I suppose I could curse myself for having stopped, now that I see how far superior it is to all that came before. Instead, I find myself praying, pouring out my gratitude that this had been preserved for me until this moment, because there's no telling how right it is for me right now.

Regarding Memento
There are good lessons in here. We must always be in the moment, because even the past is a kind of illusion. We are caught in a stream of consciousness, with little clarity about our own motives, much less the motives of others. We are constantly improvising, we are method actors. We make mistakes which harm others, and have to live with that. Trust is a matter of instinct. Memory is both suspicious and vital, and art preserves it. Our identity derives from our mission, which we must discover as we go along, and engrave the clues upon us beyond forgetting.

It seems, though, that the protagonist is as much the victim of Nolan, the director/writer, as he is his hero. Nolan tosses him upon waves of violence and distrust, toying with him. He has taken the heroic stance of this character and made it a gimmick from which he can reap commercial success. Nolan is like Teddy, using the character's flawed memory for dirty work and fast cash. That is revolting to me, because it depersonalizes what was almost a truly heroic figure.

We are, I guess, too far from having a war. Men's aggression can only be unleashed on film. Fargo, Pulp Fiction, Apocalypse Now, and any number of others take high craftsmanship and moral sense and couple it with the most primitive kinds of aggression. Well, I guess that's been the story since the birth of tragedy. But I walked away with the wrong kind of horror.

Regarding Sense and Sensibility (the movie)
The title gives the first clue. Ideas are at stake; characters represent them. The synthesis, though, was already present in the words. Sense can mean both savvy and the ability to perceive things concretely and emotionally. Sensibility can mean both the ability to receive the world and the ability to deal with it practically. Sense is active, sensibility is passive. Both words speak to the fact that our relation to the world is both cognitive and affective. The relationship between the older Elinor and the younger Marianne is the human stage upon which the dialectic of these seemingly opposed but truly identical principles plays itself out.

Elinor's sense is shown not to be without sensibility, and Marianne's sensibility completes itself when she learns sense. It seems that Marianne must give her heart to the Colonel on the basis of consciousness of his merit, i.e. on grounds of good sense, before he can put aside his somber attire and become a redcoat of passion for her -- he wears his military regalia at the wedding.

It seems that the paragon of virtue for Austen is that character who can almost mercilessly subvert her own needs in order to yield to the demands of the situation. She sees clearly that the alternatives can often be bitterness in society, or the destructive scandal of rebellion. In her novels, she often makes it possible for the virtue and merit of her characters to repulse those who do not deserve them, like the suitor that begs off after Cordelia has lost her dowry and her father's blessing (in Shakespeare's King Lear). Ms. Steel is repulsed by Edward precisely because he is willing to still marry her if it means losing his inheritance. His display of his loyalty to matters of honor causes her to display her loyalty to money. This frees him to marry Elinor, who is motivated by his same values, and deserves him better.

That's great, but Edward was willing to marry a woman he did not love in order to keep his promise. Was that real honesty? Would it not have been more honest for him to confess his love for Eleanor, and beg her to release him from his vow? I do not think it is right or good to live against one's own truth in order to satisfy a rather conventional idea of honor.

But more about sense and sensibility. The head and the heart are classically opposed between male and female in the case of Marianne and the colonel, and more originally opposed between two women, Marianne and Elinor. Marianne's sensibility is her being subject to her own feeling, which is in rapport with the thunderstorms she keeps finding herself out and about in. It almost ruins her reputation, a greatly horrible consequence in society. And it nearly kills her. This is the consequence of a wholly subjective life, without any governance by objective principle: loss of humanity, loss of identity.

She is redeemed by the cares of the Colonel and Elinor, and in the process, becomes conscious of their merit and of her own fallibilities. Only by humbly admitting her responsibility for the moral danger she had put herself in, and adopting as mentors those whose counsel she used to resent, can she recover her health and learn to love again.

The Colonel's poetry reading is a fit synthesis of sense and sensibility. It is neither an explosion of passion or a nervous, self-conscious twitter. It is spoken honestly, with both understanding and feeling. Our passions must be governed to be human, and we must labor to find their truly human expression.

Regarding Lohengrin
Listening to this opera once again, I keep hearing new ancient themes. In this story of a saint betrayed by his lover and the people he has come to serve, we keep watching the sacred be defiled. More than that, we see mortality itself as the decadence of values. We see glory continually passing into misery, and are left to savor the perfect imperfections of our own nature, constantly striving towards virtues and values that transcend and humble us. Our values are undiminished by the fact that we seem doomed to betray them, and, if they could sing, they would sing sadly but not without warmth and compassion.

Does this, then, explain why the best days seem always gone by, why the present is filled with meanness and the past with beauty and nobility? Memory and imagination are wedded, and we must always imagine a clime and a time when our values reached fulfillment. We weave this dream into our past, then. And who is there to blame us for our myth making?