Greetings!
Still playing around with the best day to publish these. Let’s give Friday a go.
The first section contains some spoilers for the first 40 minutes of Drive My Car (released last year and now streaming). You have been warned!
Let’s go.
Idea of the Week: The Prologue
“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
— T.S. Eliot
Imagine that someone is making a film about your life.1
Now ask yourself: are you still in the prologue?
When we first meet Yûsuke Kafaku, the protagonist of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 3-hour epic, Drive My Car, he has long since given up on the idea that his narrative remains in its early stages.
Bereavement tends to do that to a life’s story. It exposes the hopeful innocence of the prologue, with its allure of divergent possibilities and whispers of a yet unheralded future, for what it is: a mirage, a delusion that depends on the arbitrary kindness of fate.
With grief comes a forced shift of perspective. Gone are questions of what’s next, replaced with mourning reminiscences for what came before. The prologue becomes an object of memory, of fantasy.
Kafaku, a theatre director and actor, is a man haunted by the death of his daughter several years earlier. This sense of loss, and of being a man out of time, is only accentuated over the first 40 minutes of the film, as a series of devastating events compound upon each other.
The discovery of his wife’s affair with a young, handsome, erratic actor. A car accident. The partial loss of his vision. And then, most brutally of all, the sudden death of his wife, and with it, any hope for Kafaku to find a cathartic resolution to his wife’s infidelity.
Throughout, Kafaku’s grief manifests in a careful, studied apathy. It is not so much suppressed as smothered entirely, along with his ability to emotionally engage with the world around him. He proceeds in a state of robotic alienation, a plot without a story.
Eventually, Kafaku suffers a public breakdown on stage while performing the role of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. His abandonment of the performance is heavy with symbolism: it’s as if he has chosen to vacate his own life, to exit the stage and wait for the curtains to fall.
Kafaku is a man who believes that his story may as well be over.
At this point, we are 40 minutes into the film. We have watched as our protagonist suffers through the grief of his daughter’s death, the deterioration of his eyesight, and the betrayal and death of his wife.
And then the opening credits roll.
It turns out that everything that has happened so far: the grief, the anger, the emotional alienation, it was all just the prologue.
Kafaku’s story was, in fact, only just beginning.
We all have preconceived ideas of the shapes of our stories. As we move through life and the promise of the future becomes the burden of the past, we find ourselves yearning for the infinite possibility of Before. Before we grew up. Before we suffered that loss. Before we made that promise.
In The Tempest, Antonio declares, “What’s past is prologue.” It’s easy to read in these words a mockery of the present, a reminder that we are trapped by what came before.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Drive My Car reminds us that our stories are more flexible than we may think. Our past may be set in stone, but our narrative isn’t. Whatever we’re going through, however intense it feels at the time, it’s always possible that it is but a prologue to our greatest story.
The Enchantment Diaries
Birds
Something most people don’t know about me: I like bird-watching (I believe the street lingo for it nowadays is “twitching”).
Well, that’s not completely accurate. I wouldn’t want to sit motionless in a field indefinitely waiting to see one specific bird. A bird-watching holiday sounds awful. I cannot tell you off the top of my head the genus and species of the Fluffy-backed Tit-Babbler (yes, that’s real), and heaven forbid I try and identify the difference between a chiffchaff and a willow warbler (turns out it’s by the leg colour. Obviously.)
So perhaps I don’t deserve the “twitcher” label quite yet. But I do, whenever I’m outside, get a huge amount of joy from searching for birds. Something about the process of labelling a bird or hearing an unusual birdsong tethers me to nature in a way that my mind, which is usually 10 degrees of abstraction away from whatever I’m supposed to be looking at, is wholly unused to.
As a lifelong gamer, it also tickles my completionism. Whenever I go somewhere new, I will buy a bird book and, one by one, tick off each one that I see. The added challenge is trying to get a snap on my iPhone.
Most satisfyingly of all, each new sighting tells a story. I still remember my excitement at seeing a kingfisher, my embarrassment at mistaking a turkey for a vulture, and my satisfaction at luring a hummingbird to our apartment.
Put your preconceptions to the side and give birdwatching a try: you won’t regret it!
Forgiveness
I was really moved by this story from
' Anti-Mimetic.Luke describes how a single act of forgiveness had a profound influence on the direction of his life:
I sensed that that single moment of grace created and brought forth more goodness in the world, and in my own heart, than the prior 80 hours of work that week which I had put into building my young business. It was a creation of a different order. It was far more powerful, far more generative, and powerfully human.
Worth reading in full.
Derek Sivers
I read all of Derek Sivers’ books last week. His commitment to minimalism, from life choices to writing style, is something to behold. Nothing is superfluous.
Here are some quotes that resonated:
1. Are we our actions?
“No matter what you tell the world or tell yourself, your actions reveal your real values. Your actions show you what you actually want.”
2. Think long term
“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year, and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”
What do I want to have done in ten years’ time?
3. There is no speed limit
Regarding Derek’s music teacher, Kimo, who taught Derek that “there is no speed limit.”
“Kimo’s high expectations set a new pace for me. He taught me that “the standard pace is for chumps” — that the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you’re more driven than most people, you can do way more than anyone expects. And this principle applies to all of life, not just school.”
4. Adopt beliefs because they’re useful
Apparently the subject of Derek’s next book
Sunsets
Here are a couple of amazing sunsets. As always, excuse my amateur photography.
Thanks for reading! If you like what you’ve read, then I’d love it if you commented and/or subscribed below.
Have a happy weekend.
I’ll leave you to decide the genre.