La Folie
des Grandeurs aka Delusions of Grandeur, based on the play Ruy Blas by Victor
Hugo, author of one of the best known novels, Les Miserables http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/12/les-miserables-by-victor-hugo.html though popular in motion picture
format, I doubt that many people have read it these days
9 out of 10
This note
is not about the play Ruy Blas, it is about the adaption which I have seen
recently…I keep saying that it used to be possible to introduce an entry and
have a ‘review’ connected with the real thing, only now it is for ‘librarians’
to do it, and then it must be admitted that I tend not just to digress, but to
write about what comes to my mind when I read or see something, or worse still,
when I write about ‘it’, and thus, it is not all that unfair to put a comment
down on one thing, instead of another…
I have had
a couple of complaints (maybe a few more) related to what I talk about of here,
which for I while deterred me from offending the large number of readers, then
I relented and said the above, soothed by the realization that the ones who
seek expert advice on a site for amateurs could well do with the thrills
offered by the surprises…I try and see what professionals say, read only the
best books, from The TIME 100, Modern Library Best 100, Le Monde 100 or The
!,000 Novels Everyone Must Read lists.
Still,
there are times when I do not rejoice and find the book less than elating,
Swimming Home http://realini.blogspot.com/2023/02/swimming-home-by-deborah-levy.html by Deborah Levy, a writer that has enchanted
me more with Hot Milk, and when critics and experts fail to see what book will
offer you the best alternative life, then what can imperfect readers suggest - “The
person who doesn't read lives only one life…The reader lives 5,000…Reading is
immortality backwards” ― Umberto Eco
With this multitude
of universes we can step into, it may seem as if there is no problem if we make
the wrong choice and spend one life out of five thousand in the wrong company,
with the less than perfect book (could we extend that to films) and think we
still have another four thousand and many hundreds, even when errors
multiply…the problem is that we have a shorter biological life, however much
extended that will be, according to Yuval Harari http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/homo-deus-brief-history-of-tomorrow-by.html
In Homo
Deus, the brilliant luminary offers the optimistic perspective of a future
where humans become Gods (aka Deus) in that they will extend their life span
towards…well, infinity and then we will really have time to read the classics,
the masterpieces we love again, and again, and the five thousand lives become
millions, not to mention what Malcolm Bradbury says in his To the Heritage,
that novels are much more captivating than reality, characters in fiction are
wiser, more compelling that the real humans…
Seneca has
said that ‘life is not short, we have enough time; the problem is that we treat
time as if it were in endless supply and we do not see that it is the most
important, or among the most important things we have’ – this is just the point
he was making I hope, for a quote, one has to go to a more reliable source and
stop reading scribblers without a solid education, and accurate memory – and one
conclusion we draw out of that is that we must stay away from boring volumes
and sordid motion pictures…
The little
story about Dostoyevsky comes to mind, one told by our divine Professor of
Literature, Anton Chevorchian, Bless his Soul, if there is a heaven, then he is
on the side of Jesus, Magdalene, Proust and some of the other saints, he
explained how Dostoyevsky was sentenced to death, and while standing near the
firing squad, he divided his remaining three minutes into…three, what else, and
then looked at his life passing, said goodbye to friends and family, and left
the remaining minute for a ray of sunshine…
Only in the
last moment, the pardon came (perhaps the czar had intend all this just as a
charade, a lesson for the revolutionary rebel) and then we, as humanity, are
lucky to read the magnum opera, and in that we find that faced with death, the
condemned would rather choose to live on a rock in the middle of the ocean than
die, how wondrous our being extant on this planet is http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-idiot-by-fyodor-dostoyevsky.html and the moral is to enjoy it all.
There is
the expertise we find in Flow http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/08/learn-how-to-get-to-optimal-state-from.html by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
co-founder of Positive Psychology, and the Ultimate Specialist in Being in the
Zone, reaching the Zenith, the conditions for that rare state (which we find
advice on how to extend and make more segments of our daily life more intense
and rewarding) are identified after research – challenges meet with skills, are
balanced there, we have constant feedback
We are in
control of the activity that brings us into Flow, it is autotelic, we think of
nothing else, Time becomes very relative – it is already so, in the approximate
words of Albert Einstein, ‘a moment with the hand on the hot stove feels like
more than an hour spent with a beautiful woman’, something like that maybe, but
when in Flow, the examples given are of a ballerina that is on stage for less
than one minute and she feels it as if there were many hours, and the surgeon
(a profession given to Flow) who comes out of a difficult operation and asks
for lunch, only to be told that it is dinner time, for he has spent more hours
than presumed…
Humor is a
key element of Positivity – the book to read on this would be Positivity by
Barbara Fredrickson http://realini.blogspot.com/2015/05/positivity-by-barbara-fredrickson-life.html - and one of the character strengths
listed by Martin Seligman, the other co-founder of Positive Psychology, under Transcendence,
where the other strengths would be appreciation of excellence and beauty, hope,
gratitude, spirituality…strangely, sometime in the 1990s, I have received an
invitation from British Airways, at that time they were selling some tickets
through our agency, and then got to spend a couple of nights in London, one of
which was almost lost, because we had tickets for…Les Mis, and during the performance
I was lamenting that I have not (yet) reached the status of the jet setters who
fly to see concerts, plays in another town…I was still a redneck then, and not
much better today, alas http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world
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