Cult of Observation

 

On Douglas Adams, James Burke, and the People Who Taught Me to Notice.

This essay started the way so many of mine do. With an observation that leads to one of my patented wandering conversations.

While They Can

A dance recital, a middle school ceremony, and the brief gift of childhood. 

I was struggling to find a follow up to my Old Roads essay series. As I said in the last one of those, I wrote them out of my own desire to discover why I felt the way I did and now I understand why.

Old Roads: The Road Forward

 

On Understanding How We Got Here.

So this series finally comes to a close. It's been some journey. It was, for me anyway. I always find the best way to work through things is by writing about them. This time it actually led to an interesting discovery. I'll try not to do that again.

Old Roads: Where You Find Yourself.

 

When music finally tells you how you feel.

This most recent bout of maudlin nostalgia, which I have apparently been writing through for over a month now, has been an eye-opening one for me. One could almost apply the Aristotelian concepts of anagnorisis and peripeteia to it. Though, in a most anti-Aristotelian way, my reversal of fortune was for the better, not worse. We can discuss catharsis and hamartia as they pertain to me in another essay.

Old Roads: The Stories That Shape You

In my earlier essays, I briefly touched on how the stories you experience can stay with you, can become close friends, can feel like home. Whether you experience them through movies, TV shows, books, or by listening to someone speak, they become part of you, sometimes without your even knowing it.

Old Roads: Old Friends, Always Welcome

 

  What makes us go back to our enjoyments, our enthusiasms, if you will, of the past over and over again? Every time I use the word enthusiasms I am reminded of the movie The Untouchables with Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, and Robert De Niro. The scene where Al Capone has his capos around a table, making a speech. "A man becomes preeminent, he is expected to have enthusiasms, enthusiasms. What are mine? What draws my admiration? What is that which gives me joy? Baseball." 

Old Roads: Returning to the Books That Made Us

In You've Got Mail Meg Ryan is writing an email (via AOL, speaking of old roads. Though to be fair, the UI looks more like an IM than an email, but it's been decades and I could be wrong.) and she writes "So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?" It probably should be the other way around, but I know, for myself, that so much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, or saw in a movie.

Old Roads: Paths Though Memory.

 

Some films are favorites. Others become places we return to. For me, one of those places is the 1977 animated The Hobbit.