(November 12 – 18)
One of the random moments that’s always stuck with me from the Star Wars films is when Yoda accuses Luke of always looking to the future, “…never his mind on where we was, what he was doing…”
I’ve been doing a lot of waiting this week, and a lot of reflecting, and it’s made me think about how we continually live our lives across three different time streams (if you’ll forgive me getting a little time-wimey). We always have the promise of the future, distracting us from the present. And we always have the past that we revisit constantly, but can never truly restore to the present. Nostalgia has become a great cultural driver for us, and a great feeder for capitalism—which is surely nothing more than the drive to acquire material assets to (supposedly) make your future better.
But that’s not really my point. My point is, I think, that it’s remarkable that we can function in the third–the present–at all. We spend all our time looking forward to things: that next cup of coffee; the end of the day; seeing someone; planning for tomorrow. And then the experiences we have in the present get filed away as memories of the past which inform our desires (or fears) from the future. They also fill our present. We spend vast swathes of time reliving and sharing those memories: talking about that great movie we saw last night; that delicious meal; that legendary holiday.
It’s a self-sustaining feedback loop in which the present is the briefest flash of our existence: this split second as I write this word and then you read this one. Then it’s gone. We can only act in the present, but the bulk of our consciousness is devoted to either side of that line.
Anyway, that went way deeper than planned, so let’s talk about Doctor Who!
Watching
A little bit underwhelmed by this week’s episode of Doctor Who (“Demons Of The Punjab”), which is a shame as it was excellently made and had all the hallmarks of being a bit of a keeper. I’ll definitely give it a second chance, but I feel like the series is starting to play a lot of the same cards: they’re strong cards, no doubt, but I’m now waiting to see it all come together. The next two look pretty intriguing though.
For Fridate horror we watched an anthology film called Holidays on Netflix. As you might reasonably guess, each short film was based around a particular holiday (St Patrick’s Day, Mother’s Day, etc). With eight holidays to cover, the films were pretty short—in fact it was like an evening going through horror shorts on YouTube (with the same wild variance in quality). A couple of the shorts were absolutely batshit crazy, some were fun. One was really, really good—the one inspired by Father’s Day. If you can track that one down then I highly recommend giving it a watch on its own.
But possibly not on your own.
Reading
After looking through my virtual to-read pile, I realised I’ve owned a copy of Bird Box for some time now. My interest in this was especially piqued after watching the trailer recently, so I started reading it. Several chapters in and I’m intrigued by the premise (if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ll get a perfect sense of the book so far). I am already wondering if the plot can be sustained long enough to remain interesting, but the book seems short enough that I’m willing to stay around long enough to find out.
Meanwhile, It is continuing to plod along in it’s amiable and expertly-crafted way. I marvel at Stephen King’s ability to drift wildly from the plot, and yet still retain the interest of his reader (listener). Equally, the energy which Steven Weber continues to bring to the narration is a delight.