I saw a dead cat on the way home (I think it was a cat). It always makes me sad--that idea that something was alive, warm, breathing, thinking to a certain extent and now it's not. And then I thought of all the people dying around the world right now, today, everyday. Consciousnesses and personalities and thought patterns and behavior patterns disappearing every second, and new ones that didn't exist before coming into being. When I used to tell my therapist that I get hung up in these reflections she said I was projecting, taking some internal sorrow that I could not face and seeing everything in the world as sad, but there IS this continuous sorrow in the world, perhaps matched by the joy of new lives, but perhaps not. Does joy equal or balance grief? Many deaths are unnoticed and unmourned and not all new lives bring happiness. Is it just because I have a melancholic disposition that I come back to this again and again?
I was completely blown away by the movie of The Prestige , and I thought then about reading the novel, but it seemed too soon. So I carried the author's name around with me for over a year (Christopher Priest) and then, finally remembered to buy it through an odd sequence of events. We watched The Painted Veil based on the novel by Maugham starring Edward Norton, and while I decided I didn't want to read The Painted Veil because of it's differences from the film (which was more romantic and tragic) it reminded me that I had wanted to read Fight Club (the movie version of which starred Edward Norton) and that reminded me that I had wanted to read The Prestige (which did not star Edward Norton, but was up against The Illusionist which did). Whew...so it's all Edward Norton's fault. The Prestige is a very good novel, and yet, the movie differs from it considerably. And I am still trying to figure out what exactly that means. The central premise is the same, AND HE
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