10, 000 words in 24 hours, and counting, and no end in sight; it is exhilarating to be able to roam freely across time and space again, and all there is left to do is to find time to read the thousands of pages I must before the new year begins. A plethora of intellectual (and lesser) obligations in addition to personal ambition demands a lifestyle that revolves around the construction of knowledge and its application. How would one go about pretending to live such a life? By being ruthless, selfish, misanthropic, absolutely insufferable, or by being completely invisible, living in the shadows and always just out of sight.
Over the weekend; Tiger and the Snow. Benigni is an unlikely combination of absent-mindedness and worldliness. His naïveté is quickly tiring, and it is his personification of human, pure, love that endears, and sustains. His is impossibly efficient and resourceful where love is concerned, but cannot remember where he parked his car, ever. Delicious! There is the light, frivolous intertextuality, Fuad, our conscience, the fatalistic, pragmatic poet, a man of this world, with whom we can empathise, but cannot identify with. In Baghdad, in war, with the realities of the world pressing in, Vittoria is similarly oblivious to our useless and misguided machinations; she loves him but musn’t know; he, she, we are all not allowed that knowledge, lest love become rational, logical, put together, common-sensical. But without knowledge there can only be chance and fate; action is galvanised by knowledge, and therein lies the paradox and the natural death of any narrative of love, amour, and this climaxes at the joining of hands in the midst of overpowering, uplifting, smothering forces. Just as Benigni is removed from reality, we are told that the easiest way to love and to live is to dream, to live in utter ignorance, brash impertinence, or to be invisible. Vittoria! Vittoria!