CxD #255: No purpose + Stalker + ⭐️⭐️⭐️½ Nietzsche: A philosophical biography + Friendship vs Solitude🔥
Source = Derek Sivers’s website, which is chock full of goodies: https://sive.rs/pdog
I’ve been thinking non-stop about one of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films, Stalker. In this case, stalker means something closer to a guide.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s final Soviet feature is a metaphysical journey through an enigmatic postapocalyptic landscape, and a rarefied cinematic experience like no other. A hired guide—the Stalker—leads a writer and a professor into the heart of the Zone, the restricted site of a long-ago disaster, where the three men eventually zero in on the Room, a place rumored to fulfill one’s most deeply held desires. Adapting a science-fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Tarkovsky created an immersive world with a wealth of material detail and a sense of organic atmosphere. A religious allegory, a reflection of contemporaneous political anxieties, a meditation on film itself—Stalker envelops the viewer by opening up a multitude of possible meanings.”
I’m pairing my viewings with Geoff Dyer’s book-length essay about the film and his experience watching it over many decades of his life. Dyer is one of our most insightful and versatile critics, with photography chops, and literary chops, and music chops, and cinematic chops. He has an amazing talent to make all kinds of things funny and enjoyable, including very serious and metaphysical Soviet era Russian films.
⭐️⭐️⭐️½ Nietzsche: A philosophical biography
I love examining Nietzsche from multiple angles, each one revealing something unexpected, strange, bedazzling.
"It is absolutely unnecessary and not even desirable for you to argue in my favour; on the contrary, a dose of curiosity, as if you were looking at an alien planet with ironic distance, would strike me as an incomparably more intelligent attitude towards me."Over on Fire Philosophy 🔥, Dale Wright contemplates the need for community vs. the need for solitude when crafting our lives. Consider subscribing if learning from a wise scholar and teacher is your kind of thing.
