&

There are some questions that don't interest you, and require nothing more than good sense in avoiding them. Like East & West. Distinctions become increasingly meaningless with time. Is this because your vision blurs, or because you see more clearly now? With time.

The width of the interval between people is no-body's business. A distance is overcome only if one first imagines there to be distance. A bridge can fall away-as in the old myths and stories-once you sense the truth, get a scent of it.

Seven seconds is a space, in which we are contained, in which we find ourselves.

~~~

Dersu.

Couldn't watch through the whole thing. Some nice photography-but then again, i could have just watched National Geographic. Irreverent, I know. But it didn't work for me. I don't know why, but increasingly everything seems fake. There's a temptation to internalize that and conclude that that's because there's something fake in your own life; there's the tendency to dismiss and sneer at everything (words, film, music) because they're not the "real deal". It's one of the strangest things you've come across-perhaps because you're so naive; this scepticism towards words and language. As if what was real was lurking strangely and tantalizingly behind the scenes. Either that, or the bizarre notion that the surface is all there is. You can veer from one extreme to another.

But here's the thing: you don't for a second buy into the idea of the 'mystical east', nor do you believe that people in 'the west' are "alienated" or that they've lost their moral compass. If truth be told, we're all middle class now, and there's no going back to the virtues of the saint or the pagan aristocrat.

Instead, we have to find ourselves where we are. "This is where it's at" says Walter Matthau in The Sunshine Boys. It's all slightly ridiculous, of course. There's nothing great about the soul of the bourgeois and even less so does he possess any heroic or noble qualities. But the "brotherly love" of the commune or the monastery went hand in hand with hatred of outsiders and the lower castes, the unbelievers, women, jews , niggahs...

If western civilisation is a very good idea (Gandhi) then so is religion. Gandhi, now there's a fake for you! FFS!

Dersu:

The 'Mongol'...you'd think after all that arduous trekking he'd have lost some weight! Jesus! Get out of here! And the translations were awful: "Bird stop sing. Rain end". Yeah, okay, be a good chap then and pack up the tents Tonto.